Posts Tagged ‘how to’

Posted on September 21, 2010 - by Kwame

Reworking Twitter: Using Favorites, RSS and List Features Effectively

How do you benefit from Twitter? Do you know that, you could double or even triple that benefit if you cleaned up a little? Nope, I’m not talking about unfollowing people. I’m talking about three even cooler ways you could optimize your Twitter activities for the utmost benefit; favorites, RSS and lists.

So we’ll first look at how best you could use the ‘favorites’ feature on Twitter.

Twitter Favorites:

This feature allows you to save tweets. Any tweet you ‘favorite’ will be stored in your Twitter ‘favorites’. You’ll find the favorites button when you hover your cursor over a tweet. It’s the small star on the right:

Some of you may have figured the benefits already but for the rest of you who haven’t (;)), I’ll tell you. Because most people’s Twitter timeline gets updated several times a minute, it’s sometimes hard finding a tweet you saw like an hour ago unless you visit the “Tweeter’s” profile. Sometimes, people share some valuable links or quotes that you’ll really want to use later but if you decide to come back later without adding it to your favorites, you might lose it forever.

This feature even works better with Twitter’s search tool. If you’re doing any kind of research, Twitter’s favorites feature and its search engine are your best tools; oh, I mean after Google lets you down . It sometimes does that doesn’t it? Anyway, back to Twitter. All you have to do is just search tweets with keywords you’re interested in learning more about and then favorite the tweets you think you’ll want to look at. Voila, you just saved your search in an organized way.

You can delete your favorites any time. Just go to your favorites page and click on the star again to un-favorite.

Twitter RSS:

Now, I know Twitter’s RSS feature can be used in two ways; if there are any other ways, please let me know.

So the first way I know is to subscribe to the tweets of people who really matter to you on Twitter. Not just family and friends, brands also. So you go to a user’s profile and add their RSS link to your feed reader. You’ll find the RSS button below that person’s ‘following’ list. Here is a screen shot of @Chrisbrogan’s profile and RSS icon:

Yea of course, lists can help you do that too but you’ll still miss some tweets.

The second way is what I find interesting and what you might too. You’ll need Twitter’s search engine again so go there and search for a keyword you’re interested in. You’ll find the RSS icon on the first widget at the right side of the page. Click on it and add the link to your feed reader. Here is a screen shot of an example search I made:

Every time someone sends out a tweet containing the keyword you searched for, it will be sent to your feed reader. This is an easy way to track brand mentions or find useful links or even email list building.

You could build your newsletter subscription lists on Twitter by tracking questions with your keywords, answering those questions and then directing the questioner to a place on your website where they can find more answers. You could ask them to opt-in and download your whitepaper or eBook or any other free stuff you might be offering at that time that will help them find what they are looking for.

Twitter Lists:

So you know what Twitter lists are but are you using it effectively?

Having very organized lists cuts through the noise on Twitter. It’s like re-following your favorite people.

The best way to make lists work for you is to split them into little tiny pieces. If you have Tech bloggers, Health bloggers and business bloggers all listed under “Favorite Bloggers”, it could get quite noisy and disorganized.

However, if you split that into “Tech Bloggers” lists, “Health Bloggers” lists and “Business Bloggers” lists, you’ll find a lot of value in that. Because you can follow news and tidbits more easily.

So if you have to just read tech updates, you just visit your “Tech Bloggers” list and so on.

It’s okay to iterate if you think your lists need more optimization.

Conclusion:

After going through this short Twitter lesson, I hope you’ll be using Twitter in other ways too apart from just promoting your stuff. It’s a great tool if you’re looking at doing any of the following:

• Finding information via shared links; research.
• Generating leads; building email lists
• Networking with experts and brands
• And of course, promoting your stuff.

If I missed something there, let me know. It’s your turn now. How do you use Twitter? Any tips and tricks up your sleeve that you may want to share? By the way, don’t forget to retweet this post and follow Sociatic on Twitter.

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Posted on July 23, 2010 - by Kwame

Reasons Why Your Customers Should be Your Brand Ambassadors

All too often, businesses choose celebrities to be ambassadors and evangelists of their products. Celebrity endorsements can mean more sales for you but I think it is a short sighted way of marketing because it has some limitations.

I have two reasons why I think of celebrity endorsements as short sighted marketing.

1. People have their celebrity favorites. If you let celebrity “A” endorse your product, I may not be a fan of him and I won’t be moved to make a purchase because celebrity “A” is not my favorite celebrity and I don’t care what he has to say.

Give me celebrity “B” and I’ll buy your product, period! Can you afford to sign a contract with celebrities “A”, “B”, “C” to “Z”? I guess not.

2. Most people know that celebrities are paid to endorse products regardless if they like the products or not. Most of them do it for the money. You’ll have to use another strategy to convince them. I am this type of customer. Give me some real endorsement and I’ll follow you forever.

The best way around these two problems is to use your real customers and regular users of your products as ambassadors and endorsers of your product.

Here are 4 reasons why you owe your customers the ambassadorial right:

1. They give you their money. That’s how your business keeps growing remember?

2. They do your marketing for you by referring their friends to buy your products. Yes, you got that right; it’s called word of mouth marketing.

3. They help you improve because they give you their feedback. The awards for “quality”, “best product”, et cetera, was made possible because of them.

4. They use your product. They bought from you because they trusted you. You also owe them some trust and need to appreciate them. Fair right?

Why do you think Facebook is asking us to share our Facebook stories? Most of us have been evangelists for them and even continue to be. Sharing stories on Facebook means bringing back memories. Memories carry emotions along with them. Emotions sell. It means you’ll be promoting Facebook even more.

I read some people’s stories on Facebook and I thought to myself, “This site is really changing the world in other areas too, apart from business”. I think Facebook made their stories application public (you don’t even need to sign-in or sign-up to read people’s stories) in order to make us all see how they are changing the world and also encourage others to join. That sets our emotions in because they are not things Facebook is saying, it’s what ‘we’ (the users) are saying about what Facebook did for us.

My point with Facebook is that, they have created a category for their loyal fans (or evangelists) to share their stories. This has gotten blogs and other news media to talk about their (Facebook’s) new innovation and more people will jump on board to see what people have discovered/achieved through Facebook. It will also increase loyalty among current users.

Planning Your Company’s own stories:

So how do you choose ambassadors from your customers? Use the people who have already bought from you as your brand ambassador. Contact them and tell them you want 1, 3, or maybe 5 of them to be ambassadors of your brand. Tell them about the benefits and exactly what you want them to do to be considered. Whatever you do, don’t tell them to send an application in.

Tip: Instead of telling them to send in an application with a resume attached, you can organize a short quiz of say 10 questions and ask them to head towards there and answer the questions. Don’t forget to collect their names; email or phone numbers after the quiz so that you know who answered what.  This whole process will let you assess the strengths of your ambassadors-to-be before you choose them.

Things to be considered as useful strengths for brand ambassadors are:

1. Good communication skills; language, grammar, etc.
2. Knowledge about your products
3. A little time to spare after their day job or on weekends.
4. Feedback givers or readers of your blog

After choosing your ambassador, send a message to your other customers and prospects and let them know the criteria you used in making the decision.

Get your brand ambassador(s) a blog on your domain to share experiences with your product and interact with other customers.

Do any of these to allow customer interaction:

1. Allow comments on the blog,

2. Get a Twitter account for ambassadors only,

3. Get a number for them where other customers can reach your ambassador. If your ambassadors are extremely busy during weekdays and can’t take the phone, allow calls only on weekends.

Just get creative. Play with ideas (gosh, I like saying this a lot ).

Treat your ambassadors like celebrities and let them show on their special blog. Put your product ambassador’s picture on your home page and link to their blog from there. Other customers will definitely like to be treated that way. This will increase customer loyalty.

Let your brand ambassador(s) work with your marketing team. They should report to the marketing manager or whoever you deem fit.

Some brand ambassador responsibilities include:

• Gather feedback: let your ambassador(s) help you gather feedback
• Organize meetups with other customers to talk about your product or show off their versions or models of your product. Note that this works best with physical goods
• Report on product updates based on the feedback he or she delivered
• Share their own thoughts and experiences with your products
• Tell other customers what they are enjoying as ambassadors to your product.

Your brand ambassadors should be paid for all their work.

You can pay them back by:

1. Giving them the biggest discounts on your products
2. Giving them some cash benefits
3. Giving them some of your products for free
4. Letting them choose a cause they will like you to donate some of your products or cash to.

Try a combination of these payment methods or add your own.

Five benefits of using real customer(s) as brand ambassador(s) are:

Okay, let’s slow down for a bit. The four reasons I stated for why you owe your customers the ambassadorial rights are the first four benefits you will get from your customers if you make them brand ambassadors.

The only difference is that, there will be more of it; more money in your bank (sales), more referrals, more feedback and more trust. So the last benefit will be:

5. It creates new buzz for your business. People will talk about what you are doing regardless of them being customers or not. Just like what is happening with Facebook stories right now.

Even though you have all these ideas to try out, make sure your brand ambassadors approve of what is included in the contract.

Do you already have a customer strategy? What would you like to add or subtract?

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Posted on July 20, 2010 - by Kwame

10 Ways to Generate Leads With Social Media

How many leads do you generate every month with social media? If you’re not getting enough leads, today is your lucky day.

After reading this article, you’ll have 10 ideas you can use to increase your website traffic and leads. You may already know some of the ideas but trust me; there will be some you don’t know. So make sure to read through all the ideas and let me know if you’re already using any.

Let’s begin.

1. Create a digital product, write guest posts and offer your product for free in your byline. The product could be an eBook, infographic, themes or any other digital product. Make sure you have your website links in the document. You can also encourage people to share it and put a link back to your site. Tip: A little bird told me that Infographics spread like wildfire .

2. Search Twitter for discussions related to your niche. If there are any questions, answer them with an @ reply and provide a link back to your blog post or any relevant page on your site. This tip doesn’t necessarily grow your traffic but it sure will give you quality leads if done right.

3. Turn your blog posts into slide presentations and upload them to slideshare and scribd. Put your website and social media profile URLs in there so people who view your slides can pay you a visit. This is a cool way of repurposing your blog posts and regaining some value back.

4. Plan a series of Videos and use Tubemogul to post them to the various video sites. Make the videos as interesting as possible. By interesting, I mean enlightening, funny, … something people will remember. At the end of each video, ask people to go to your site and sign up for your newsletter in order to receive new video alerts and other updates from you.

5. Answer relevant questions on Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, Yedda and Answers.com. Ask people to Google “your business name or any keyword you rank #1 for” and click on the first result. You can post your website URL straight away but do that less often so you’re not seen as a spammy contributor to these sites. One more thing, answer the latest, freshest questions if you want to see any relevant increase in traffic.

6. Post short useful articles on forum sites relevant to your niche and leave a link back to your site.

7. Create an eBook. Take a sample out and make a PDF out of it. Share it on Lulu and Docstoc. At the beginning and end of the sample, provide a link to a page where people can put in their email addresses to receive the full book/report. Encourage people to share it with their friends and colleagues.

8. If you want to rank high for any keyword or phrase, make that phrase your anchor text in your guest post bylines. For example, say you want to rank high for the key phrase, “brand communication”, you use that as your anchor text and put your website link there. The higher the PR of the blog you are posting on, the better your chances of ranking higher. Do this consistently for all guest posts you write and use the same key phrase until you are on page 1 of Google’s search. I am on page 2 of Google right now for the key phrase, “brand communication” and I only used that as my anchor text in just one guest post. When I use it again on a top PR (page rank) blog, I will rank even higher. Try it for yourself. By the way, this is a neat trick I learnt from Brian Clark’s “How to Create Compelling Content That Ranks Well in Search Engines”. Download a copy on this page: SEO Copywriting Made Simple.

9. Answer Questions on LinkedIn. Connect with other professionals. Ask your past customers for recommendations. Jason Falls wrote an article on how to make LinkedIn answers part of your routine so head towards his blog to read about it.

10. Run a survey on your blog, Twitter and Facebook and share the results with other people. Explain the methodology and findings of your survey and publish the results in PDF format and share it on your site and other sites. Send a message @ everybody who participated in the survey on Twitter with a link to the results. You can also contact bloggers in your niche and ask them to share your findings. Tamar Weinberg shows you how to pitch superstar bloggers here: How to Get an Influencer’s Attention.

Phew! That was a short ride . Okay, seriously, you should apply these tips. You don’t have to implement all at once. Bookmark this page, start with 2 or 3 strategies and come back later to try out the other ones. Some may work for you and some may not.

Remember, social media is a lead generation tool and newsletters are your lead collection and sales tools so have your newsletter signup boxes ready to collect email addresses. Prepare some bait for the stubborn ones .

What strategy do you use to build more leads, links and traffic?

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Posted on June 16, 2010 - by Kwame

How to Add a Unique Voice to Your Brand: 14 Tips and Ideas to Help You Win

Differentiating your brand from other brands can be a daunting activity these days. This is because of the many other brands that are also out there competing for attention from the same audience you need.

In this article, we will not be looking at the very basics of brand recognition: logo and brand colors. What I’ll be sharing with you are tips that will give your brand a unique image and the unique voice it needs to speak to its audience. I am using the word “unique” because every brand has a voice so if I use just “voice” it will sound too regular. You don’t want a regular brand. That sucks.

When your brand has a unique voice, every message it sends out is heard by its audience; the right audience. Your audience will then send out your message to other people who may already be involved in your brand’s conversations or may be total strangers to your brand.

All-in-all, it is essential to give your brand a voice that can be differentiated from the masses.

Let’s look at the ideas you can use to boost your brand.

1. Use a Powerful USP: I am not going to assume you already know what a USP is, so I’m going to define it. A USP is the abbreviation for Unique Selling Proposition, which is a feature of a product or brand that makes it different from other products or brands it competes with. To form a strong brand, you will need a powerful USP that people will want to put to test. For example, a pizza delivery service may have, “we deliver in 30 minutes” as their USP. If you have a pizza delivery service and you think you can deliver in 20 minutes within a certain radius, use “we deliver in 20 minutes within ‘x’ miles” as your USP. Use USPs that sound better than your competitors’ USPs and you will be one step toward winning.

Caution: Be sure you can guarantee that you can deliver on your USPs promise before you put it out in public. If you don’t do this and you keep on breaking your promises, you will fail fast.

2.Use a Mascot: Mascots are great brand building assets. The Santa Clause we know today was a mascot for a Coca-cola X’mas campaign. The campaign was so successful that the image of the mascot spread across borders and the jolly mascot in the red and white suit is what so many people around the world refer to as Santa Clause or Father Christmas in some countries. It’s a shame so many people don’t know about where the new Santa Clause image (as we know it today) came from. You can also create a mascot that will spread your brand’s voice across borders.

3. Create a Tradition: Start a brand tradition. Some businesses have a freebie day as their tradition. They give out free stuffs only on those days. This gets people to spread the word out to their friends. You can choose to do certain things on certain days; on your brand’s birthday, or on Christmas day or Independence day. It could be a once in a month, once a week or once in a year tradition. It could also be a full day or half day event. Choose a day and do something remarkable on that day. Some ideas: give your biggest discounts on those days, host customer meetups on those days only.

4. Customer Participation: Host online and offline meetups for your customers. Get them involved in competitions. Choose brand evangelists from them. They own your brand on the internet now so give them a chance to be part of it. When you do great things for your customers, they will do greater things for you. Reciprocity, remember?

Below is a video of a Mini Cooper meetup. Mini Cooper owners met to showcase their cars and engage in Mini conversations. Can you imagine the benefits? Watch the video and see what I mean.

5. Staff Participation: You and your staff need to participate in customer meetups, your business’ online communities and industry events. Wear T-shirts with your brand’s identity to events that don’t have a dress code attached to the invitation. If you have a mascot, you can even take it along.

6. Practice Barter: There might be an area in your business that itches constantly. Get another business to scratch that itch so that you scratch theirs. Every business has an itch. If you are great at accounting and awful at marketing, marketing is your itch. There are businesses that also have accounting as their itches but that are great at marketing. If there is a situation like this, you can exchange your “itch scratching” services instead of paying for them. You can then ask the other business to list you as their partner on their website or other places both of you deem suitable.

7. Leverage influence: Do you know of a place where your target market is constantly gathered? Blogs are great examples of where you can find your target audience. Reach out to influential bloggers to publish reviews of your products to their readers for a fee or service exchange (remember barter?). When you reach out to influencers, be succinct and straight to the point; don’t go on and on with your idea in the first message. If they want to know more, they will ask you. You can also choose to write guest posts for them if you don’t want to pay with your time (at least, much of it) or money.

8. Start a cause: If you have the support, start a cause. By support, I don’t necessarily mean money. Having a large customer base is also support. Help people save the environment, help people feed orphans, help people save animals, help people do… et cetera. Put your brand forward. Be genuine; no melodrama accepted please.

9. Watch Your Footsteps: Watch your brand’s activities in order to keep your reputation clean. Your competitors will be watching your footsteps and they may be ready to bring you down. Cover where you step by first making sure it’s the right place to step. Makes sense doesn’t it ? Maybe it doesn’t. Okay, if you step in mud, it will show in your footprints and people will see it. Now it makes more sense .

10. Follow your Mission and Vision: Many businesses with mission and vision statements get side-tracked at some point in time. Some just write their missions and visions and then leave them on the desk to collect dust. They are among the 90% who fail. Want to win? Don’t let your mission and vision statements collect dust. If you don’t like it, re-strategize and change its content.

11. Create a comic: There’s nothing like a good laugh right? Consider hiring someone to create a comic about what your brand or the industry you find yourself in. Make a comic of your brand (or your mascot. That is, if you have one) kicking the ass of your biggest competitor. Make it funny, put it on your site, make it downloadable and encourage people to share it. Have your own ideas? Play with them and get that comic out.

12. Get Free Media Publicity: Getting media publicity is fairly easy. You just have to be worthy to be talked about. Perhaps, you started a cause about the environment and have made some contributions. Great! Request to share your story on the green channel or in the green magazine. Maybe a big industry player was at your event. That is great too. Interview that person and give it to the appropriate media to publish or broadcast for the price of them making reference to your business as the source. Don’t be shy to ask for the credit. If you do something remarkable, work at getting free media publicity.

13. Consider Your Website: On your website, tell people about your traditions and everything about your brand. Get them interested in you. If you communicate your brand’s story with them, they will be easily convinced to get involved with you. Integrate your social profiles on your website so that your audience can engage with you on the social side of the internet.

14. Be Consistent: There has never been an inconsistent brand that won the battle of branding. If you are not consistent with your branding efforts, you send different (very confusing) signals out to your target audience. If you want to win, be consistent with your efforts in all branding areas.

Did you get any ideas from this list? Write them down. Develop a strategy on how you are going to deploy them and take action. Don’t leave your brand’s tongue hanging out like “blahh”. Put it back into its mouth and let it start talking.