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Social Marketing Strategies

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:48:30 +0000

Unleashing the Power of Social Media – Social Marketing Strategies

View more presentations from Pedro Laboy.

Best Practice: Integrating Online Ads and Social Media

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:39:05 +0000

Everyone speaks about the importance of integrating your digital channels. However, I find that integration rarely goes beyond the creation of landing pages. I recently came across a very clever rich-media banner ad that does an excellent job at integrating with social media. I came across the ad—for the Toyota Prius—while on the Mashable website. The ad works as follow:

1. A Toyota Prius icon appears on the bottom right of the screen. On click, the ad takes over the page.

2. The Prius icon reappears on the ad and the user is prompted to drag it into a social media bar with Facebook, Twitter, Email and IM options.

This social media sharing approach for display ads will become as common as social sharing features found on web pages. Marketers who embrace this approach to integrating display ads and social media will undoubtedly increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of their online campaigns.

Five Amazing Viral Ads Videos

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:31:14 +0000

The chances of a viral ad becoming an effective brand vehicle are similar to those of a high-school basketball student making it into the NBA. By the way, viral ads are those that propagate through email and/or social networks rather than paid media channels. Here are five viral ads that have made the cut.

VW

Bing

Tony Hawk

Dove

Budweiser

So, What Exactly Makes You A Social Media Expert?

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:25:32 +0000

I know I am going to take a lot of heat for this post. Where exactly are all these so-called social media experts coming from? It seems that nowadays anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account can claim to be a social media strategist. I am afraid it takes much more than that. There is a big difference between understanding a subject and being an expert on it. For example, following the PGA tour on TV and playing golf on weekends does not make me a golf expert. A social media expert must be able to:

1. Develop and execute content and delivery strategies that align to the client’s overall marketing and sales goals. Simply posting videos to YouTube does not count.

2. Integrate social media with offline as well as other digital vehicles such as email, search, and display so they support and enhance each other

3. Have an in-depth understanding of the underlying technologies behind social platforms. Why? So you can make recommendations on how to integrate these platforms–either through third-party applications such as Salesforce, Gist or Cliqset; the client’s website CMS; or a customized applications built (i.e. using Adobe Air) specifically to fit the client’s needs

4. Provide social media usage guidelines that go beyond the marketing department. It only takes one misguided posting by a client’s employee to undo a year’s worth of social marketing
5. Collect and mine social media data to identify trends and opportunities the client should promptly embrace. This must be go beyond providing meaningless metrics such as “sentiment” or “mentions.” Social media analytics should include mining data to determine the client’s Social Graph and identifying influencers that should be targeted.

In my opinion, you cannot be a social media “expert” if you cannot master ALL of the above. What do you think?

Women Rule The Social Web

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:46:43 +0000

This amazing graphic from Information Is Beutiful reinforces what we have already learned in Anthropology 101. That is, women’s social and communication skills are more advanced that those of men. From a marketing perspective, these data should be taken into account when crafting channel strategies that target women. By the way, the data for this graphic were obtained from Google’s Ad Planner–a great source of publicly available web data.