Social networking becomes more important to businesses’ marketing (Berkshire Eagle)

Perry Webbing    Twitter Marketing     200-people, blood-drive, bustling-artists, its-special, online-posts, Push, small-gathering, the-push

With the push of a button, a restaurant can tell 1,200 people its special of the day. With just one link, a hospital can promote anything from a blood drive to a vaccine clinic. And with enough online posts, a nonprofit can turn a small gathering into a bustling artists’ market.

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Social networking becomes more important to businesses’ marketing (Berkshire Eagle)

Digital Insider: Michael Mendenhall, CMO, Hewlett-Packard Co.

admin    Web Marketing     Digital, HewlettPackard, Insider, Mendenhall, Michael

Michael Mendenhall, senior VP and CMO of HP, was the general chair for the 32nd John Caples International Awards show held in New York last week, which celebrations the best creative work in direct and digital marketing. Mendenhall has a history of steering innovative and creative marketing programs for major brands. DMNews spoke with Mendenhall about creativity, particularly in digital.

View full post on Latest articles from DMNews News

Is Twitter more for girls? (The Temasek Review)

Jim Ray    Twitter Marketing     amanda, amanda-lian, Exact, Feminine, find-out, from-friends, Girls, more-akin, the-exact, the-feminine, Twitter, very-hard

By Amanda Lian Is Twitter more for Girls?

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Is Twitter more for girls? (The Temasek Review)

5 Fundamentals of Successful Inbound Lead Generation Packages

admin    Twitter Marketing     Fundamentals, Generation, Inbound, Lead, Packages, Successful

Over the last two years at HubSpot, our monthly lead volume has more than tripled — from around 1,200 leads per month in March 2008 to about 14,000 leads per month today.

What’s driving this growth?

Certainly each of our inbound marketing channels — this blog, webinars, social media, SEO – as well as paid media campaigns, have grown over time.

But focusing on channel-by-channel growth misses another very important story: Content produced as part of a cohesive multi-channel package generates more leads than it would produce independently.

If 1 blog post + 1 webinar + 1 Facebook campaign all produced independently is 3, the sum of them produced together in a helpful, interesting way is far greater than 3.

So what makes a great package? Here are the fundamentals:

1. A Big, Sexy Piece of Content

This is the foundation of your package — the core piece of new information that draws people in and gets the conversation started on your site, blog and traditional media outlets. The piece of content could be an ebook, a research report or something else. Our State of Inbound Marketing report released in February is a great example that worked well for us.

2. Supporting Blog Articles

This is how you publish and distribute your big, sexy piece of content. Take a couple of the most important, interesting pieces of your big piece of content and turn them into a short blog article. For example, for our State of Inbound Marketing report, we turned a sections on cost per lead and blog-post frequency into individual articles. The blog articles are great opportunities to promote your campaign’s webinar (see below), but be careful not to be too promotional. 

3. A Supporting Webinar

You should use the attention your big piece of content generates to drive signups for a big webinar on the topic. A webinar is a great way to capture leads from the the report — the signup form gives visitors a reason to leave their email address. There’s one other big advantage of the webinar: It generates discussion about your piece of content. As people retweet their invitation and the discuss the live webinar, people in their networks get drawn into the discussion and find their way to your site.

4. Supporting Social Media Campaigns

Once you have your content and blog articles published, you should promote the whole campaign on social media. Post each blog article and your big piece of content on Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you webinar landing page is easy to retweet and share on Facebook. And don’t forget about LinkedIn. LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to post questions and start discussion before to a webinar. 

5. Email Follow-up 

When you finish your webinar, make sure you send out a recording to all of the people who registered for it. This is one more big opportunity to generate some buzz around your content. Many of the people you email will share the recording on the social networks. When they do, you’ll get more traffic and more leads.

There are other elements and ways that you can do to expand and optimize an inbound marketing lead generation package, but these are the fundamental we focus on at HubSpot.

How about you? What’s fundamental to your inbound marketing package. What are you experimenting with?

Image:  Jonathan W on Flickr

Webinar: The 2010 State of Inbound Marketing

Connect with HubSpot:

View full post on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

5 Fundamentals of Successful Inbound Lead Generation Packages

admin    Twitter Marketing     Fundamentals, Generation, Inbound, Lead, Packages, Successful

Over the last two years at HubSpot, our monthly lead volume has more than tripled — from around 1,200 leads per month in March 2008 to about 14,000 leads per month today.

What’s driving this growth?

Certainly each of our inbound marketing channels — this blog, webinars, social media, SEO – as well as paid media campaigns, have grown over time.

But focusing on channel-by-channel growth misses another very important story: Content produced as part of a cohesive multi-channel package generates more leads than it would produce independently.

If 1 blog post + 1 webinar + 1 Facebook campaign all produced independently is 3, the sum of them produced together in a helpful, interesting way is far greater than 3.

So what makes a great package? Here are the fundamentals:

1. A Big, Sexy Piece of Content

This is the foundation of your package — the core piece of new information that draws people in and gets the conversation started on your site, blog and traditional media outlets. The piece of content could be an ebook, a research report or something else. Our State of Inbound Marketing report released in February is a great example that worked well for us.

2. Supporting Blog Articles

This is how you publish and distribute your big, sexy piece of content. Take a couple of the most important, interesting pieces of your big piece of content and turn them into a short blog article. For example, for our State of Inbound Marketing report, we turned a sections on cost per lead and blog-post frequency into individual articles. The blog articles are great opportunities to promote your campaign’s webinar (see below), but be careful not to be too promotional. 

3. A Supporting Webinar

You should use the attention your big piece of content generates to drive signups for a big webinar on the topic. A webinar is a great way to capture leads from the the report — the signup form gives visitors a reason to leave their email address. There’s one other big advantage of the webinar: It generates discussion about your piece of content. As people retweet their invitation and the discuss the live webinar, people in their networks get drawn into the discussion and find their way to your site.

4. Supporting Social Media Campaigns

Once you have your content and blog articles published, you should promote the whole campaign on social media. Post each blog article and your big piece of content on Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you webinar landing page is easy to retweet and share on Facebook. And don’t forget about LinkedIn. LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to post questions and start discussion before to a webinar. 

5. Email Follow-up 

When you finish your webinar, make sure you send out a recording to all of the people who registered for it. This is one more big opportunity to generate some buzz around your content. Many of the people you email will share the recording on the social networks. When they do, you’ll get more traffic and more leads.

There are other elements and ways that you can do to expand and optimize an inbound marketing lead generation package, but these are the fundamental we focus on at HubSpot.

How about you? What’s fundamental to your inbound marketing package. What are you experimenting with?

Image:  Jonathan W on Flickr

Webinar: The 2010 State of Inbound Marketing

Connect with HubSpot:

View full post on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Social networking becomes more important to businesses’ marketing (Berkshire Eagle)

Nick Yorchak    Twitter Marketing     200-people, blood-drive, bustling-artists, its-special, online-posts, Push, small-gathering, the-push

With the push of a button, a restaurant can tell 1,200 people its special of the day. With just one link, a hospital can promote anything from a blood drive to a vaccine clinic.

See more here:
Social networking becomes more important to businesses’ marketing (Berkshire Eagle)

5 Ways Marketers Can Use Google’s New Bookmark Lists

admin    Twitter Marketing     Bookmark, Google's, Lists, Marketers, Ways

This week, Google made yet another step into the social media world by making its bookmarks
social. While Google’s bookmark feature may still be flying under the radar of most users, its new list feature creates interesting collaborative opportunities for marketers. Users add bookmarks to Google by either using the Google Tool Bar or the star feature in search results. It is likely that some of you may have saved bookmarks in your web browser, but not online. Why would you want to save them on the web with Google?

These are two key reasons for using online bookmarks: (1)They can be accessed from an computer or device that connects to the internet. (2)They are on the web means they can also be social.

What do Lists Have to do With it?

Whether you do it on the web or in a browser, it is likely that we have all bookmarked articles and found it to be useful when needing to find information quickly. Why do bookmark lists matter to marketers?

Lists help organize content and help it to be more social. Lists also create a common interest that allows people to more easily collaborate around a topic by grouping information into one place. We are starting to see lists pop up in all types of social networks on the web, most recently lists were a major feature addition for Twitter.

The powerful thing about really big web services like Google and Facebook is that becasue so many people use them, they have the critical mass to make collaboration happen.

5 Marketing Applications of Google Bookmark Lists

1. Creating a Real-time Corporate Newsroom
- The days of sending out boring press releases are quickly fading. The problem is that companies still need ways to communicate news and events. Customers and prospects want to know if you have experts being interviewed in industry publications or what other people outside of your organization say about your product. Creating a list of articles that feature your company is an easy way to have an easy-to-update system for saving and viewing all of your news and information online. Check out a sample using HubSpot.

2. Crowdsource Marketing Ideas
- Two heads are better than one right? If so, then letting a group of internal staff or customers share links about marketing examples they like or other ideas may create a valuable opportunity for creative thinking. E-mail isn’t the right tool for collecting input from a large group. Bookmark lists create a simple page similar to a wiki that allows team members to share links and ideas for future activities.

3. Write Blog Articles Easier – Blogging
is a great inbound marketing tool, but it can sometimes take a while to get the right text with the correct links posted. Create a bookmark list for each blog post you are planning to write and use the lists to gather all of the links you need to include in your post. This helps to save time and provides a better way to organize thoughts. You could even link to your bookmark lists in your blog post as a resource page that includes all the links and information used to put the blog post together, which creates added value for the user.

4. Promote Brand Advocates – Customers who support your brand and products online can be a huge driving force for word-of-mouth credibility. One thing that brand advocates love is recognition by the company they love. Using lists to create pages praising top brand advocates can be a powerful way to draw more support and create healthy competition amongst customers. For example, build a list to recognize some of the top bloggers in your industry. This list will make the bloggers feel like they have influence in the industry, but it will also win your organization credibility and goodwill for acknowledging their hard work.

5. Create Thought Leadership
- A bookmark list is merely an organized collection of links that your have read. When a company creates a bookmark list it builds credibility by becoming and industry curator of knowledge and information. Think of a bookmark list as a “What We Are Reading” page for a business. As employees and executives bookmark credible links the aggregation of all of this knowledge will portray your organization as one that is about learning and is tapped into the pulse of the industry.

While this posts was focused on Google lists these ideas work for many different social platforms that use lists.

How do you use lists?

Connect with HubSpot:

View full post on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Twitter’s New “Monetization Platform” Coming “Later this Month”

admin    Web Marketing     coming, Month”, Platform”, This, Twitter’s, “Later, “Monetization

Remember when Twitter caused a stir among the development community, when it suggested you may never want to use a third-party app again?

Well, co-founder went CNBC and appeared to reveal just a little information about Twitter’s monetization model. When asked if Twitter was receiving a cut of the ads shown by third-party Twitter apps, Biz said “no” then went on to say:

We’re going to roll out something we think appropriate not just for Twitter users but also for the ecosystem when we develop this monetization platform, it’s not going to be just for us, it’s going to extend to all these apps that are out there that everyone is using.

Now, Silicon Alley Insider took this to mean that Twitter would create a model devoid of those annoying ads that are inserted into your tweet stream, but I’m not so sure.

First, I don’t see anything in that statement that suggests these ads are going to go away anytime soon. In fact, I can’t think of anything Twitter can do except insert ads into the stream. OK, so maybe not in the same format we currently see on desktop and mobile apps, but similar. Twitter needs a way to make money and web users have shown time-and-time again that they simply don’t like to pay for stuff. That really only leaves ads as an option.

They may be more creative ads than we see now, but I suspect we’ll still see advertising as part of Twitter’s new business model. I guess we will have to wait until the end of the month–which is when Biz says all will be revealed!

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Top 5 Inbound Marketing Articles of the Week: Social Media Attacks

admin    Twitter Marketing     Articles, Attacks., Inbound, marketing, Media, Social, Week

No, I’m not talking about some kind of social media-wide conspiracy, I’m simply referring to the recent social media crisis Nestle has experienced on its Facebook page.

Our top inboud marketing article this week takes Greenpeace’s recent Facebook attack on Nestle and Nestle’s resulting communicative shortcomings as an opportunity to discuss recommendations for how to counter social media attacks on your company or brand. 

1. How to Salvage Your Brand on Facebook: Lessons for Nestle

Author: Rohit Bhargava of Influential Marketing Blog

If you haven’t yet heard about the recent Nestle scandal, Jeremiah Owyang offers a nice little recap of the situation on his blog.  In Rohit’s article, he takes note of Nestle’s recent communications misstep, highlighting other examples of social media crises and the opportunity they afford the targeted companies to reinvent their social media efforts.

Rohit expands upon 5 tips he suggests for companies under attack: 1) apologize and change your tone, 2) use employees more than just HR, 3) share positive stories more transparently, 4) consolidate branded Facebook efforts, and 5) find and encourage more advocates. 

Marketing Takeaway: If you fall victim to negative reactions in social media, don’t just sit back quietly — react! 

2. 10 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

Author: Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog

Lee defines digital asset optimization (DAO) as “the practice of taking inventory of a company’s marketable, digital assets and implementing a process for keyword optimization and promotion to relevant channels.”  Different from search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses on the optimization of a company web site, Lee writes about the importance of DAO and highlights his 10-step digital asset optimized content marketing strategy.

Although the implementation of his strategy may not exactly be “easy,” Lee notes that the good news about completing the steps to optimized content is the significant impact you can achieve in overall authority and the attraction of new business, coverage and employees.

Marketing Takeaway: Content optimization takes time and effort, but the results make it worthwhile.

3. Scaling Social Media

Author: Chris Brogan of ChrisBrogan.com

Interested in getting involved with social media marketing but worried about how it will scale? Brogan’s article helps businesses like yours get a sense of what will take time, how to budget for it, and how to consider engagement efforts.

Brogan starts off by summarizing the various methods of engaging in social media, and then addresses approaches to allocating these methods/tasks, which include listening/monitoring, customer service, client relations, social marketing, sales prospecting, and publishing.

Marketing Takeaway: Make social media involvement less daunting by first taking the time to prioritize your engagement.

4. How to Boost Search Engine Rankings Using Twitter

Author: Kelly Gillease on Search Engine Land

With the emergence of real-time search results, you may have started noticing the increased presence of tweets in search engine results pages, offering a valuable new opportunity for marketers.

Kelly’s article discusses various techniques brands can use to increase their tweets’ chances of popping up in search results.  Her first recommendation?  Make sure your company’s Twitter handle matches its company name (e.g. HubSpot is @HubSpot on Twitter, which is a good thing).

Marketing Takeaway: The business and marketing benefits of Twitter are becoming increasingly prevalent. Is your company on Twitter yet?

5. 10 Fundamental Web Analytics Truths: Embrace ‘Em & Win Big

Author: Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor

Avinash’s article starts off by addressing the fact that there are a lot of mistruths, fear, uncertainty and doubt out there about web analytics than he thinks makes sense.  He uses his article as a call-to-action to make a change as well as a chance to share his 10 web analytics ground truths. Although Avinash’s article may be a bit lengthy, I’m telling you, it’s worth reading…

Marketing Takeaway: There are a lot of myths regarding web analytics, so don’t believe everything you hear.

Video: How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online

Learn how to use social media to manage your company brand. Download the free video and learn how to manage your company brand effectively using social media.

Connect with HubSpot:

View full post on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Cup of Joe: The Care Bears Hold the Secret to Being a Successful Entrepreneur

admin    Web Marketing     Bears, Being, Care, Entrepreneur, Hold, Secret, Successful

Care Bears?

Have you lost your marbles?

Well I’m not sure yet, but here’s the story.

This week I was taking a break from some coding to relax a little bit with my 21 month old niece. We decided to turn on Care Bears. This specific episode is called Lucky charm. Here we see the story of a young girl with low self confidence who is taught to believe in herself and to create her own luck.

I think this is an incredibly important message not only for children but also for entrepreneurs and businesspeople alike. It’s easy for us to write-off doing something worthwhile by making excuses for ourselves or our companies. By doing so we are able to hide behind our own insecurities and never move forward, taking risk and confronting the challenges they are required to do amazing things in life and business.

It’s interesting that as adults we tend to forget these important lessons that children are taught on a daily basis. This is generally because as adults we have responsibilities that force us to be rational and conservative with the decisions we make. But what’s important is that we don’t confuse our responsibilities with our insecurities.

Being an entrepreneur is all about risk management. Trying something new whether it be a different business model or product idea requires taking a risk and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that minimize risk by laying a foundation through a solid business model or funding strategy. But even before that, the best entrepreneurs are the ones that believe in themselves. They create their own luck and write their own rules.

So if you want to be a better entrepreneur then you have to take risk. But first you need to believe in yourself and create your own luck. Unfortunately, the Care Bears are not real. They are not going to fly down in a cloud car and teach you an important life lesson. You have to do that on your own. But, in doing so it’ll make all the risk and scary moments more worthwhile.

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim