Friday, December 31, 2010

Best Wishes for the end of 2010 and the start of 2011

Well everyone
It certainly doesn't feel like it but another year is about to become history and live only in our memory. 

As a final thought for 2010, as you ponder all your new years resolutions for 2011 for you personally, let me remind you that it is equally important to think about and commit to business, marketing and of course social media objectives that you will build strategies around and ultimately be accountable for.

What ever they may be, please give them some thought.
Thanks for reading and all the best for 2011.

Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Major Upgrade to Foursquare

The leading geolocation social media platform Foursquare has jsut announced that it will now be adding on two significant features to its already impressive site. Namely comments and pictures for its members using smart phones.

This ability  has now been activated for iPhone users and will be available to Google android system phones within a week, with Blackberry users getting the chance to to the same in the new year.

Foursquare is experiencing quick growth having recently also announced that it had  five million, further reinforcing its creditials as a must have social media platform.

Some would say that this was an inevitable expansion of its original functionality to now offer users the chance to better communicate where they were and what they were doing in a way that augments the message.

It may be early days for the geolocation sites such as foursquare, but the excitment, scope and engagement that they offer strongly suggests that they will only get bigger and better in 2011 and beyond.

And one final thing from me is I'd love to wish everyone all the best for Christmas and the New Year. I hope your festive season is a great one.

Unit next time, good marketing and good luck.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Creating a Dashbooard For Your Social Media

As the scope of social media continues to expand and the type of marketing platforms seem to have no limit, it becomes increasingly important to focus on our stated social media and overall marketing objectives to determine how well (or otherwise) our key performance indicators (KPI's) are being met over time.


To be able to answer this we need to do a couple of key things.


Firstly we need to be clear about what it is we want to be able to measure from its existing point moving forward and why these measures are the key ones for us. If we focus on the wrong measures, then even if they are properly assessed, the result will provide little useful data for the business.

Secondly and almost as almost as important is the way the metrics will be displayed. Too often, managers are inundated with and overwhelmed by copious amounts of raw data making it difficult to focus clearly on the key data points and trends.

For this reason it is wise to set up a simple, efficient and practical dashboard that will provide management with facts and figures designed to update and provide added insight into what has transpired.


There are I'm pleased to say various existing providers of Dashboard templates and resources available. Some are free and some will cost you some money.

iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) and MyYahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) both for example provide free tools for the respective Google and Yahoo home pages.

For Twitter, Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) provides a dashboard specifically for the brief Twitter messages.

Specifically for social media you have free dashboard services such as: Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com/default.aspx) as well as paid versions from suppliers such as: UberVU (www.ubervu.com)


Regardless of whether you opt for the free service or pay a little more for the one of

the paid options, the point is simply that you need to be starting to get your structure set up so that all valuable information is routinely gathered, analysed, seen and understood by the business.



Until next time,
Good marketing and good luck.

Friday, December 3, 2010

A Cautionary Tale on Social Media Marketing

Hi again everyone.


This week I want to devote my blog post to a quick bit of feedback from a presentation I gave the other night at a W omen's Business Network meeting. I was asked to speak on the role of Emotional Intelligence in Business and the positive benefits that flow from having a team of people with high EI. It was a great night and I walked away with two strong memories from the night.
1. How tight the group was and how mutually supportive they were of each other. Great stuff, and
2. That in some discussions later people had the view that as one person put it:
"I've done the all the social media things and it didn't work. My sales are flat."
Hearing this I asked a couple of questions about exactly what she had done. Cutting a long story short, she hadn't done everything.  No Slide Share, no blog, no LinkedIn, No social book marking, etc, etc.....
Now to her credit she had done some things, but even there they were incomplete.

What I'm trying to get at here is that as we all know or should no, social media is not a simple check list of tactics that you set and forget.
It flows from broad strategy that we implement through appropriate tactical platforms and tolls and monitor closely and adjust and change over time.


If for what ever reason you think you have done it all, you wont have to add your sales are down. It will probably be a given.


 Keep studying, keep testing and measuring, keep fine tuning and the benefits will begin to flow over time.

Good marketing and good luck,
Regards,
Daniele.