Creating Valuable Brand Advocates through Social Media
Mar 10, 2008 Michael BritoRead this eBook now - Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement through Social Media - written by Brian Solis. You can download for free (PDF or Word). It’s short, sweet and gets straight to the point.
One of the key takeaways was what many refer to as conversational marketing. Here is Brian’s take from the eBook (page 6):
However, marketing needs to be clarified as I am not referring to the traditional marketing that typically “speaks” at people through “messages.” In Social Media, this is about dialog, two way discussions that bring people together in order to discover and share information.
I wholeheartedly agree that participation through two-way conversations is a form of marketing; and I would argue that it’s probably one of the most effective methods of marketing today. As Brian suggests, consumers don’t want marketed to anymore. They are sick and tired of us (yeah, me too) shoving our marketing messages down their throats. It’s about conversations; and not necessarily about conversions anymore; my direct marketing friends would scarcely disagree with me!
It’s more than just conversations though. It’s about action (or lack therof) from these conversations. A great example of this is what Dell is doing with IdeaStorm. They are having real-life, genuine conversations with their customers; and more importantly, they are listening and acting!
Technorati Tags: social media, conversational marketing, brian solis
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March 10th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
This absolutely needs to be happening more between companies and their customers. When customers have more control over the market, they will be more willing to buy. Too much spam is getting out and it is turning buyers off. Great post!
March 11th, 2008 at 8:10 am
just downloaded the book. Thanks for letting me know!
March 12th, 2008 at 6:41 am
dood. You social media types are full of fluff. Social Media does not have any substantial ROI. Try telling an HP or DELL to cease their paid search/display advertising initiatives...
yeah right.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Internet Marketing: A ringside view:
If your business involves products or services spread across the globe or even within a region, internet marketing can be effective in showcasing your product/service to the discerning buyer. The first step towards a successful internet marketing campaign would be building a suitable web-site. Your web-site should be simple but elegant looking. Crisp and precise presentation often scores over too many colors, too many promises or in short too much of anything. The prospective customers would be looking for valuable information that he can instantaneously use.
Great web sites often offer some freebies like music downloads, software downloads, computer games, graphics etc. to attract customers. So if the freebies you offer are attractive enough for the target customer profile, the traffic to your site will also rise rapidly. Internet marketing is indeed a long drawn process where you first build a web-site and then nurture it through all its stages till you can figure at the top of the search engine results.
Search Engine optimization and link building are the two most popular methods to improve the ranking of your web-site. Internet marketing cannot ignore these tools even though they come at a hefty price. Enter any search string into the most popular search engines, and you will stumble upon several hundred, if not thousand pages of information relating to that subject. People searching for information tend to look at the first few web-sites that come up from the search result. Chances are that the information they sought would be contained in those pages. Therefore, most searches do not get beyond the first page of the results. Imagine if your web-site figures in the 20th or 21st page, the traffic it can generate for you would be only closer to zero. This makes search engine optimization relevant to make your web-site work for you.
What are the main attributes of search engine optimization? Keywords and link building; these are the two major attributes that would help you to optimize your web-site for the search engines. Keywords are the possible search strings that a user will enter into the search counter. For example, someone looking for a Home Theatre can use terms like "Electronic product manufacturers" or "Theatre Equipment dealers" or "Home Theatre manufacturers" or even "where can I buy a Home Theatre". Though all these search strings have a commonality, they are also distinct. Therefore, a web-site representing Home theatre should have all these phrases somewhere in their content, preferably in the first page and right on top. Search Engines crawl through several thousand pages at lightning speed and return with the optimal results. Keywords and key phrases should be coined by experts to get the best results.
Link building is another important aspect of internet marketing. Most popular search engines will look at the number of links that your web-site has to other web-sites and blogs. If the number of links is high, it indicates the popularity of your web-site and hence get ranked at the top.
Article marketing – There are several article banks which will accept your submissions and then feed to
People look for information on various topics. So, if you are in the business of solar energy, you can create or hire people to write articles on solar energy, submit to the article banks, with a link to your web-site. This will induce the visitor to look at your site and when the number of articles is large, the number of visits to your web site will also rise in proportion. Article marketing is yet another tool to lead you to success in internet marketing.
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Have you seen the Easy Viral Traffic blog yet? They provide some pretty cool information about how to get free website traffic... check it out http://www.easy-viral-traffic.com/blog/
March 14th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
the spammers are here!!!
; )
Hey Michael...miss you over here at Yahoo!