Social Media Strategy Archives - Page 2 of 16

Speaking And Presenting Are Brand Builders

08/22/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Jayme Soulati holds her new book prior to presenting at New South Digital Marketing Conference

Nothing new in this headline, right? I mean, everyone must be aware that speaking to audiences of your peers with a presentation that is #RockHot is good for the brand.

Joining a panel as a speaker or being a presenter on a local, regional or national scale do not happen overnight. In fact, it may never happen; some are confined to quarters listening to others in webinars, on podcasts, on YouTube or during Google+ Hang Outs.

That’s OK, too, for every speaker needs an audience.

So, please join me in these two locales and venues as I ply my speaker skills and delight you (I have solid expectations!) with creative insight:

IABC Kentucky & Louisville Digital Marketing Association

On September 10, 2013, I will take the dais at the2013 Integrated Marketing Summit hosted by IABC Louisville and the Louisville Digital Marketing Association.

The best news is about who else you can expect to hear:

Gini Dietrich, of the infamous Spin Sucks and Arment Dietrich and co-author of Marketing In The Round

Heather Whaling, president of Geben Communications and a PR maven extraordinaire who tweets @PRTini (I love that Twitter ID).

Jason Falls, himself a maven (can guys be mavens?) across the great divide of social and digital marketing is the master of ceremonies, the emcee, the guy who put us all together.
I’ve been cursing Jason a lot of late as I attempt to build my deck. He assigned me a topic that is sure to give you pause as it has given me paws.

Jason said, “Jayme, you’re going to speak on how social media integrates across all the marketing channels.” Say what??

And, so the heavy duty thinking began with a new title,

Savvier Social Media Across Blended Marketing.

Please do drive or fly to Louisville for this meeting. It’s not going to be the customary “everyone has to jump on the social media train;” it’s going to be about how marketers can better apply social media throughout integrated disciplines and break down the marketing silos.

Here’s the link with all the deets. With the demise of Social Slam in 2014, this conference is a good one to consider as a replacement. The location is central, the price is right, and ohmygoodness, you’re getting PR Rock Stars in the flesh!

Join Me At ConvergeSouth

Here’s what happens when you write a book, you get invited to present in front of some really cool audiences about the topics you love to write about. At ConvergeSouth October 11, 2013 in Greensboro, NC, I am keynoting the content marketing track.

By now, you know how much I love to generate original content that is #RockHot with more ideas you can shake a stick at. There is no lack of blog or landing page fodder in this house, and I want to share that passion and verve for content with you when I present:

Community Is King; Content Is Queen

Yes, I’m dethroning the “content is king” mantra. I’m getting tired of hearing it for the last 18 months. You know who really deserves the new title, right? It’s you; this community. Without a community or loyal followers, readers and lurkers no social media strategy can be successful.
Put that in your crown and ponder!

Join Jayme Soulati

IABC Kentucky & Louisville Digital Marketing Association, Sept. 10, 2013, Louisville
ConvergeSouth, October 11, 2013, Greensboro, NC

Use EverPost To Influence Klout

08/19/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Via a LinkedIn group, a pitch came from someone I didn’t know asking for a review of EverPost.co. I let it sit and slide to the bottom of the priority list until a better time to find time.

About EverPost

To my utter delight, EverPost is the simplest tool I’ve come across for content shares of others’ material.

You register free with Twitter or Facebook.

Choose which channels you want to share on — either LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Select five categories of topics you’d like to follow.

Voila! A board appears with content from a variety of sites in the categories of topics you want to peruse.

Click share or auto-schedule, and your share is on its way to the channels you selected.

It’s so simple, and there’s a plethora of content at your fingertips to push out to the Interwebz.

Why I Love EverPost

Did I say it’s simple?
There is zero learning curve; sign up and go.
I do want to share good content without strings attached; this enables that.
I get to share a wide range of topics from one dashboard. If I get tired of posting content in one category, then I go back to the drop-down menu and select another after deleting one of my chosen five.
There are no comments from the dashboard; however, you can go to the blog and read the entire post before sharing (ahem, as you’re supposed to).
The tweets show up with the author’s Twitter ID; they can see that a new person is sharing their material.

Klout Is About Influence

Triberr, my fave blogger sharing platform (please ask to join my tribe!), is getting into the influence game. That means influence scoring is going to be more about the Klout number, too.

If you’re at all concerned about lots of shares to keep the Klout score high, then you need to use EverPost.

In about 10 minutes, you can share 20 blog posts. Yes, you can scan the post and vet it prior to sending, too.

I find it always a challenge to concern myself with keeping my Klout score high. I don’t have the ability to sit around on the Interwebz and share content all day. Were I to be able to, my influence score would be higher than it is now.

Perhaps I’m going to use EverPost every day this week to see if I can sustain a higher Klout score just so those numbers prove I’m really an influencer. LOL.

Clipsi: A New Social Collaboration Tool

08/13/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Clipsi is a new social collaboration tool currently in beta. I’ve been toying with it and am impressed in the earliest stages with what I see. As someone who makes a total mess of bookmarks (I do not organize), I can see how Clipsi will help me curate, collate, collaborate on a Pinterest-style or Storify-style board the content I want to reference and write about.

I’m excited for my colleague and friend, Neicole Crepeau, who is one of the founders of this awesome tool. Please ask for an invite to the beta in comments below…Neicole?

How would you describe Clipsi?

Clipsi is a collaboration tool designed for business users. It uses the Pinterest metaphor, putting extracts or clips from websites and documents onto an online bulletin board, where people can work with them and discuss them. We’re in the very early stages right now, but our product roadmap involves a slew of features to enable teams to use Clipsi boards as a tool for organizing and discussing content.

Right now, a lot of what I see on your blog is about using Clipsi for marketing. How does that fit with this collaboration idea?

We’re following the familiar model of releasing a free product to gain broad adoption, with a plan to add additional paid versions with richer features. Since user adoption is critical to a young startup with a new product, we built the free version with features that help marketers and content creators. When marketers and content creators use Clipsi to market their content, it increases awareness of Clipsi, too. So, we let people create great boards, clip from their ebooks and content, share the boards and clips broadly, and embed the boards on their own websites. We expect the free version of Clipsi will always be a useful content curation and marketing tool, while also being a useful social collaboration tool.

How can bloggers use Clipsi, then?

I think there a couple of ways. First, you can create boards for your econtent to give potential readers a “peek inside” of your book or PDF. As well as putting reviews and articles about it on the board. You can embed the boards on your book download page or in blog posts, and encourage reviewers to do the same.

Second, you can create boards to enhance a blog topic. Say you’re writing about PR versus Marketing. You could create a board with clips from PRSA documents and charters, articles on the difference, and forums where debates are happening. These days, we don’t want to make our posts too long, but a Clipsi board lets you provide information, right on your blog post, for people who want to dig deeper. And they can discuss and debate the topic more via the Clips. And, you can keep the board updated, adding new information from time to time, to keep the discussion fresh.

You have a Public Boards page and a Top Boards page. What is the difference and what is the plan for these pages?

Public boards at this point are any boards that are not private. In the free version of the product, you get one Private board (indicated by the lock icon) and that board can only be used and viewed by you. All other boards can be accessed by others and appear on the Public Boards site automatically. In the Pro version, we’ll be offering Private Team boards, where you can invite a group of users to work privately on a board.

Top Boards is a page we manually curate and that only contains boards that meet certain criteria, as outlined on this page: https://about.clipsi.com/how-to-get-on-our-top-boards-page/.

We will definitely be adding categories to both pages in the future, and you’ll be able to specify a category for your board when you create it.

Clipsi lets you curate by clipping sections of a source document or article. Doesn’t this promote more plagiarism?

We’re very concerned about plagiarism. This is fine line that any content sharing platform has to walk. Pinterest had the same challenges, Facebook, etc., which all post clips or excerpts. Like other platforms, our terms indicate that it is up to the user to be sure they are not violating a copyright.

They should ask permission if they are going to clip from a copy of someone else’s document that includes the full content, because it is viewable in our viewer. So, for example, in the case of your book, I had your permission and I removed all pages that I didn’t clip from so that your full book was not available via the viewer. Note that we also have a detailed take-down procedure. We abide by the DCMA policies and follow the procedures it outlines. Anyone who believes their copyright is being infringed can fill out our take-down request form at https://about.clipsi.com/copyright-complaint. We don’t want to encourage that.

Right now, you only allow clipping from documents in Dropbox. What if people don’t have Dropbox?

Dropbox is only the first cloud storage system for Clipsi. We picked it because it is the most widely used system. However, there are other common systems that we plan to integrate with. We have our eye on Box, for instance, as it is focused more on business users, which is our target market. But, we are a new product with a lot of features on our roadmap. So it’s one step at a time.

Embed code for your Verve board

Embed code for Social Media Marketing Data board

We’re Drowning In Marketing

03/04/2013 By Jayme Soulati

It’s daunting being a marketer these days. The lexicon in how we market has widened into an array of confusing methods to attract better brand positioning, growth, ROI, influencer authority, social this and that, and consumer loyalty.

The latest favorite is influencer marketing. Last week on this blog, we took an angular look at Google+, Google Authorship and Influence Marketing.

Buy Influencer Marketing Books

Several books written by peers in my own social circles are must reads to keep us thinking strategically and visionary.

You may pre-order Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing (Que Biz-Tech) written by Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella.

They have been writing it up with a large amount of content on blogs, Google+ Communities, and in comments all over. It promises to be a must-buy and read.

Meanwhile, a dear colleague of mine, Mark W. Schaefer, has written a quick read,Return on Influence, The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing, his second book that has hit the corporate world (IBM recently bought 500 copies) and the social media sector by storm.

Because I know all three of these peeps and vouch for their own cred and influence, you ought to consider purchasing these books for your reading pleasure.

Now, back to the topic at hand…If some marketers think they’re drowning, how does a company cope with that?

Does every marketing team need to know every aspect of marketing, or can they learn in a steady trickle?

The good news is, everyone is in the same boat absorbing knowledge and learning new tactics at the same time. How marketers execute on these evolving techniques is how one differentiates.

Here are my thoughts on how companies should stay the course with these basics and never mind the marketing buzz until prepared to address them head on:

Five Marketing Basics

1. Set up a solid team of people with the right mix of marketing for various types of organizations, someone in PR, another knows email and inbound marketing, a copywriter, a social media enthusiast, and someone familiar with advertising for all media.

2. Assess and solidify brand and dust off that mission statement! It’s critical to revisit this to ensure the company is growing in alignment with founders’ goals and vision.

3. Hire Jayme Soulati (shameless, I know) to do your message mapping exercise. No matter if your company is established or just starting, message mapping charts your company’s communication course.

4. Build a responsive website. I’m not talking about a website that looks good on a mobile device; I’m talking about a scalable site that conforms to smart devices and positions calls to action and contact information on the top of the screen followed by all the rest of the goodies. When your company keeps a website that requires visitors to slide windows back and forth, then the message you’re sending is pretty much, “We just don’t care.”

5. Pay attention to social media and engage already. You have to; you just do. In this post-social media adoption era, there are still companies without the basics in place. Companies owe it to consumers to connect via social media channels. If all we get is a direct mail coupon with no other channel, that is grounds for negative online reputation.

Confused about any of the above? Please ask me, I’m right here.

By Jayme Soulati

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Google+ Meet Influence Marketing

02/28/2013 By Jayme Soulati

By Jayme Soulati

In developing my piece on Google Authorship, and another one this week on niche networks, I needed a link for the words, “brand evangelist.” What happened in the next three minutes shocked me into writing this piece and made me extremely nervous that Google+ is going to influence influence marketing whether we want it to or not.

The steps that occurred are spelled out here carefully so you can follow along. See what you glean from what I did; do you come to the same conclusion, or not?

My search for “brand evangelist” was returned by Google. I saw a series of Google Plussers who had written a post or piece published on Google+ featuring these key words.
Each of the folks listed were mentioned with their Google Authorship profile. There was a photo as well as the number of people this person had in circles and the number of circles this person was in.
I scrolled down page one of my search on Google to see if I recognized anyone.
Way at bottom, I saw Mack Collier’s name although his Google Authorship information was not included because his post was pre-Google+.
Because I didn’t recognize an author or publication (there were few), I looked more closely at each person’s Google+ profile seeking anything that would help me discern influence.
I saw the quantity of circles each person was in; wouldn’t that mean something? The peep with the highest number of circles would supposedly be more influential, right? And knew what they were talking about? (Remember, this was happening over a minute to find one hyperlink.)
I set out to select the link for the person with the most circles.

Inadvertently, I had just discerned that I would select a hyperlink using someone’s Google+ post content in my blog post based on the quantity of circles associated with that unknown person.

I am agog. I believe strongly that it’s never about quantity; it’s about quality!

I did the exact thing that people complain about Klout for; I associated influence scoring of my own creation and subconscious to determining strength of content and influence.

I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, if I had automatically begun to select someone from a Google search with the highest number of circles, then every other company would be doing the same without a shred of second thought.

What does this mean for how influencers are screened?

Anyone who understands what’s written above understands what I’m getting at…we can hide behind a Klout score because it’s not well-known as an influence metric.

When someone in business plugs in a key word or phrase and watches those with Google Authorship turned on scroll by, then the ones with the most circles wins, right? (Based on what I just experienced first hand, to my utter chagrin.)

One can only hope I’m wrong. Danny Brown, Sam Fiorella, Neal Schaffer? Can you weigh in on this, perhaps?