soulati.com

Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

Soulati-'TUDE!

Serendipity And The Social Web

By

3-princes-of-serendip.jpgSpoiler alert: the secret to making people like you on social media is to stop trying to make them like you on social media. Letting go of that desire can cause some amazing things to happen. I was reminded of this principle recently.

One morning I started my day doing two things I do not do enough.

The first was to look through my Twitter stream. Usually I see links to the same articles I find on Triberr, my RSS feed and other content discovery sources. This time was different.

Immediately I spotted a tweet from Jayme with a link to a new post: “Thoughts On Love In Business.” It’s a topic I have blogged about, and I was thinking about it again for another post.

Clicks And Comments

I clicked the link that led to this blog. That’s when I did the second thing I do not do enough.

I left a comment. Just a quick response to the question posed and a “thank you” for opening the discussion. Those two things, a Twitter discovery and a comment, triggered a series of unexpected events that amazed me.

First, Jayme replied to my comment asking me to leave links to the articles I’ve written. Then a chain reaction:

• She read my posts and liked them. A lot.
• She left comments.
• She shared them on Twitter and Facebook.
• We connected on LinkedIn and Facebook.
• She encouraged her community to visit my blog.
• Some community members left comments and subscribed.
• We had an awesome phone conversation the next day.

All of that happened within 24 hours of my leaving that comment. Jayme asked if I’d be interested in writing a guest post about this experience. And so here we are.

Social Media Serendipity

Some would describe this chain of events as the law of attraction at work. Some would call it good Karma. Others would use the word “grace.” Whatever your orientation, the common idea is serendipity.

Serendipity is most commonly defined as luck or good fortune and the aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. But when I looked it up, I found a new wrinkle to its meaning.

The word originates from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip whose heroes had a gift for making accidental discoveries of things they were not in a quest for.

Which brings me back to the beginning.

What I learned from this experience is that ‘happy accidents’ can happen on social media when you are not trying too hard to make them happen. When I started the day, I wasn’t on a quest to make power connections or drive traffic to my blog. I didn’t even leave a link in my comment until being asked.

You could argue that is not savvy marketing. But in that moment I was not in a self-promote mindset. I was just following a discovery I stumbled into by accident.

And wow. At the end of the day I got a wonderful lesson on the power of a tweet and a comment to open up serendipitous opportunities on social media.

Thank you Jayme and community.

About The Author

John-Gregory-Olson.jpgJohn Gregory Olson is a B2B marketing consultant and freelance copywriter. He writes about marketing strategy and leadership on his blog. Follow him on Twitter @John_G_Olson .

 

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Fashion Brands And Fashionbi Big Data

By

Fashionbi-Newspaper.jpg

Credit: Fashionbi Newspaper screenshot via https://fashionbi.com

The world’s largest fashion brands are ubiquitous. Every developed country and most every woman within yearns for a stylish handbag by Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Hermes, Dior, Prada, or Yves St. Laurent. Across worldwide time zones and language barriers, a high-end and classy handbag requires no translation.

A handbag from either of these brands is more important than just being chic. Women in Hong Kong short on cash are using their hand bags from four global fashion brands as collateral for loans. The girl short on money between pay checks turns over her handbag for authentication via Milan Station Holdings and gets 80% of its value from Yes Lady Finance Co. When she’s able to pay off the loan, she earns back her handbag. The Wall Street Journal had this story Aug. 14, 2013, “Cash Is In The Bag, If It’s Gucci.”

What does that mean for the brand? Each has an iconic statement women want; what that means is the need for a more targeted focus on engaging with the customer and having the customer engage positively about and with the brand, called a net promoter score.
How do brands track and listen on a global scale?

Fashionbi Is Big Data of Fashion

Recently, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Italian startup, Fashionbi. It’s the “complete digital marketing tool for the fashion industry,” with big data and analytics crossing borders and time zones for the world’s global fashion brands. Based logically in Milan, Fashionbi has offices worldwide and is growing exponentially.
Its ability to track social media analytics on Twitter and Facebook via Profiles across the world, including Weibo in Chinese, puts Fashionbi squarely at the forefront of its sector as a company to watch and work with.

Not only can Fashionbi share brand engagement by social media channel, it can also provide deep analytics of content quality and value. I got a look at its dashboard for member users only, and it blew me away. The graphs and charts typical to any users’ dashboard put Slideshare presentations to shame.
When I saw the analytics Fashionbi produces with sleight of hand, I immediately suggested it launch or purchase a digital marketing shop to execute on the big data being produced every minute of every day across every time zone. The wealth of information in Fashionbi’s dashboards requires expert assistance from marketers and public relations to interpret the data and put it into action for fashion brands.

Care to learn more?

Fashionbi on YouTube

Check out this YouTube video, two minutes of polished and well-done by the folks at Fashionbi. Even if you’re not that interested in a high-end handbag from Louis Vuitton, you have to admit, the analytics this company produces is enough to make you slap happy.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Use EverPost To Influence Klout

By

EverPost.jpgVia 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.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Clipsi: A New Social Collaboration Tool

By

clipsi-beta-logo.jpgClipsi 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.

jon-buscall-clipsi.jpgHow 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

Enhanced by Zemanta

Does Your Marketing Pay It Forward?

By

bowden-2-bowden.jpgTrust is the foundation stone of any successful relationship. If two people don’t trust each other, they constantly second guess the other’s motive and integrity. There is no opportunity for growth.

The relationship between a business and its customers is no exception to this rule. Customers can become intensely loyal to a particular brand, but only if they feel they can place their trust in that company. So the real question is, how can you make potential customers view your business as trustworthy?

The answer lies in social media marketing.

Why Is Social Media Such a Big Deal?

Social media has completely altered the face of Internet marketing. Previously, companies had to rely on emails, 1-800 numbers, and promotional events to connect with their customer base. But now, with the help of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, literally millions of customers are just a tweet or status update away. Twitter alone has around 500 million users.

Social media is different from most other marketing techniques because it is both simple and timely. Tweets are limited to a mere 140 characters, which means your message must be concise and relevant. People are constantly logging onto social media accounts to give and receive information, ideas, and opinions. For some, tweeting or updating their status comes before brushing their teeth or eating breakfast. In short, social media offers an immediate, dynamic, and personal way to connect with potential customers.

But How Can You Build Trust?

Many businesses grumble about the fact that they have tried this “social media thing” and not seen tangible benefit. It’s possible they have done everything right and somehow the gods of social media have simply deemed them unworthy. It is much more likely they are approaching social media marketing the wrong way.

We’ve already established social media is a completely different animal from conventional marketing strategies. It makes sense that businesses must approach it differently, as well. Traditional marketing is all about the business and the brand. It focuses on what the company has to offer and concerns itself with presenting an idea in the most appealing manner possible. To be successful in social media, the focus needs to shift to customers. People love social media because it provides a forum for sharing ideas and information. People want to be inspired, intrigued, and moved. If your company doesn’t offer content that is deemed valuable by social media users, you won’t gain a single customer.

So What Strategies Are Effective?

Being successful on Twitter is about the simple concept of paying it forward. If your company provides exceptional content, information, and insight without any brand or product flaunting, people will be drawn to it. It all goes back to that central idea of trust. When customers know they will receive interesting and relevant content from your company they are more likely to place their trust in your brand. They will want to talk about your company to their friends, family, and social media networks. Because social media is an opt-out society, users are completely in control of what brand messages reach them. Remember the core of social media is exactly that…being social. Once you establish trust, social media will become a huge boon for your brand.

 

About The Author

randy-bowden.jpg

Randy Bowden

Randy Bowden is a principal partner along with his wife, Shalah, of bowden2bowden llc, a marketing and branding consultancy firm. Specializing in developing targeted marketing solutions, exceptional creative executions and solid branding strategies that give clients a real competitive advantage. Our core team has the ability to scale quickly and effectively with trusted partners as needed. We consider them an integral part of our team and process. Our ability to approach challenging projects in an atmosphere of spirited cooperation leads to engaging, compelling solutions and successful work that yields desired results. Randy writes three posts weekly for their bowden2bowden blog.”

Enhanced by Zemanta