PR Communications

Print Trumps Digital With Infographics

One of the interesting aspects of my new job at Pace Communications is finding the places where my colleagues on the print side of the business have skills and expertise that works well for the digital part of the business.

Illustrations and infographics is an area of expertise where I believe print designers excel, but infographics is an area where there's much to explore with digital. I've discussed the advantages of icon, or infographics before in previous a previous post.

My colleagues and I at Pace Communications created a custom content infographic to illustrate the custom content development process, and the interactive team built a custom content process webpage where you can grab some code to embed the image in website or PowerPoint.

Let me know what you think of this graphic, and also examples of infographics you enjoy.

Thinking Iteratively With Agile Marketing

Scott Brinker writes Agile Marketing for Conversion Optimization on search engine land. He mentions my earlier post interview with the CMO of webtrends, and also includes a short list of steps for running an agile marketing project, here they are:   

    * Bringing everyone together—all stakeholders participate throughout the project lifecycle
    * An iterative approach—a series of small projects instead of one massive, indivisible project
    * Short cycle times—these smaller projects are generally completed within 1-4 weeks
    * Showing instead of telling—quick drawings and prototypes to illustrate and refine ideas
    * Objective measurement—establish good metrics and evaluate new ideas against them
    * Frequent, open communication—quick, daily meetings to check progress, fix roadblocks
    * Minimal bureaucracy—pointless busywork is ruthlessly eliminated (no “TPS reports”)

Scott's point about using an iterative approach with a series of small projects instead of one massive, indivisible project makes a lot of sense. Often marketing departments take on projects that overwhelm their participants. Instead, by splitting up tasks, and producing content, or campaigns that have smaller lead times, you can get more done over time, and show progress quickly.

Social Media Celebrity Marketing

One fascinating phenomenon with the advent of people publishing and creating content on the web so easily with all of the social media tools now available is that it is now possible to become a social media celebrity through the content you publish. Those celebrities can then profit from that celebrity status by helping to promote an advertiser, sponsor or client.

Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com takes the idea of social media celebrity marketing to the next level by making his entire business concept the idea that he will wear your company's t-shirt for a day, and during that day he will talk about your company. 

Jason is just himself in blog posts, twitter feeds and online video. So don't expect an expert who will market your company's product, rather imagine your average customer, who will give great insight into what he thinks about your product, and why his followers and readers should use your product.

Chris Brogan helped launch Radian6 with the Twebinar series -- Chris videotaped interviews with lots of social media influencers, then rolled the tape with live commentary by video and Twitter. You could argue the Twebinar was an event campaign, but I don't believe the event would have been as successful if Chris had not been involved. Hiring Chris to front the Twebinar campaign was a stroke of genius, not only did you have a brilliantly executed new social media marketing concept, The Twebinar but you had an instant following from all of Chris' fans.

The Twebinar cemented Radian6's credibility as a social media monitoring company and helped drive Chris' personal fame and standing in the wider marketing community.

Sarah Evans launched #journchat a Twitter based community where journalists, PR people and social media enthusiasts could discuss the PR 2.0, Journalist 2.0 and social media questions of the day. The weekly chat session recently partnered with CNN.com at the South by Southwest Conference, and featured a live Ustream session, where Sarah asked the CNN.com interactive team questions about their digital capabilities. Sarah runs Sevans Strategy.

Free TV Show from Ustream

microMARKETING Planning By Color Post It Notes

Greg Verdino is presenting at the Custom Content Conference today, he also recently finished his manuscript for his new book microMARKETING.

Congratulations to Greg on finishing the book, what a relief, I know I had a similar feeling when I finished my book strategies and tools for corporate blogging.

One tip Greg provides in his post however, was how to approach planning for a large document like a book. He shows a picture of all of the post it notes he used to develop his book lay out.

List Of Social Media Marketing ROI Examples

I was recently asked to give some ecommerce examples of social media marketing ROI. So I put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn for examples. To me to quality as a good example you have to be using social media tools, and engaging your customers, by conducting both a content marketing and engagement marketing strategy. I'm starting off this post with Dell's Outlet store but expect to add to the list as time goes by:

@DellOutStore - Dell's outlet store on Twitter is set up to provide a channel to sell Dell products via Twitter. Since starting the Twitter account the company has generated over $6 million in sales by using online coupons back to its online store according to a report on Mashable. The Twitter account is one Twitter success story, however, recent results for Dell indicate their 2009 sales were lower than 2008.

Dell's Stephen Felice, the president of Dell's small and medium business group, suggests the company has earned over $9 million from Twitter and Facebook in 2009. The company is growing its outlet business by setting up more Twitter feeds in other countries and they can be found at Dell's list of Twitter feeds.

3 Ideas For Measuring Social Media Marketing ROI

Measuring ROI in social media marketing is important because as an industry we need to demonstrate the value social media brings to marketing efforts. And I believe if we can show ROI and value, social media will gain additional budget, and the body of knowledge of how to manage social media marketing efforts successfully will grow. Here are three ideas for measuring ROI.

1. Metrics - Put metrics in place, for example, measure your standings in search engine rankings compare your results today with the results after you've run your social media efforts regularly.

2. Track Resources - Determine how much effort you are putting into your social media marketing efforts. Track what agencies are doing for you, and track how much time your internal staff are putting into monitoring, triage, response and writing. If you are using a combination of structured resources and organic resources for your social media efforts, you will find it more difficult to track employee time, but ask your colleagues to track how much effort they are putting into social media. Explain that if you can show ROI, you’ll be able to provide a justification for more funding, and technology resources.

3. Tie Metrics To Goals - If your goal is sales, make sure you have some way of capturing sales results, you might not get direct sales, but social media can certainly influence sales. If you gain higher search rankings, and that gives you more leads you will want to track the relation between your social media efforts, higher search rankings and sales. Give new prospects who are leads ways to tell you how they found you, but don’t depend upon their memories, develop tracking processes to determine how people signed up for products from your social media properties.

If your goal is customer retention, use social CRM software to discover how much interaction within social media is needed to help influence customers when it comes to improving retention. If you can show a direct correlation between interaction with customers and their retention rates, you may have just built a stronger case for social media than offering a discount, by demonstrating ROI.

#GSO2 Tweetup On April 15th, Tax Day In Greensboro, NC

I created a new registration page for the second GSO Tweetup at the Rioja on Battleground in Greensboro, North Carolina.

One issue with Eventbrite is that if you are creating repeat events it is not possible to show the registrants with subsequent events. I believe this is because Eventbrite will show everyone who has ever attended an event in a series, rather than those people who are just attending a single event in a series. However, a great way to use Eventbrite is to show who is attending as that helps to promote the event. Instead you can just create another event, in this case, I created http://gso2.eventbrite.com.

4 Ways Fortune 500 Companies Adopt Social Media

The question of how you deploy social media within a large multi-brand company, really comes down to budget, which department is going to pay for the resources to set up a social media program?

Different companies have taken alternative approaches to corporate social media adoption. Reviewing the landscape and history of social media I believe there are four ways social media deployment has happned within larger enterprises:

1) Organic – Microsoft, IBM and many early technology pioneers in blogging and social media technologies organically grew their use of social media. Individuals risked their careers and set up blogs and other applications without permission from executives. As a result their companies reaped long term successes.

2) Inspired - Again companies like Microsoft set up individuals centers of excellence around social media. Microsoft set up Channel9 hosted by front man Robert Scoble. The effort inspired wider social media adoption by other brands and departments within Microsoft.

3) Structured - A central social media engagement center is built. After Dell Hell, Dell set up monitoring, triage, response and quality control in 2006. The company improved customer service and used social media to develop more innovative products, and in the process turned a -49% negative rating in blog to -22% over an 18 month period. Executive support and resources were strong. I believe Macromedia; under the guidance of Jeremy Allaire before they were purchased by Adobe was another example of the structured approach to social media deployment.

4) Immerse & disperse - Faced with a low budget and the need to spread ideas about social media quickly through people across the enterprise, but not wishing to take the inspired approach. Chris Barger's General Motors hired employees into a small central social media engagement center, trained employees in how to use social media, before sending each graduate of immerse and disperse over to a brand or other corporate department.

AMA Iowa Business Blogging Presentation: April 7 2010

I'm off to Iowa for a corporate blogging speaking engagement on April 7, at 11:30am at the Hilton Garden Inn in Johnston, Iowa.  The talk is for the Iowa chapter of the American Marketing Association...which is cool because I've been heavily involved with the AMA for a while, I was previously the President of the Boston chapter in 2005.

I'm presenting on the topic of Tools and Strategies for business blogging, and will be talking about the dialogue nature of social media, and these blogging related topics.

• What is a blog?
• Should your organization blog?
• Building a blogging strategy
• Blogging guidelines
• Effective engagement strategies

But I also want to hear more from the folks at the Iowa chapter, do you have other questions about blogging and social media you'd like me to cover within the time of the presentation? If so, post a comment here on my blog and I'll try to cover your question in my presentation.

Tax Day = 2nd #GSOTweetup

April 15th is just around the corner, so mark your calendars for another chance to chat about social media and digital marketing here in Greensboro, NC at the Rioja Wine Bar on Battleground Ave. Rebecca Cochran and I have already decided to host our second event after the first #gsoTweetup.

Sign up on eventbrite for Greensboro's second GSO Tweet-Up.