Does your company have specific business goals for your social media activities? If not, you should.

In a November 2009 survey MarketingSherpa discovered that approximately ninety-four percent (see chart below) of those surveyed use social media to increase their website traffic, which is not surprising.

What might surprise you is twenty-one percent don’t actually measure their results and five percent have no specific objectives for their social media activities. So I can only assume that they’re on LinkedIn and Tweeting, for example, because they think it’s the right thing to do.

Doing something for the sake of doing it doesn’t sound like real business to me, does it to you?

 

The other thing that surprised me was the relatively low number of respondents who use social media to reduce their customer acquisition and customer support costs. I mean, the tools are free!

The bottom line is social media is a free and easy to use platform for promoting your business and communicating directly with your customers and prospect, so use it.

If you’re not sure how, give us a call.

Steve Hartkopf

800-707-9150

If you’re looking for niche markets, hot topics and new ideas there are a bunch of sites that can help you beyond the search engines although, in some cases, they are sub-domains of the search engines.

I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. Since I’m usually targeting the US market, I’ll click on “U.S. Zeitgeist,” otherwise I’ll look at “Zeitgeist Around the World.”

Lycos Top 50 and Yahoo! Buzz are two other sites, like Google Zeitgeist, that I review when I’m looking for the latest trends in digital products and hot topics.

The eBay Pulse site is also an excellent place to start looking at niche markets and topics and is one very few people, from what I can tell, use for research.

If you still can’t find anything to get your creative marketing or writing juices flowing then here are some other sites to investigate:

Nichebot - http://www.nichebot.com

Shopping.com Searches – http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches

AOL Hot Searches - http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot

Google Groups - http://groups.google.com

Craig's List - http://www.craigslist.com

Delicious Popular - http://del.icio.us/popular

Digg - http://www.digg.com

Google Catalogs - http://catalogs.google.com

Google Suggest – http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Technorati - http://www.technorati.com

If you want to focus exclusively on what’s selling visit the Clickbank Marketplace (http://marketplace.clickbank.net).

The web is constantly changing so it requires effort to stay current, to remain relevant.

As a marketing consultant it’s my business to stay abreast of web-trends. Feel free to call me if you’re having trouble finding the information you need.

Steve Hartkopf

800-707-9150

 

In case you want your message exposed to millions of people, Aligned Marketing does social media and video.

Steve
803-810-3180
800-707-9150

Small to mid-sized businesses know that free press, as long as it's positive, is a fantastic marketing tool. Then why do so few use them?

I think there's some mystery around press releases so here are a few tips to improve the odds of getting yours printed.

1. Make sure the editor is interested in your topic area. When targeting a selected list of papers and outlets, review their recently published articles and try to draw a connection between your press release and their stories. If you don’t know who to contact at a news organization, search their website for stories about related topics, products, or companies similar to yours and approach the people, editors and reporters, involved in those stories.
2. Stick to the facts. Opinions are great but unless you’re famous more news outlets, sorry, don’t care. Professionally trained journalists stick with the essential five W's and the H are who, what, why, where, when, and how when writing a story so you need to do the same. Answer these questions for them, do their work and you’ll increase the odds of getting your story into print.
3. Be clear. Make sure your press releases are free of industry jargon and acronyms. Translate technical or industry jargon into plain English and write in short declarative sentences at approximately an eighth-grade reading level. (Just guess.)
4. Brevity is a must. Every word and every line, including the obligatory quotes from company executives, must provide editors and reporters with useful information. Use only the facts you need to support your story, edit out any filler that snuck in during the drafting process and get to the point.
5. Provide proof sources. If there is someone, a credible source, the editor or reporter can contact to verify your statements and claims, then include their contact information. Be sure to let your sources know that they may be contacted, what they can expect to be asked about, and you would like them to respond.

Steve

The practices on Wall Street are not easy to defend but neither are they surprising. The U.S. Government took the cost of capital, the raw material banks use to make loans, down to zero and, at the same time, poured an avalanche of money into their coffers. That may have been necessary but random acts have random consequences and, in a panic, the last two administrations acted randomly.

From what I can tell the bailouts were done with little oversight. The banks are the new bad guys because they didn’t do what the current administration thought they should do. Metaphorically, we gave a teenager the car keys and said do your thing. Please. What the heck did we expect?

The banks acted in their own self-interest. How shocking? And now they are being slapped with the greed label. An old enemy returns and by-golly we’re gonna get ‘im. We’ve got new weapons too, more regulation, punitive laws and more outside interference. Wait, aren’t those are the old weapons? How well will that work? Wall Street might know. The Dow plunged 213 points (2%!) yesterday.

"Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail," Mr. Obama proclaimed Thursday. I feel better already.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl said, "Let's not be finding (sic) a bogeyman so that we can turn public attention away from what they're doing wrong in the administration." Good for you, Senator, waggle that finger.

Peter Drucker said that laws brought forth from "scandal" (real or concocted) are usually bad laws. He reasoned scandal driven laws “punish 99 innocents to foil one miscreant. They penalize good practice, yet rarely prevent malpractice. They express emotion rather than reason."

Ginning up scandal and public outcry to produce regulation will create more confusion, add cost and is unproductive. The American people need private sector jobs that sustain the economy, not hobgoblins and speeches, from either side.

Mr. President, if you’re listening, which you said you were going to do, seriously this time, like now, after the Massachusetts’s election, trim government spending so that you can lower taxes on businesses and individuals. You see, some greed really is bad. Greedy politicians who keep raising taxes are the worst.

If I were a tough-guy I’d tell all the politicians to just shut up, give us back our money and don’t let me catch you nosing around here again, but I’m not.

 

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As my title suggests, I’m going off the reservation with this post. Today’s post isn’t about business or communication. It’s about me. It’s about you.

When I look over the expanse of human history I see three significant events:

1. Fire
2. Jesus and
3. the Internet

I know a lot more happened, I just think the rest of it is largely subtext. I guess I’m a big picture guy. Some of us operate at 20,000 feet and some us at 3 feet. That’s fine. We’re just different. One view is not necessarily better than the other and we need both types of people (and a lot more) in the world. We all have a role to play.

I’m a good guy to have on your strategy development team. I can spot trends early on in their development and ways that seemingly unrelated events and conflicting data are, in fact, lining up to a predictable conclusion. Rarely a week goes by that I’m not amazed that someone, or some company, “didn’t see that coming.” That’s one of my strengths, but I have weaknesses too.

Even though I consider myself a decent writer, I’m not the guy to hire if you want to a write long detailed process manual, which may be needed to implement a strategy. I’d get about 90% through, get bored and struggle with the last 10%. Attention to detail has been a life-long issue for me. My best work has been done when I had highly analytical teammates, people to help me with details. These differences are good, in fact they’re important.

Can you imagine how boring it would be if every night you sat down with your friends and family and said, “Okay, what should we talk about? Fire, Jesus or the Internet?” That wouldn’t work well, although I know people who, it seems, do only talk about the last two.

It’s hard to figure out your own set of words. It takes time and effort to work through and reconcile your inner-most thoughts and feelings. But that’s exactly how we learn about ourselves. My little three-word exercise is just one tactic and those are my results.

I’m going to assume your list, your top three (fifteen, whatever) is different than mine and that’s the point. Write your own list. Once you have it, study it. What does it tell you about yourself? How can you incorporate your natural tendencies, the real you, into your work? How can you mix it into your fun?

I’ve shared my list. Care to share yours?

Steve