CNN vs. TMZ: What Does Your Brand Say About You?

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: January 17, 2014
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  On the evening of November 30, celebrity and entertainment news site TMZ released a report: “Paul Walker Dies in Fiery Car Crash.” The star of the Fast and the Furious movies, the site reported, had been riding with a friend in Santa Clarita, when the driver lost control of the car and crashed into a tree. The story immediately spread like wildfire across social media. But of the people sharing and commenting on it, many had the same question: “Is this a hoax?” And even as other sites started reporting the story as well, many people maintained their doubts about its veracity, until it was finally confirmed on Mr. Walker’s own official Facebook and Twitter pages. Read More

Using Messaging Apps For Marketing

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: January 16, 2014
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  Smartphones, tablets and other types of mobile devices have opened up a whole range of new opportunities for communicating. Which means they’ve also opened up a whole range of new opportunities for promoting your brand. In particular, there’s the rise of messaging apps as a new form of social media. For instance, there’s Kik Messenger, which combines social media, texting, and IM, allowing you to converse and share content with your friends, privately and mobilely, either one-on-one or in groups. Or Snapchat, which lets you send photo messages to friends in short bursts that last no longer than 10 seconds before disappearing. These messaging apps eliminate the walls and newsfeeds and connect people directly with their social circles. They enable the things their users want, like messaging and sharing content, while eliminating a lot of the extraneous features of other social media platforms. And they’re quickly going from a novelty to a mainstream social media tool. According to a number of experts, these apps represent the future of how people are connecting with one another. Messaging apps are here to stay. Read More

Weathering Social Media Storms – And Dancing In the Rain

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: January 11, 2014
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  Social networking has brought a bunch of benefits for business branding, but disadvantages exist as well. One of the main difficulties is maintaining a consistent image, especially when you have an online presence 24/7 to deal with. It’s easy when you’re under pressure to react too quickly, post off-the-cuff messages that aren’t well thought out and sometimes put your foot in your proverbial mouth. If you have a strong social media persona, however, you can probably weather the resulting storm better than most. Here’s how to present the right company image in your social media marketing so that when lightning strikes, recovery is possible. Read More

5 Reasons Why Users Unsubscribe From Your Email Marketing List

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: December 30, 2013
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  Another one bites the dust! If that’s how you feel on a daily basis watching notifications come in about email unsubscribes, maybe it’s time to figure out why you’re losing users. There are lots of reasons why people leave an email marketing list, and if you can identify the ones that apply to you, it might be possible to do something about them. Here are the most common causes for readers disappearing suddenly and without warning. Read More

Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developers And What They Can Teach You

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: December 27, 2013
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  Facebook makes its money through marketing and ad revenue. In order to maintain its position at the top of the social media world, it needs to work with the very best marketers and advertisers. So they established their Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. Elite and talented marketing companies who join this program are able to work with Facebook to find new and innovative ways of reaching its users, from app building to ad creation to Facebook Pages. Read More

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Social Media Marketing “Jabs”

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: December 26, 2013
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  So you’ve managed to amass a following on social media. How do you use that following to reach out to people? How do you engage with them in a real and personal way that will affect the way they think of your company? How do you make the connections that will ultimately lead to sales? Gary Vaynerchuk would seem to have the answers to all of those questions. He’s a social media marketer who knows how to promote his clients, and who knows how to promote himself. It’s a process he calls, “Jab, jab, jab, right hook” (which is also the title of Vaynerchuk’s just-released book). A “jab” is an interaction between someone and your brand, and anything of value that you can provide for them. This can be as simple as a compliment or acknowledgement of something they’ve said to you. Or it can be a larger favor. Read More

Google Plus’s Shared Endoresments – What They Mean For Social Media Marketing

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: December 25, 2013
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  The whole purpose behind social media is marketing. Obviously, there’s the concept of connecting people all over the globe and allowing them to share their lives with one another. But the way social media sites make money is by sharing products and brands. Endorsements for a particular company or product are much more meaningful if they come from someone you know and trust. So with that in mind, Google+ has introduced Shared Endorsements. When you give a positive review or recommendation to a particular company or product, whether it’s a restaurant, a song or a product purchase, that recommendation, along with your name and profile picture, can then be shared with the people in your circles when they search for the same thing. So the question is, what does this mean for you and how you market your brand on social media? Here are a few things to consider: Include Google+ in Your Social Media Strategy. You might wonder what the point of marketing on Google+ is. It’s not as popular or as active as Facebook or Twitter, so while you might maintain a nominal presence on it, you may not be focusing a lot of your social media marketing efforts there. But the thing to remember is this: what sets Google+ apart from other social networks is that people don’t have to be actively using it in order to be affected by it. Google+ content is embedded into their regular search results. So even though it’s not the most popular or widely used social media platform, it can still be a powerful tool. So make sure you’re using that tool. Sharing Is Caring. Now more than ever, you should encourage people to share your content. Make sure all of your blogs have the “+1” button on them and focus more effort on promoting your brand on Google+. Once someone shares it, anyone they’re connected with can see their recommendation when your content turns up in their search results. It’s a great way of reaching out to a targeted audience. It’s Who You Know. With the right connections, Shared Endorsements can increase your exposure simply and effectively. Find a few friends or colleagues who have a large number of people in their Google+ circles—a thousand or more is ideal. Get them to do you a favor by recommending or giving +1 to your site, or some of your content. Offer to do the same for them. You’ve just opened yourself up to over a thousand new potential viewers, all pre-targeted, and increased your credibility with all of them based on your colleague’s recommendation. Read More

Let It Snow: 4 Reasons To Keep Content Marketing Alive In the Holidays

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: December 5, 2013
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  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go! And just like the song says, in just a few weeks’ time the holidays will be here. Or will they? Sure, there’ll be holiday decorations in your home and the stores, and many of your friends and family will be winding down to take a well-deserved break. But does that mean you can do the same, and just stop publishing content for a week or three? Surely, nobody’s going to notice if you do, right? Wrong! Here are four reasons why content marketing matters as much—if not more—during the holidays as any other time of year. Get yours all set up and then you can let it snow, baby, let it snow! Read More

Is There Such Thing As Bad Publicity?

  • Author: admin
  • Posted on: November 30, 2013
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  “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” is a common saying in marketing. A company may make a huge mistake or even get caught doing things that are unscrupulous or illegal. Everyone comes together to condemn what they’ve done,… Read More