Sky Soft Consulting Blog – Anything about website, social media, and business.
We finished this project a while ago. The project was to setup an online streaming video ads (latest DVD, latest artists, latest news, etc) from DiscTarra headquarter to major DiscTarra stores. The video is controlled and can be adjusted anytime or whatever the admin wants.
In order to leverage technologies for business, marketers should stay up-to-date with latest trends. That’s why many wonder what the future holds for social media marketing.
Learn from Previous Innovations.
The only way to prepare adequately for the future is by looking back at history. Exploring the evolution of e-business, for example, can help today’s marketers better understand the evolution of social media marketing. Nobody talks about e-business anymore because it is just business. We are now observing the same type of dynamic we witnessed ten years ago, and we should be able to recognize these familiar patterns.
Forget about the Notion of De-Marketization.
In the future, the notion of demarketization will disappear, thus closing the gap between social media marketing and just marketing. The sooner people realize that what we are talking about is marketing and communications; that what we are talking about is reaching people in the ways that they want to be reached, using these sorts of networks that they are already on, then the faster they can become successful at using those new tools.
The Tools Will Keep Changing.
A couple of years ago, Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was limited to students only. A few years from now, new tools will populate the online landscape. But don’t think of them as completely new—they simply reinforce some fundamentals of marketing. They will sustain the methodology of understanding your audience, creating something of value and providing it for free.
I read this article a while ago from Mashable.
This article is worth reading:
Google announced that Google+ will be available for Google Apps users. This means that the millions of people using Google Apps for their businesses will now have access to the Google+ social collaboration platform.
With Google+’s unique features for search, selective sharing and rich communication, it offers consumers a very different user experience than the established social networks. For individuals, Google+ has quickly become a great place to build your interest graph — that is, find the latest content and people related to topics you’re interested in.
Google+ has five unique advantages over other social business platforms.
1. Smart Integration With Existing Google Apps.
Google+ is fully integrated with Google Apps. As a user, you don’t need a new login — it’s just another tab like mail, calendar, docs or video. Most business users spend their day in mail or calendar, so a tool that’s easily accessible from the daily workflow has advantages over third-party software.
Thinking a bit ahead of where the product is, the possibilities that are opened up by the integration with Google Apps are pretty exciting. You can imagine “+1” buttons and rich collaboration across sites, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, blogs, videos, photos and more. Or imagine working within a doc and starting a hangout with collaborators while sharing your screen. For companies using Google Apps, taking advantage of these features would require no additional software, logins or changes in behavior.
2. Google+ Already Knows a Lot About You.
Because of its tight integration with Google Apps, Google+ could take advantage of what it already knows about each business user, including whom they email, how often and how recently, as well as the topics they write about and search for. Google+ is in a position to help an enterprise user not only quickly build out his internal circles, but also discover those outside the company who are talking about the same topics or industry. If Google chooses to pursue this, it would make a great tool to help each user build out broad interest-based professional networks.
3. Google+ Is Uniquely Positioned to Help You Find and Share Interesting Content.
Nobody has a better index of what’s on the web than Google. So nobody is better positioned to help you find interesting content and people from both inside and outside your company. Google+ Sparks let you follow the latest from the web on topics you’re interested in, and one can imagine something similar within your domain. Internal Sparks could let you quickly find content and experts within your company on work-related topics you’re most interested in.
4. Google+ Integrates Public and Private Sharing.
Unlike other social enterprise platforms, which keep most shared content behind company walls, Google+ integrates public and private sharing. When I’m using Google+, I can decide for each post whether I want to share it with my colleagues, my clients, or certain subsets of either category. Also, because a number of websites have already embedded +1 buttons, it’s easy to “like” content from across the web and share it with targeted groups.
5. Android Phones Sync Easily With the Entire Apps Suite.
Finally, an Android mobile phone brings this complete integration to users on the go. Activating Android handsets with your company’s Google Apps account brings all this productive and social functionality to the palm of your employees’ hands. And the wide variety of devices and carriers means greater flexibility.
Today, it is highly debated whether the old rules of measurement still apply to modern marketing. But there is no doubt about the importance of newly emerging metrics.
Challenge Old Metrics
For a long time, measurement of marketing efforts has been around sales leads. But things have rapidly changed with the development of new technologies and especially with the growth of the Web. Are you taking notice of these emerging realities and incorporating them into your marketing reporting mix?
Focus on Exposure
Marketers should develop new metrics that track exposure to ideas. Interestingly enough, this comes even prior to the actual sales cycle. A lot of the measurement happens higher up in the funnel. Where in search engines is your content appearing when people enter specific keywords? How can you get to the first listing? These are the types of questions that will help you focus on making your ideas and content more visible to the public.
What Should You Measure?
It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Avoid making this mistake and focus on a few key elements to track. You can measure the number of people reading your blog posts. You can track your performance in search engines. You can see how many people are following you on Twitter. All these things demonstrate your reach and how it is growing (or decreasing). The larger the exposure, the more triggers to the sales process you are creating.
Google+ is the new player in the block. It has quickly become the place to be in social media.
The last thing entrepreneurs need is another social network to join, right? Weren’t you just getting the hang of Twitter? Didn’t you just start putting that Facebook business page together? So why is this important to get into Google+ now?
What I’ve seen so far is that the new social network from Google has a lot of advantages that are worth thinking about, and entrepreneurial types should take a look-see.
THE NEXT BIG THING
Google+ is a social networking platform, but you can look at it a lot of different ways. You can say it’s like Facebook, only cleaner. It’s like Twitter, only more engaging. It has the potential to be a great collaboration and communication platform (you can isolate who sees information by sharing it with specific Circles, or groupings of people).
Also, realize that Google+ is indexed by the biggest search engine in the world, also known as Google. Other search engines like it, too. And it has a lot of integration points, such as Google Places (which shows you location information), and an incredible potential for integrating even more of Google’s services over time.
HOW IT WILL HELP YOUR BUSINESS
Social networks are built to try and emulate real-world connectivity and information-sharing. On one hand, they’re like a more interesting telephone. On the other hand, they’re built to augment (not replace) cocktail parties, chamber of commerce meetings and other places where people get to know each other (or at least used to). Google+ does this surprisingly well, for a few reasons.
Google+ lets you share photos, videos, links and location data with everyone, or with your select Circles. Thus, when you find the good stuff that applies to your real estate friends, if you’ve grouped them into a Circle, you can send that information only to them. Other times, you can share with the general public to try and grow your audience.
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
First (and important) Facebook is not indexed by Google for search results, meaning that everything you do inside there stays inside there. Second, Facebook and LinkedIn both are set up for more of an “exclusive” model, which means that you have to know someone to know something. That’s why you see companies pushing so hard for “likes,” and why you see people spam the LinkedIn Groups.
Google+ is slowly rolling out their “for business” parts of the platform.
GET IN EARLY
Simply put, it’s important to take action on Google+ right now. I saw the benefits of this when I joined Twitter a while ago. If you get in, get familiar, start growing connections and learn how to curate and share, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Why Submit Your Press Release to Distribution Services?
Think about Google News and Yahoo! News as different search engines. In order to get your content to be indexed in these places, you need to submit your press release to one of the recognized press release distribution services.
Where to Submit Your Press Release?
The five big ones are: PRWeb, PR Newswire, Business Wire, Marketwire and PrimeNewswire. There are other less popular ones, plus free services you may be able to use. While we encourage you to experiment, make sure you know what you are getting. You should have access to the main search engines and the capability to hyperlink from the press release to your site.
The # 1 Critical Element in Press Releases
Including hyperlinks in your press releases is critical. Make sure to hyperlink relevant words directing to targeted pages. For instance, if your press release is about a new product launch, you should hyperlink the most important phrases and send people to your website pages corresponding to these phrases. This is essential for search engine optimization.
Don’t Forget to Publish on Your Site
In addition to sending the press release to reputable distribution services, you should also publish it on your own website. Put it up on the Media page, on your blog or wherever you think is appropriate. If you put it on your site, it is going to get indexed by the main part of Google.
Do you remember the sweet anticipation of receiving new email messages? If you are like most people today, you hardly think of your inbox fondly.
Here are the two things you need to consider when using your email for marketing. It is great to see people opening and enjoying your emails. Here is how you can achieve more of this:
Don’t Use Email to Only Sell
“The biggest problem that I see is that companies use them [emails] exclusively to try to sell things,” says David Meerman Scott in his book “Real-Time Marketing.”
The messages they send revolve around product offers, discounts and free shipping. Emails from B2B companies, on the other hand, are always trying to push the recipients toward engaging with sales people. While this approach is okay every now and then, it should occur only after a company has earned the attention of its email subscribers.
Earn the Attention of Email Subscribers
Every email you send to people needs to lead with something valuable. You might want to share a link to a video, a new webinar or some type of industry report or an infographic. In this way, your recipients will be excited to open your messages because they will expect to see real value there. So, before sending your next email, ask yourself: “Why is this going to be valuable to the person I am sending it?”
Maybe you are a local business owner, or an entrepreneur, or a marketer at a small company. How do you make the most of social media to increase your visibility online and attract new customers?
What Is Social Media?
When we say “social media,” do we actually talk about the same thing? People want to define social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. While this is a component of it, it does not accurately portray the entire picture. The emphasis should be placed on the word “social,” which in reality means sharing. “The best small business use of social media is to create things that are worthy of being shared,” says David Meerman Scott in his book “Real-Time Marketing.”
Create Great Content
Content, of course, is one of the best things that is worthy of being shared. It can come in different formats, ranging from video series and webinars to text-based content like eBooks, whitepapers and blog posts.
If these content pieces provide your target audience with valuable information, people will be eager to share them further. Today the social way of sharing is by using the tools you are familiar with: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Social Media Is Not A Stand-Alone Thing
A lot of businesses make a mistake by thinking of social media as a stand-alone thing. Companies focus too much on specific tools, profiles and features. If you think of Twitter and Facebook as ways to share irresistible offers, then social media becomes easy. If social means sharing, go and create something share-worthy!
Integrating user-generated content (UGC) into the product page is a proven, effective way to drive more traffic to your product pages. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of integrating UGC on the product page:
There are many types of UGC valued by Google, including but not limited to: customer reviews, Q&A, discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Wiki Entries.
How to Deal with Negative Comments
If you have been blogging for a while, you have probably felt the frustration associated with negative comments. If you are new to blogging, you probably fear receiving biting criticism. But you might be surprised to learn that negative comments can sometimes be a good thing.
Understand the Criticism.
“When you have somebody who is thoughtfully critical of you, respond to them and show that your organization is human and you are a caring person,” says David Meerman Scott in his book “Real-Time Marketing.” Critical comments can spark meaningful and authentic discussions. Responding to them shows that you are attentive to the remarks of others and that you are not just rambling in a vacuum.
React in the Same Channel.
“It is always a good idea to react in the same media that the comment was made in,” says David. If someone posts a tweet, tweet back at them. If they leave a blog comment, comment on the same post. If they did a video, do a video in response. Pay attention to people’s preferred method of communication and continue the dialogue on that platform.
Don’t Respond to Bullies.
“If it is a thoughtful comment, it deserves a response. If it is a bully and all they are trying to do is bully you—you don‟t have to respond to that,” says David. Trust your guts to evaluate if a comment is attacking you or your argument. If the commenter is being insulting without providing any meaningful criticism, feel free to ignore them.