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Intuit’s social media campaign drives conversion on par with its transaction sites

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

By Jan Carroza

This is worth repeating.

Intuit drives conversion with social media on par with its transaction sites.

If anyone continues to doubt the influence of social media on sales, this is the time to acknowledge the value. Oh, and remember, BTW, it’s still basically free. Unlike traditional or pay-per-click advertising, for the most part, the only real cost is the time of staff or an outsourced team to create, manage and monitor the messages.

How did they do this? Kira Wampler, Principal of Ant’s Eye View and formerly of Intuit, described the process at the August Social Media Breakfast Seattle meeting, saying that it all started by word of mouth. Once they had a track record, they demonstrated it to develop partnerships that took it all further.

What was the compelling word of mouth message? Helpful engagement.

Identify the Pain Points of your Prospects

Intuit asked businesses to describe their biggest challenge and how they solved it. As the program grew to over 1.2 million visits and 2000 stories, they partnered with bloggers. Leads were more valuable than the average.

Responding to a common desire for businesses to be noticed, Intuit built a program called Love A Local Business, to award small business grants. They also employ a widget to extend their message across retail sites increasing traffic 360%. A whopping 40% of traffic votes…

Reputation Management Is So Worthwhile

Incredibly, they found they could reduce the negative messages. When they started into a new venue, such as Facebook, they typically found that negative messaging made up 65% to total sentiment. With careful attention to their audience, they reduced negative sentiment by 30%.

Two great suggestions Kira had for the audience:

Make sure all your social media URLs are entered into your website analytics. Analysis from this data will help you share your interpretations with your management and drive the next decisions for your efforts.
Survey your customers to see where in the purchasing process they might use social media. Are they reading online reviews? Encourage them to post one for you.

Time Management is Possible

One of the biggest objections I’ve heard to getting into is how much time it can take. At Intuit, the management takes about 4 hours a week by one employee. They prioritized social media starting with the most impactful, Amazon’s reviews. Once your social media sites and management tools are all set up, the day-to-day can be very productive for a focused individual.

How do you make social media management work? Find the right response to your target’s pain points, be helpful, track your messages in a focused manner and you too might see social media success that matches or beats your paid advertising campaign.

You can watch the entire talk at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8840696.

Tags: Amazon, Ant’s Eye View, Intuit, Love A Local Business, reputation management, Social Media Breakfast Seattle, social media management, web analytics
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, Local business, Social Media and Social Networking | No Comments »

How is your company using social media?

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

By Karen Miller

Like most people, when I saw the Wheat Thins TV ad where they delivered a year’s worth of Wheat Thins to a consumer, I was amused and intrigued by what they were doing. Of course, I went to their website, Facebook page and Twitter to see what was happening. And, they were listening to their fans and communicating with them!

Over and over it has been said that social media is all about communicating. Companies like Wheat Thins are using social media to their advantage. They are giving out coupons on Facebook, delivering Wheat Thins to those on Twitter and making product announcements on both. But this is only one example of a company using social media to their advantage.

Staples, Chase, Pepsi all have some interesting campaigns using social media that involve interaction with their consumers. The Pepsi Refresh campaign has used social media to donate millions of dollars to local and national charities. Instead of advertising on the Super Bowl this year, they are using social media sites to give away those advertising dollars to the charities. They are gaining product recognition and building brand loyalty as well as being “socially responsible.”

Chase did a similar campaign for Community Giving and Staples engages their consumers by asking questions, talking about donating to schools, showing sale items, etc. The key is engaging and communicating. Make sure you are doing both with your social media but most importantly take time to listen to your consumers.

How is your company using social media to their advantage? And what companies do you think are uniquely using social media?

Tags: advertising, Chase, Facebook, Nabisco, Pepsi, social media, Staples, Super Bowl, Twitter, Wheat Thins
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media and Social Networking, Twitter | No Comments »

Beyond the Big 4 – Flickr Digg Delicious

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

By the Social Media Dynamics Team

What Flickr, Digg and Delicious can do for your business

After you’ve developed your routine on the Big 4 social media programs of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, moving beyond to Flickr, Digg and Delicious offers important benefits:

Increased web presence
Increased search engine optimization, backlinks, Google “juice”
Increased community, relationships, new audiences
Sources of creative ideas

Flickr, Digg and Delicious each offer all of these benefits. In general, every link to your site and every additional web presence you create increases the opportunity for greater returns in new audience and higher site rankings.

Each offers you a Profile section to share information publicly about your business, website, events, charities, teams and locations.

Each offers community and group participation to develop and engage in relationships with members. Be sure to “lurk” in all sites to get comfortable with what is said. Monitor conversations. Then join in and leave comments, being sure to leave your contact information in the signature you leave on your post. Let the listening you do suggest new ideas for what more you can provide your audience in terms of education, reputation management, information and entertainment.

Flickr is image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community owned by Yahoo! Popular as a website for users to share personal photographs, Flickr is widely used by bloggers to host images used in blogs and social media. As of October 2009, it claims to host more than 4 billion images.[1]

Posting images of new products, locations, community activities, and industry events helps a business get better ranking due to Google’s affinity for indexing images and video. Join Flickr groups to engage like-minded visitors and share images. All images help: logos, photos, headshots, product and store shots, portfolio graphics and stills and video from events. The benefits can include the viral nature of your new audience sharing your images with others, increasing your prospects and community.

Look for images that you might like to get permission to use in your blog posts and the like. Note copyrights and give attribution where required. Make sure to “tag” images with great keywords and captions to make them easy to be found with search terms.

Digg is a social news website, letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. The website traffic ranked 100th by Alexa.com as of April 2, 2010.

Digg likes postings of recent news including articles, fresh news events and new products and services, helping to gain short-term traffic surges while stories are current. Again the viral nature of sharing comes into play in terms of getting in front of more and more new audience members. You begin to see the value and importance of strong content and creative that’s interesting and compelling enough to share.

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks that is owned by Yahoo. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique URLs bookmarked URLs.

I’ve seen suggestions to submit every page of your site to Delicious. Certainly submit articles, site sections, and blog posts that you think offer great content value. Take advantage to develop your Profile, add photos and even a blog if you like. Explore the applications available to see what might be helpful.

Yahoo’s ownership of both Flickr and Delicious certainly helps get pages indexed faster. The intertwining of these services with your Yahoo and My Yahoo account increases the exposure of graphics, profile and contacts.

Many of these services let you tie back to your Twitter, Facebook, blog and other social media activities to share in their venues. So share away, develop new audiences, explore and benefit from your expanding social media universe.

[1] Source for all definitions: Wikipedia

Advice to Small Business on Social Media – Part 2

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

By Jan Carroza

Where do businesses do all this Social Media connecting?

Cookie crumbs should be left wherever your users are talking plus wherever you hope to find them. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook are a good starting point. Each offers a different audience. Twitter is for news and great for customer service. LinkedIn is for business networking. Facebook Fan Pages have become special places to give fans and customers discounts, special offers and a sense of a preferred status. Google and Yahoo offer Profile placement and there will be continual jockeying for position by offering more services. More networks will pop up or be gobbled up. Staying tuned to your prospects conversations will guide you to additional opportunities.

Other ANCHORS:

LinkedIn: Consider this part of the preparatory part that makes the first nice impression. Work on your LinkedIn Profile to tell your story in the first person. Be personable. This is not your father’s resume. Make yourself approachable to other members who would look to you for information based on the expertise you display. I share this advice a lot: Building out your LinkedIn Profile.

Next: ask for a Recommendation of your services by at least one person. Over time, try to get a 360 review from folks who have worked for you, those that you have worked for, colleagues, vendors and other members of your organizations.

Build a LinkedIn Company Profile and MOST IMPORTANTLY, put terms in Specialties that prospects would search on to find your services. Here are some guidelines: Building out your Company LinkedIN Profile. With a recommendation and keywords in Specialties on the Company Profile, you now become a Service Provider and can be discovered by millions.

Facebook Fan Page: 6.8% of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook. Business can no longer ignore the impact and should take advantage to find their fan base where they interact. As the #2 site in traffic rank, Facebook gives a boost in search results to any business.

You have several choices of the kind of page. Choosing Local Business will let you provide hours and parking and is somewhat limited. Brand, product or organization lets you give more of a profile of your business. Community and Group pages are generally Stage 3 efforts

Create a Facebook Page

Twitter: Super for building a base to direct to Facebook or a blog or shopping cart. Twitter is used to manage reputations and customer service issues. Steady, regular communication, again with just a few minutes a day, will build relationships and convert to sales. You can build a presence in just minutes. Include a bio and image with link to website or blog. Search on topics related to your industry and “lurk” or “listen” to conversations. As appropriate, reply. Retweet others to caption the attention of other visitors. It’s the content of your conversations that will attract followers.

I would add a 6^th Strategy to Mari’s list. Continue to learn. You’ll find others whose posts you like. Ask them questions. You’ll need some tools to manage this process. Those tend to be selected as a personal preference. Services that make it easy to schedule posts, shorten URLs will save you time. There are lots of choices and just a search away.

My last advice to encourage businesses to just get started. However small, make that first step. And then another. Just keeping leaving crumbs all over with great information and point them back in your direction. Enjoy the process. It’s rewarding in so many ways!

@social_dynamics

Tags: Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn Company Profile, Mari Smith, social media for business, social media objectives, social media strategy, Twitter
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, How To, LinkedIn, Local business, Social Media and Social Networking, Twitter | No Comments »

Advice to Small Business on Social Media – Part 1

Monday, May 10th, 2010

By Jan Carroza

Small businesses can take advantage of the exciting interaction that social media can offer while overcoming the concern of time constraints, misconceptions and the sense of overwhelm that cause inertia. Tackle social media in 3 stages with 6 great strategies.

Manage Your Expectations

Be patient. My advice to any business is not to expect tons of sales right out the gate. Social media is about building relationships of trust which lead to actions. While I have seen tremendous reaction in just hours, in general businesses should think of each communication as another cookie crumb with the possibility of being found by someone who will follow your trail. Each communication gives a business an opportunity to ENGAGE. I can’t stress this enough. Eventually, each business can have benchmarks tracking results to know that x number of communications yielded y in sales.

A lot has been written about businesses pitching soliloquies. Companies, agencies and PR firms have been dropping the ball here. Social media is about INTERACTION. Businesses must make a CONNECTION. That means starting a conversation or reacting to one. That’s why social media marketing might take more time than traditional advertising.

Don’t be overwhelmed with what you don’t know. Even the experts don’t know everything. We are all trying to run as fast as we can to keep up with new opportunities and new technologies.

Don’t be afraid this will consume your time. Can you spare 10 or 30 minutes a day? That’s enough to get you started. If you like the results, you’ll find more time if you want to.

Plan for three Stages to your experience.

Stage 1) Preparatory–
Set your Objectives. To make those cookies, you have to have a kitchen where you can pull out and measure the ingredients and an oven to bake them in. You need to prepare the places where you want actions to take place: the website, a blog, social media and networking places, and the like. Sign up, observe and participate on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Learn from the mistakes others make in formatting, links and typos.

Stage 2) Mix a Small Batch-
While you are getting familiar on this learning curve, just take small bites so you can increase your chances of some early results from your time invested. Choose 3-5 venues to start with. You’ll look back at how much you learned in a short time. Be patient.

Stage 3) Expand the Kitchen-
Add more venues. Answer questions on LinkedIn. Learn about Bookmarking to share and repeat your communications and continue to drop more crumbs in more places.

I love @MariSmith’s 5 strategies:

1)   Objective
2)   Design
3)   Content
4)   Promotion
5)   Engagement

Start by outlining your Objectives for doing social media. What are you trying to do? Get new prospects, sales, donations, information and/or managing a reputation. Keep these in mind so you don’t stray too far. Your goals will drive your strategies and choices you make in terms of places you develop your presence and in what priorities. You want to make the biggest impact for the least amount of effort. For instance, if you have products that you can show with images or video, then YouTube would be one of the early channels to add and post. There are lots of places to put video. So you don’t get overwhelmed, you start with a large one and add others in Stage 3. Same goes for images. You might start with Flickr to begin with and add more later.

Prioritize your goals for using social media. Are you providing customer service? Finding new prospects? Managing your reputation? Rank these requirements.

Focus your social media efforts to achieve these goals. If you’re handling customer service, monitor Twitter and Facebook for comments about your company and your competitors. If you dedicate a few minutes a day to monitoring and replying, you will begin a significant step forward into the limelight. Look for questions to answer and other blogs where you can post interesting, informative comments. Your signature will direct interested parties back to you.

Start with just a few things. The ones that make the most sense for your Objectives. If you want to drive actions to a website, adding a blog to your website is the biggest single recommendation to generate new content to attract prospects and persuade visitors to buy. That should be an ANCHOR. Something you give great and frequent attention to. A blog post can be a daily or weekly event that is a short discussion meant to drive at least one strong point home. One post might take just 10 minutes to write.

Check back this week for:

Where do businesses do all this Social Media connecting?

@social_dynamics

Tags: Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn Company Profile, Mari Smith, social media for business, social media objectives, social media strategy, Twitter
Posted in Articles, Blogging, Facebook, How To, Local business, Social Media and Social Networking, Twitter | No Comments »

Managing Your Facebook Expectations

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

By Karen Miller

The other night I had dinner with some friends and social media came up in conversation – specifically Facebook. One friend related the story of a colleague of hers who had set up a FB business page for a relative’s local retail business. In the course of 24 hours the page had over 5,000 fans (those who like) I questioned that, but she insisted it was true and on that basis, this friend was anxious to set up a FB business page for her husband who has a service-oriented business.

Now this person is expecting to also get 5,000 (or at least close to that number) fans in no time. Is that realistic? I don’t think so – unless you are a well-known person or company, it’s going to be hard to get that many fans quickly. Is she going to be disappointed and think she failed? Probably. Even asking every friend you have to like your business page and asking them to ask all of their friends, it still is going to take time.

When you start a FB business page, you need to be realistic about why you are starting one and how you are going to use it. We (and others) have said over and over that social media is all about communicating, connecting and opening up dialogues. Don’t just start your FB page and check on it once a week thinking that business and fans will now automatically come your way. You need to work at it on a daily basis and sometimes several times a day.

Social Media Examiner has said that marketers just starting out using social media spend an hour a week on it, but those who have been using it several months longer now use social media 10 hours a week.

Before you create your business FB page, consider how much time you can devote to using it. If you can’t spend the time to update it and keep it fresh, you might want to reconsider creating the page or you might want to consider outsourcing help.

@social_dynamics

Tags: Facebook, social media marketing
Posted in Articles, Facebook, Local business | No Comments »

Like It or Not

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

By Karen Miller

“Why did “Become a Fan” change to “Like”?
To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we’ve changed the language for Pages from “Fan” to “Like.” We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.”

We have all heard the rumors that changes were coming to Facebook and they were true. You are now going to “like” something instead of becoming a “fan.”

Everyone has an opinion on it that’s for sure. The usual argument is that I like something, but I’m a fan of something else (fill in your own example). Fandom means a commitment and like is just, well, a nice feeling. Personally, I prefer to become a fan of a company or product, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

As a marketer how is this going to affect you? You can no longer use “Become a Fan on Facebook.” Every message you have that uses those words will need to be changed. For some this includes TV commercials, radio spots, website pages and more. You might want to use “find us on Facebook” instead. “Start liking us on Facebook” doesn’t really have that great of a ring to it.

You will still be able to treat those who “like” you as a “fan.” Since the thought behind the change is that Facebook users are clicking more often on “like” rather than “become a fan,” the change in terminology may drive more people to your Facebook page and increase your fan-base or rather your like-base. Other than that is appears it will business as usual for Facebook. The upside to the change is that you may find more people landing on your Facebook page and staying there.

For some this change is not a big thing. For others who have to pay every time a change is made to their website, it costs money. You will need to make the necessary changes to your marketing messages so you won’t be out of date by requesting people become your fan.

@social_dynamics

Tags: become a fan, Facebook, fan, marketing, social media
Posted in Articles, Facebook, Local business, Social Media and Social Networking, Websites | No Comments »

Facebook Fan Page or Group Page – You Choose

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

By Sharon Hill

No really, you need to choose. Recently we were working with a university on a local alumni club’s new Facebook page and it was decided to go with a Fan Page. The page looked great, the first event was posted and a discussion started.

By going with a Fan Page, we had several other choices to make:
Local
Business
Artist, Band, or Public Figure

Focusing first on Local, we had 26 business categories from auto to travel including Club in which to choose.

Moving onto Business, we had 24 business categories from something very generic such as Products all the way to Websites including Non-Profit.

If we had selected local, the information tab would include street address and hours open for business. This would not work for our alumni club at all. Business worked fine or so we thought.

Now that we were ready to have our new Facebook Fan Page link placed on the university alumni club page, we realized most of the other clubs had selected Groups rather a Fan Page. As we had just started and had not announced our new Facebook presence we decided to investigate.

Groups are the same and different from Fan Pages

Group Type drop down box includes 10 selections, two of which would fit: Organizations and Student Groups. Selecting Organizations, we have these choices: Academic Organizations, Clubs & Societies or Non-Profit Organizations

Student Groups look like this:

Most obvious choices would be Alumni Groups or Clubs and Societies. Most of the other Facebook alumni clubs had selection Organizations and Clubs and Societies. For consistency purposes, we made the same choice.

So what are the other advantages specific to our example choosing Groups over a Fan Page?

There is a place to list Officers and most Clubs have Officers. You can Message all Members and invite people to join.

Here again is the difference between Fan Page and Group Pages. For Fan Pages you may suggest the Fan Page to Friends and only to Friends.

With Groups when you invite people to join you can invite people by email. You can invite folks to join your group even if they do not currently have a Facebook profile (they will need to create one).

These are just a few of the differences between Groups and Fan Pages. Be aware that you cannot change from one or the other. The only way to change from a Fan Page to a Group or a Group to a Fan Page is to start over. Choose wisely.
@social_dynamics

Tags: alumni groups, Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages, Facebook Groups, Groups Facebook, student groups
Posted in Articles, Facebook, Non-profits, Technical | No Comments »

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Facebook Fan Page or Group Page – You Choose

Groups are the same and different from Fan Pages

Student Groups look like this:

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