Think every brand from McDonalds to Avon to Curves to Subway and so many more, all with beautifully designed tabs available to their base, each with the option to slightly customize for their location.  Smart.

“We designed Customizer Enterprise to give large companies and brands the ability to launch a social media campaign without having to worry about some of the risks of inconsistency or inexperience normally associated with turning their brand over to the masses,” said Zach Mangum, co-founder and CEO of GroSocial. “This enables businesses to quickly and easily feature their products and services across hundreds or even thousands of unique Facebook fan pages that are independently managed by their distributors and other retail partners – all the way down to mom-and-pop shops that can’t afford expensive campaigns.”

I took a backstage tour of the Customizer Enterprise last week and here’s how it might work.

• A B2B company like Coke or Nike can create a highly customized Facebook fan page to promote a special event, the high profile launch of a new product or special promotion.
• Then, they can decide to allow all the retailers that sell their product to import that custom tab to their own Facebook fan page and slightly customize it for their individual stores.
• They can either push the ad out to partners who have already requested it or allow partners to come to GroSocial and opt in.  Either way, the page owner has the option to accept or decline the tab.

Say Nike releases a new shoe for Christmas.  Bob and Betty’s Shoe Emporium plans to feature that shoe in their main holiday gift push.  But Bob and Betty don’t have the budget to custom design a special tab for their Facebook page. So they, in essence, subscribe to Nike’s tab.  Nike has set the customized controls so that Bob and Betty can add their store address and hours but can’t change the image or the offer. Bob and Betty can set their landing tab, during the promotion, to the Nike holiday offer on their Facebook page for higher visibility and can regularly point to it in posts and tweets throughout the sale season.  Bob and Betty will pay about $9.00 a month for the tab with no long term contract and so their two month promotional period would cost them just $18.00.

Now, if Bob and Betty decide to keep the Nike tab live after the holiday season ends, Nike can refresh the content and feature another new shoe, item of clothing or offer and that will automatically change on Bob and Betty’s tab.

I can imagine celebrities, musicians, authors and even motivational speakers potentially using this strategy to create highly designed tabs with desirable content which their fans would enjoy sharing on their own fan pages.

If Justin Bieber created a page with an exclusive interview about the album he’s working on right now, music stores, Bieber fan pages, and celebrity news pages might see a value added reason to add that page to their pages. Authors might see adoption of their free previews or video interviews by other writers, booksellers pages, news stations pages and more.

Because the Customizer Enterprise tool controls cannot be modified by the end user, the brand maintains complete control over their visuals, messages and offerings. The tool also allows the company to measure their ROI with built in social engagement metrics.

Users can launch several types of promotions including “reveal on like” or product giveaways that motivate customers to become fans or “like” their pages – helping to build their own fan base.

The dot com’s, dot net’s and dot co’s will still be the mainstay, however, because the new branding opportunity for companies to use, say .Nike, will come at a steep price.

According to Mashable.com, these new opportunities will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of the usual $9.99 and the annual renewal could be as high as $25,000. So the majority of businesses and entrepreneurs will still be using the generic URLs.

Will there be a massive “land grab” for .socialmedia, .food, .organic, .Auto? On your mark, get set, go.

We now produce a billion tweets per week.

We’re alerted to breaking news, disasters, celebrity deaths, political unrest and emergency procedures through Twitter.  We talk, real-time, to the CEO’s of major corporations and expect them to pay attention to what we have to say about their brands.  We rapidly spread the word about political unrest and change the colors of our avatars and our home country information in solidarity with oppressed people to help them keep their anonymity in countries where they could be in harms way just for Tweeting.  We share, and sometimes overshare, from our computers and our mobile devices, a billion times per day, all in 140 characters or less. Books have been written and published on Twitter. Poetry, especially Haiku, is flourishing on Twitter.

In short, we’ve fallen head over heals for the micro blog. We’ve got a lot to say in a few short characters.  But as much fun as Twitter can be, the power brands have figured out how to utilize Twitter to drive customer actions, to create brand loyal communities and to enhance their business reputation.

A good business strategy always includes listening and monitoring.  So in honor of Twitter’s 5^th birthday today, I’ve compiled a short list of sites that will give you insight into your own Twitter habits. These stats can provide you with a clear picture of when you tweet, what keywords you use most, how influential you are in your Twitter circle and help you determine your course of action moving forward.

Tweetstats: This site helps you graph your Twitter patterns such as number of tweets per day, tweets per month, tweets per hour and provides a great visual look that can help you understand your patterns.  If you’ve been effective with these patterns, you can replicate them.  If you’re struggling with your Twitter marketing, then you knowledge about your previous patterns can help you adjust.  The bright, full color charts are great for presentations, too.

Klout: Klout is a social influence score based on proprietary metrics and takes into consideration your influence style, how often your network retweets or interacts with you, the influential scores of your close network followers, unique mentions, number of followers and also factors in your Facebook community, blog subscribers and your LinkedIn tribe. In the past year, some high profile events have been known to use Klout scores to determine which bloggers to invite to parties and press events. It’s clear that the ability to measure social influence is important to companies and paying attention to yours, might be worth your time.  Klout gives you suggestions on areas in which you might put more focus to raise your score.TwitterCounter: This site gives you a visual map of your recent follower acquisition, a ranking among all Twitter users, predicts your growth over the next 15 days and gives you an estimate of the time it will take you to double your following given your historical data.  A paid version will give you significantly more information and this site is well worth a look.  I particularly like the live link on the right hand side to follow other Twitter users who have recently visited the site.

TwitterGrader: This site gives you a grade from 0 to 100, uses their own algorithm to measure your power, reach and authority or your actual impact in the Twitterverse.  It looks at the number of followers, the power of those followers, the number of updates from your account, the currency of those updates, your follower to following ratio, the engagement between you and your followers and then calculates a grade.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a web-based Twitter management tool that allows you to monitor multiple Twitter streams in a glance.  It also allows you to pre-schedule tweets to go out to your account at different times of the day.  Hootsuite just rolled out a new suite of very useful analytic tools to help clients monitor their account activity.  Ow.ly is the Hootsuite link shortener and you can now print out and share with clients, a nifty color pie chart analysis of exactly how many people clicked on a given link.  This is useful for tracking the effectiveness of your messaging and the actions that message was able to create.  The “Quick Stats” report gives user, at a glance, their top referrers, percentage of followers from any given country, and their most popular shared links.  These reports can be exported, customized and shared.

Twitterholic: This simple site takes a look at the date you joined Twitter, where you rank in terms of followers against others in their database and also gives you a ranking based on your location. This could help location based accounts see where they stand in their market.

Twitter, itself, gives you some great ways to monitor your marketing effectiveness.  Check your @replies, your DM’s and your @mentions daily for real-time valuable information about the effectiveness of your marketing message.

Using a variety of sites to listen and monitor your marketing and branding efforts on Twitter will give you an effective way to develop your own bench marks and success metrics.  The key is to monitor, measure, and adjust your business marketing strategy based on the valuable information that these and other sites can provide.  If you found this article helpful, I’d appreciate hearing from you.  Please leave a comment, ask a question or share any other sites you like to use, and be sure to wish Twitter a happy birthday today.

Don't let time mismanagement leave you hard-boiled

A while ago in a fit of frustration over the fact that I may need to join Bejeweled Anonymous and that I check my Facebook stream more often than my e-mail, I posted an old school luddite time management tip straight out of the “naughty chair” play book many of us used when raising our children. I suggested setting a cheap kitchen egg timer three times a day for 15 minutes at a time and strictly scheduling your social media activities during those three periods, morning, midday and end of business day. Then I boldly recommended that the rest of your time be devoted to, duh, income producing work.

The upshot is that I had more comments, e-mails and @replies over my various social media sites about that short post than anything I’ve written in a year. Now I’ve been beating the drum about the power of listening on social media as though I were an old-fashioned circuit preacher in the wildwest. So I was able to really hear what people were saying. They are overwhelmed, over worked, under impressed and very, very concerned about how to monetize the enormous effort they’re putting into social media marketing. They need to find ways to utilize the power of the massive network that can be created and still have time to create whatever it is they are selling.

Sometimes old school low-tech Luddite strategies fit well into a shiny new media marketing world.

If you’re spending more time implementing social media and less time creating or delivering your income-producing product, it’s time to take out a big sheet of flip chart paper and a sharpie and write down the following:

1. Income producing idea, product, platform – 40%

2. Manufacturing, developing, creating -20%

3. Marketing, promoting, selling -20%

4. Evaluating, reinventing, reinvesting -20%

5. Repeat

Resolve now to learn to utilize timesaving applications and strategies, so your frustration doesn’t come to a bubble over and leave you with hardboiled eggs and no bacon.

7 Blog Strategies for Brand Visibility

Most people do not think of themselves as brands.  They think of themselves as having a great, marketable idea or a top-notch marketing tool or a book or motivational speech, but not as a brand.  Viewing yourself, and therefore your product, as a brand will clarify the steps needed to take your idea, product or self out into the world and connect with consumers.  Here are 7 quick blogging strategies you can adopt, right now, to boost your visibility and build you brand into a sales driving machine.

7 quick blogging strategies you can adopt right now

1. Blog:

   If you’re not blogging, you’re missing an important opportunity to spell out exactly who you are and what you offer to consumers in a way that positions you as a thought leader in your area of expertise.  You can start a blog on WordPress or Blogger in minutes, and for free.  No excuses on this one.  As Nike says, “Just do it.” When I started my blog, I used my very first post to clearly share exactly what my brand stands for and to announce my presence to the waiting world.  I also used that first post to establish my brand voice; personal, intimate, transparent.

2. Guest blog:

   Take your expertise out to the world by offering to guest blog for larger websites.  In the last few months, I’ve written several blog articles for major sites such as Oprah.com.  Doing so increased my visibility and helped bring my work to a new audience. The key when blogging for other sites is to make sure that you speak to that sites audience interests while still maintaining your own brand voice.  I loved writing for Oprah.com because I was able to talk about overcoming challenges, which is just one element in developing a strongly branded platform.

3. Encourage Discussion:

   Blog posts that give step-by-step how-to information about a topic in which you are a pro will be highly viewed, encourage questions and responses and will increase your social currency as a teacher.  A recent post on the blog Social Media Examiner by Nick Shin garners more than 214 questions and comments and another 752 retweets.  That’s valuable word of mouth brand building.

4. Lists:

   Creating blog posts with lists is a spectacularly easy way to encourage other people to link to your post and provided info nuggets for a fast read. Darren Rowse of Problogger.com says lists can be short, they are pleasing to the eye and they are very likely to be passed on to others.

5. Listen:

   Check your Google analytics for some real insight into what your followers want from you.  I wrote a post on How to Add a Twitter Button to your Facebook Fan Page more than a year ago that still ranks as the #1 draw to my website, so recently I updated it to reflect Facebook’s new look and added visuals to help people understand the instructions.

6. Be Provocative:

   I wrote a piece called “Bacon and Book Marketing Strategies” to illustrate the value in keeping up on trends. This piece spoke to my audience with humor but also grabbed the attention of a wider consumer base and brought new readers to my blog.

7. Re-purpose your content:

   As new people find and follow your blog, don’t be shy about bring up older posts and introducing them as a resource to this new groups of followers. Blogging powerful, useful content is a key component in my Maximum Visibility Plan.

I invite you to post a link here to the blog post you think best illustrates one of these ideas.

Many business owners say they just don’t always know what to tweet about. I advise them to tweet about events they’re hosting, new products they’re launching, tips and strategies that will be useful to people in their industry and in general to talk to their customer on Twitter exactly the way they would in person. But even the most prolific among us can sometimes be at a loss for ideas. I’ve shared before that I subscribe to several great blogs and use some of those posts as tips to tweet out to my followers.

Another great idea comes from Mana Ionescu via Twitip. Because Tweets are short, they are often very similar to article headlines so an RSS feed may be the right solution for those who want to subscribe to tweets alongside their news and blogs in a reader such as Google Reader. Twitter has an RSS solution only for your Favorites, so here is a simple way to turn any Twitter list into an RSS feed for your favorite reader.

Follow these steps for a simple and quick solution:

1. Create a list of people you want to follow closely; people who regularly put out quality content that you often share with your friends and followers. For example I follow the Forbes.com list of the Top 30 Women Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter. You can create your own custom list or access an existing list. If you haven’t created a list before, look in the right column of your Twitter account and click “New list.” You’ll be prompted to name the list and then add peeps to the list.
2. Copy URL of list. Once you are viewing the list, copy the URL from your browser window.
3. Go to this simple set up page aptly called Twitterlist2RSS and follow the easy two step process to generate an RSS feed URL.
4. Copy the generated RSS URL from your browser window.
   
5. Paste that RSS URL into your favorite reader to create a subscription.

You’ll be able to browse your own custom list of influential tweets along side your favorite blogs and news headlines and have an unlimited source of great information to share with your friends and followers. By passing along valuable tips and techniques, you become a trusted resource and create conversations about you.

Guest Blogger, Bob Martin

A few weeks ago, the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal published an article from an experienced marketing and communications professional, offering a contrarian view of the rush to incorporate social media into business communications. The gist of the argument seemed to be that incorporating these new techniques and channels into your business’s marketing efforts offers no obvious, tangible benefits over those delivered by a traditional mix of marketing communications activities and media.

I respectfully disagree – and not just because of the increasing power of younger, more social media-oriented individuals in the customer and consumer pools. As someone who’s worked in media and business communications for more than two decades, I see a compelling philosophical reason for embracing the new social media in our efforts to reach and serve our customers.

Since the beginning of mass media, business communicators have struggled to overcome the technical limitations of traditional communication channels, as we work to make our message connect more effectively with target audiences. Today’s new social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs and the like – are game-changing advancements precisely because they’re breaking through those limitations, and creating a new, more effective business communications paradigm in the process.

Encouraging give and take during discussion, alternating the roles of messenger and receiver within the communication, adjusting your message on the fly based on the other party’s reactions – by enabling these actions, social media presents smart business communicators with something we’ve always wanted: a way to have an honest-to-goodness conversation with our audience.

Admittedly, this new conversation paradigm can be disorienting to traditional business communicators, because it adds a third dimension to our messaging – not brand to customer or customer to brand, but customer to customer ABOUT the brand, in which the communicator has to relinquish some measure of control over the message. For example, consumer products companies are realizing that relationships with influential bloggers can be excellent avenues to introduce new products, or emphasize features of existing ones, or just communicate their brand promise. But it comes at a cost: the power of the blogger can be directly related to their perceived independence from your influence, and you need that perception of independence to maximize the potential benefit of your relationship, so you accept the possibility of loss of some control over the message to the blogger and their audience.

Forward-thinking companies who can accept the social media conversation paradigm can use it to constantly adjust and update marketing strategies as they are executed. A social media audience is different than the total target audience, of course – but they’re different in ways that add to their value as “thought leaders”: they enter the conversation as generally knowledgeable about your company and its products, they are comfortable with the new conversation paradigm, and they relish the feeling that their opinion matters to what happens to “their brand” and so take that perceived responsibility very seriously.

To that point, a current ad campaign supporting the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating systems centers on PC users who offered feedback to Microsoft that ended up reflected in the new product – prompting each to claim that “Windows 7 was my idea.” The theme carries over to the product’s Facebook presence, which encourages groups of users to suggest, complain about or tout features of the product that others may find useful. It’s easy to see how these discussions could lead to adjustments in marketing strategy emphasis on particular features – which would in turn reinforce the umbrella theme of “Windows 7 is my idea.”

A final word of caution: by facilitating the continuation of a conversation, feedback through social media fundamentally changes the nature of any business communication effort. Establishing a presence in social media amounts to a commitment to your audience to continue that conversation. Fulfilling that commitment will cost time and money, but failing to live up to it will cost precious standing with key audiences that you won’t easily regain. Before embarking on a strategy that includes these new communications capabilities, make sure you’re prepared with the right resources and mindset to commit to a real conversation.

This stance seems to be supported by the recent massive survey conducted by Verso Digital, presented this week at Digital Book World by Verso Digital Business Development Director, Jack McKeown. As reported by MediaBistro’s GalleyCat columnist Jason Boog, the Verso Digital survey reveals that heavy online readers consume their media in multiple formats and that e-book readers also purchase print versions of books regularly. The Verso survey also touched on price sensitivity and the fact that consumers have been trained by Amazon.com to expect e-books to be priced in the $10.00 range. One encouraging note for publishers, however, was that a significant percentage of survey respondents said they would be open to a price point in the $10-$18 dollar range based on the book.

As Apple prepares to enter the e-reader market with the iPAD and Samsung’s Papyrus joins the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Amazon Kindle, the Sony e-reader and other producers, more consumers will flock to digital books. This is good news for writers, good news for readers and ultimately, with a well thought out strategy, good for publishers.

How do you like to read books? We’d love to hear your experiences, predictions and ideas.

How can your brand utilize this information in your own social media marketing campaigns? Let’s look at some possibilities.

1. Offer insider or follower-only discounts. Reward those people who have taken the extra step of finding and following your brand on social media sites by offering them special discounts.
2. Send out early alerts. Turn your fans and followers into true brand evangelizers by giving them a preview of new services or products before word of those things hit the street.
3. Create a brand panel of especially active and engaged fans or followers and offer them the opportunity to test drive new products or services pre-release. Ask them for candid feedback on any improvements you could make. When that feedback is valid and insightful, take their advice and make changes. Thank them. Treat this elite group as the very special brand ambassadors that they can be.
4. Hold special events for fans and followers. These can be virtual or live or a combination of both. The point is to reward those who have invested time in your brand and make sure they know you value their loyalty. Give respect to get loyalty.
5. Check in with your followers regularly to monitor your brand reputation and address any concerns immediately. Make sure that these important people are heard whenever they speak directly to you.

What is your brand doing to reward your fans or followers? Are you helping them create conversations about you? We’d like to hear your story.

Make sure that your social media marketing efforts serve your overall brand goals. As you set or review your brand goals, ask yourself:

1. What unique product or service do I offer?
2. What “need” does my service or product fulfill?
3. Where would potential customers seek solutions for fulfilling that “need?”
4. What 5-7 words describe the “why to buy” for my product or service?
5. What is my complete marketing strategy for announcing and promoting this product?
6. What are my expectations for income from this product?
7. Does this product reflect all of my brand messages and core values?

After you’ve identified your unique offer and created your targeted, keyword rich messages, make social media outreach via your business Facebook page and Twiter account a regular but measured part of your everyday business tasks. Just 10-15 minutes in the morning and perhaps another 10-15 minutes at the end of the day or at midday can help you keep your brand message in front of potential customers.

Here are five things I do every morning:

1. Facebook Profile: Check in-box and respond as need, accept or decline invitations to events and pages, check my “key contacts” stream briefly for any interesting updates, news, innovations I want to share with my friends.
2. Facebook Fan Page: Briefly check to see if any comments or questions need clarifying and post either a link to a news article or blog post that I want to share with my fans or post a tip, strategy or idea. That post goes out automatically to my Twitter as well.
3. Twitter: Check @replies to see if anyone has questions. Thank folks who retweet or #FF me. Check DM’s and respond as necessary. Check one of my key lists and peruse the stream to see if any of these industry movers and shakers has something I’d like to retweet or read or share with my followers.
4. Blog: Post to my blog, which will then auto post to my Facebook Fan Page and my Twitter account.

Periodically throughout the day, if I find something worth sharing I pop over to Hootsuite, which I keep open on a tab on my browser. I post the link, write a quick post and pre-schedule it to go to one or more accounts later that afternoon.

I spend no more than 10-15 minutes each day glancing through my Google reader which aggregates about 20 blogs I find most relevant to my business and I grab a link and schedule a post from one or more of those on Hootsuite.

Once a week, I spend a full day writing blog posts, making videos and planning additional marketing strategies for my business.

The rest of my time I spend on clients, writing, and creating new opportunities and outlets for my work. For every product, my social media marketing strategy is just one portion of my overall marketing plan. My marketing strategies including speaking engagements, webinars and teleseminars, e-newsletters, targeted advertising, guest blogging, in-person networking and media interviews.

What are your non-social media marketing plans? How will you create conversations about YOU this year?