How does a medical facility in the middle of nowhere become so well known and respected that world leaders want to be consumers of it? According to Lee Aase (@LeeAase), director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, word-of-mouth (WOM) fueled by social media is the driving force. Watch (1 and 2) his relaxed case-study presentation from a few years ago and adapt his success principles (see the above pyramid) to advance your brand.
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Landing Page Infographic by KISSmetrics (@KISSmetrics).
Search Engine marketing agency Trada (@Trada) held a webinar today explaining "Landing Page Psychology:"
Visitors are likely to have a certain amount of wariness as they're asked to part with money or personal information. Use the following elements to work toward removing this friction from the buying or decision-making cycles.
Twitter Infographic by Touch (@touchagency).
Jonathan Richman (@jonmrich), Group Director, Strategic Planning for Possible Worldwide (@possible), writes on Warc (@WarcEditors) that if consumers don’t love your Web marketing, it may as well be invisible. And it’s difficult to conduct a SWOT analysis to discover how your competitor stacks up against you because, “when it comes to digital, everything is your competitor.”
Your competitors in digital are everything else that takes time away from your digital program. Everything. Your competitors aren’t just a product in the same category or even brands in the same industry. It’s everything. That means that your competition online isn’t your arch nemesis’ brand site, but it’s also episodes of Family Guy on Hulu. It’s Lolcats1 and Perez Hilton’s blog. Sure, you may not admit to visiting any of these, but someone is accounting for the millions of visitors a month to these sites.
Richman offers a list of digital marketing sins that cause your customers to say “We Hate Your .com”:
· Blunder #1: Trying to Do It All
· Blunder #2: Random Targeting
· Blunder #3: Death by Boredom
· Blunder #4: All for one and… all for one
Let Somersault help you succeed in digitally marketing your brand.
Sell the sizzle along with the steak. That advertising mantra is exemplified in STA Travel’s (@statravelAU) I Want To Know viral video marketing campaign (the above video is 1 of 3).
Karl Krantz of the Start Up Daily (@thestartupdaily) says it’s “an example of advertising done right....it makes me want to travel....for a video commissioned by a travel agency, you can’t get a better emotional response than that.”
It's not important what your marketing says, it’s important how it leaves people feeling. Show your customers what could be, inspire them to live better.
Nick Morris of Internet Marketing Adelaide (@WebMarkAdelaide) interviews Adam Fyfe, the “Move, Eat, Learn” campaign coordinator. Morris asks, “What were your objectives for this project?” Fyfe says,
At a brand level we had a need to increase awareness of our brand. At a more personal level, it was about putting some excitement back into what should be an inspiring industry.
Let Somersault help create a strategic and effective ad campaign for your brand.
Creativity (@creativitymag) reports that The New York Times (@nytimes) has launched beta620 (@beta620), a site that highlights experimental and ongoing projects at NYTimes.com. It’ll also be a crowdsourced venture, where Times readers can offer feedback and ideas – taking, essentially, formerly live events and making them virtual. The "620" refers to the Times' street address on Eighth Avenue in New York.
It’s similar to Google Labs, Google's experimental playground that shuttered last month, where users could suggest projects and Googlers could share what they were working on. At the Times, just like Google, some ideas may be turned into real products.
Read the Creativity coverage in full.
Nat Ives (@natives), media editor at Advertising Age, describes the 7 projects beta620 has launched with for consumers to try out and comment on:
Read the AdAge coverage in full.
Should your website host a crowdsource section to test new publishing ventures?
Brandchannel (@brandchannelhub) writes, “If any brand name seems to be loved by all who come in contact with it, it's Moleskine (@moleskine). This 14-year-old Italian iconic brand became known for a simple notebook.” It goes on to explain how Moleskine encourages consumer generated media to help foster its brand.
It isn’t just the brand’s positioning that makes it so special — it is the manner in which the company nurtures and interacts with its fiercely loyal fans and retailers.
Marco Beghin, president of Moleskine America, told The New York Times (@nytimes), “We let our fans speak for themselves.”
Fans are only too happy to share their stories. They post sketches on Moleskine's Facebook page, which has attracted almost 90,000 followers, and they make videos (favorited on Moleskine's channel) demonstrating how much fans love the brand. They also attend special events around the globe organized by Moleskine, such as a recent ‘sketching event’ at Bloomingdale’s in New York. Shoppers could stop and make sketches of a model using Moleskine pencils and notebooks.
This product has always been considered a platform and a culture product. A tool for self-expression."
Watch this video to see how a person who loves the Moleskine concept hacks that same idea into Bibles: Moleskine Bibles (@MoleskineBible)
But also read how a raving fan can be lost, in Michael Hyatt’s (@MichaelHyatt) “Why I Ditched My Moleskine Journal.”
Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman (@equalman), the above video is the latest attempt at capturing the world of today’s social media culture.
Compare where we are today with these previous videos summarizing the social media revolution.
Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate these accelerating changes in social media.
On his blog Social Media Examiner, Michael Stelzner (@smexaminer) explains that authors today have “an amazing advantage” from pre-Internet days, when they’d have to depend on traditional media, long lead times, and mercurial reporters as their only hope for book publicity. Now, he says, “not only are there millions of bloggers whose collective audience is larger and more engaged than that of the traditional press, there are also millions of consumers who are one click away from sharing your work with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.”
If you can make it easy for people to share and get excited about your book, you won’t need to spend big bucks or hope you make the list of some old newspaper that no-one really reads anymore.
Here are his 9 suggestions:
Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you use social media to launch your book. Be sure to use the free SomersaultNOW dashboard for publishers and marketers; especially the Social Media tab.
Hitwise (@Hitwise_UK & @Hitwise_US) believes in the benefits of social media and that Facebook in particular is becoming critical to the success of multi-channel marketing. Leveraging its unique data sets, it’s determined that every new fan retailers acquire on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to its website over the course of a year. Fans are clearly worth the social media effort.
According to Business Insider War Room (@tbi_warroom) Facebook fans and Twitter followers have an avalanche effect. “As hard as it is to get that first handful of followers, thanks to news feeds and retweets, your social media fans can grow exponentially. Plus, users are far more likely to ‘Like’ a page that thousands of other people have already ‘liked.’” It offers tips on how to “get millions of business followers”:
According to an analysis by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz), of Digital Quarters blog, Facebook, online video, and mobile consumption are causing the rest of the Web to shrink. He says in the future brands will need to spend less time on SEO and more time optimizing for Facebook.
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