Sunday, March 27, 2011

Social Media Bookmarking Expertise

One of the best ways to influence your tribe to try your products is through social bookmarking. The rule here is to get your links on sites that will promote them and organize them. This will help to create another stream of income for you by the increased targeted traffic it will generate. 
Your use of SEO will also generate targeted viral traffic so that you will have traffic targeted to your content. Your content will attract the kind of user that will buy your product because they read the content. Readers that aren’t interested in your product just wont read the content. 
You want your story to be one of those that “buzzes” with the tribe you want to attract. Social Bookmarking and Networking sites are being observed daily and there are lots of tales about stories that make their way around the word in record time. Some call it instant buzz. Its kind of like instant karma, though. The more buzz you have the more tribal response you'll get.
The links back to your site from the sites you are being promoted on are important too. Prt of your rank on some of the search engines is calculated on how many links and back links you have. Reciprocal links are always better. Because more links gives more opportunities for your tribe to click on, you will get more traffic. 

Another advantage is the free advertising that results. Social Bookmarking was only intended as a way to organize originally, but it does the job of advertising admirably. AS the amount of your use increases , there are going to be more people that will pay more attention to what you are doing. It could be thought of as online word of mouth advertising. 
There is also the branding that results from social media bookmarking. Let's face it, there are over eight billion websites out there, so know one really knows who you are. So you need to stay on top of it by using social media to get the word out. Using social media gets your branding information out to the people who are interested. Especially if it is targeted correctly. 
As more and different technologies come online , maybe we will be able to use other mediums. Smell-o-vision comes to mind here. But it's probably still a ways off right now. 
If you have any suggestions about how we could make this process more efficient for all of us, I would like to discuss it here, if possible.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Do You Need to Calculate ROI?

A Return on Investment calculator seems to be a subject that most tribes have little experience with. Usually the results come from an ROI formula that someone had invented. I think most follow the ROI=NetPfrofit over sales times sales over investment algorithm. That might be a little difficult to get your head around though

Return on Investment is important because these statistics are used to make conclusions about whether your current marketing efforts are working or not. This way we can determine if its time to take profits for the tribe.

Before you can get to this point there must be a management detail in place. This plan should discuss what the goal of the marketing plan is. What tribes do you wish to talk to? This is your objective viewpoint. You need to have a strategy to help you accomplish the goal and objective.
What tactics will you use? How will you measure things like ROI? Is there a budget for all this and what is it? Costs and tactics are related subjects and you'll observe that your measurement system does not help with calculating ROI. But when it comes to calculating all costs must be budgeted.

The raw data , when calculated for ROI, is actually a percentage. Usually this is expressed as a dollar figure though. The ROI confusion often results when we assume that the marketing sections of the equation sum up to 0 . This is not true.

Some authors state that the first portion of the equation is actually figuring the profit percentage of sales. Which can be influenced by some marketing considerations such as sales volume and advertising.

It is suggested here that corporations work with their accounting teams to really get a determination on what net profit is. Not that you aren’t already, ay? So the accounting team should have total access to the size of the marketing investment in order to be accurate with their determination of the ROI.

At this point you can go into the other products if there are any to perform the same operation. 

If the company is a non-profit, this does not mean it has no ROI. Most likely it will need to do more with less and less in the coming years and a penny saved is a penny earned here. Outsourcing projects like marketing will make it more important for enablers to provide more financial information in order to make the calculation more accurate. As social media marketing becomes more widely used this will become more true. By the way, non-profits can be sensitive about words like sales. Try to use a term like support or donation. 

The big question may be , should PR and branding require ROI? Just for the sake of standardizing the Field? Does it make sense to calculate ROI on these projects?

This is an argument I would like to discuss here. Let me know what you think.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Advertising Your Social Media News

Your Expert Webman is pleased to announce that this article is going to be written like a standard press release about Social Media News  to demonstrate the many ways that a press release could work for your organization. 

Social Media Websites and Blogs have matured alongside improvements and refinements that the major search engines have incorporated into their formulas. What this means is that if your company wants to issue a press release, then you will need to have someone that understands the Search Engine Optimization rules. You will then be able to take full advantage of a press release. 

You need to take into account what platforms you would like to share the information on and with what tribes , also. The circulation should contain the things that will be needed to share a story in a way that shows what your original intent was .

One thing you don’t want to do is talk about a lot of things in the message. Stick to the main message . Make sure your keywords are clear and targeted for the tribe you want to reach. This way it will have the ring of truth to your readers. This is usually a way to make the tribe grateful in addition. By using targeted keywords , your release should get a good ranking in the online world. 

Make your release the right size so that you give the most information and not be too long. Remember , you only have ten seconds. The size of the article should be around 550 words or so, which translates to a page or so. Search engines like this also. 

Links in your anchor text comes highly recommended. Usually about 2 links per 5 to 6 hundred words or so will be ideal. Using anchor text to phrases like,” for more information”, is sometimes frowned upon, according to my research. You should use your most important keyword in your headline and your lead sentence. It will focus the search engines on it.

When you are describing your product, use language that will help you connect with the tribe you want. 
Don't forget to use your targeted keywords here so that the search engines will be able to find it, too. Try to get your release on Social Media Websites and Social Media Blogs.

In your headline , it always helps to use the keyword phrase that is most important to your message. Also, you  will be repeating it in the content . If you keep the headline to 75 characters or so, your readers wont lose interest. Try to keep subheads to less than two lines. 

Make sure the news is of interest to the tribe and make sure they can share it through Social Media Websites, Social Media Blogs and other platforms. Social Media News platforms can help here too.

You know its true that a picture is worth a thousand words. So share your images with the tribe so they can share it with their tribes. While you are at it, upload videos, wave files,links to your relevant websites and more of your releases. This will help to pique the interest of the tribe and attract more attention for your product. 

These few suggestions are what seems to me to be pretty basic means to getting the word out via press release. But as you know, there are plenty of other ways to do it. A press release is just another tool for you to use. Make sure you use it correctly.