Alert Blog Reviews

The Marketing Executives Networking Group is a group of 2000 marketing executives (10 points if you already guessed that ) at the VP level and higher. Recently, the group’s leadership asked members to name their favorite blogs by non-MENG members—and guess who was part of the top 20? Oh, I guess the title kind of gave it away, didn’t it? That’s right, Marketing Pilgrim . Seth Godin’s blog took top honors, with 59% of execs naming that as a favorite. Mashable was second with 38%. Tied for third were Chris Brogan’s Community and Social Media and Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World (30% each). One in five named Tom Peters’ blog , tied with Duct Tape Marketing to round out the top five (with six blogs ). The rest of the top twenty: Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba’s Church of the Customer Brian Solis’s PR 2.0 David Armano’s Logic + Emotion David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now Denise Lee Yohn’s Brand as Business Bites Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy John Moore’s Brand Autopsy Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice Mack Collier’s The Viral Garden Shelly Palmer’s MediaBytes Steve Hall’s AdRANTs Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent What do you think? Are there any you’re surprised to see there? What do you think is missing?

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Marketing Pilgrim One of Top 20 Most Read Marketing Blogs

It’s true to state that different businesses take different approaches to using social media, whether that is blogging, tweeting, creating facebook groups and fan pages or utilising LinkedIn . Small businesses have gained online advantage with their small size flexibility giving them the confidence to stand out for their brand and engage with their audience. It’s key to online success for all business sizes that the “social” element of social media and twitter is really appreciated. Both the smaller, and large businesses which do well in social media are those who embrace with open arms the opportunities it gives. Small businesses are doing well because: - They are taking advantage of their size and “knowing their customer” - They often have just one person tweeting for the firm and no chain of command to define the social media approach. - They socialise and build real business relationships on Twitter and other social media platforms, in the way that traditionally they would offline at places like the Chamber of Commerce. And – it is much cheaper to do so! Larger businesses shouldn’t be afraid to get involved on Twitter and other social platforms. As an organisation you can learn from listening to what is already happening in your area of expertise by using Twitter Search to check out content, tone and discussions, as well as googling to find out if competitors are using social media, and how. Twitter and other socialmedia platforms can work well because business does work on trusted connections, and the online medium of Twitter is just the new extension of that. Businesses will do best when they work within the context of their own environments and answer the unspoken questions (Is it safe for my business, won’t it take too much time, what if it goes wrong, what if an employee talks about us or our work…) honestly and up front before taking action online. At the same time, if you’re not involved you’re missing a great opportunity, and if you don’t test the waters, you’ll never know if it works for your business. When you do dip a toe in the water, you’ve got all those experiences built from networking offline in the “real world” in the corporate environment. Use the right people, who are interested in social media and your subject, and you’re off and running and born to tweet! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Big Business: Don’t lose out to small businesses on Twitter

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Big Business: Don’t lose out to small businesses on Twitter

Many people mistakenly think that joint ventures are only effective if you are a large player in the market that your business or product falls under.  However, the truth is actually quite far away from that statement even though they are usually most notable when they involve joint ventures.  For example, most people in the online community already are away of the joint venture effort between PayPal and EBay.  The good news is that you can have the same success with a joint venture if you plan properly and take full use of everything that such a deal can offer. The essence of joint ventures is based around the premise of helping a small less known company get a leg up on the competition by using the customer base or popularity of another business.  They are designed to help out small businesses by joining up with another company to share a customer base and promotions in exchange for either equal advertising and promotion efforts, or a small percent of the commission on sales.  This is reasonable given that the sales would not have happened without the aid of the joint venture. For a company that does not have a large budget or the ability to advertise a joint venture is an easy way to gain access to a new wider customer base or potential target market.  Generally they work out best when you explore businesses that are not your direct competitors, but are closely associated such as a company that sells Quickbooks if you provide accounting services.  Of course, the logical question that most people have is how to find a joint venture partner.  It is highly unlikely that they will come to you, so the best way is to get out there and research potential partners online.  LinkedIn is also an excellent business resource online that provides plenty of social networking opportunities and connections to businesses that may be looking for potential partners.  The more time you spend investigating the opportunities the more you will see them fall into your lap.

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Joint ventures are not just for the big guys

I’ve been a contributing analyst for the eConsultancy/ cScape Customer Engagement Survey over the past few years. The 2010 edition has just landed and I thought I would share with you the data that jumped out at me. Email Newsletters Fading? The 2nd Customer Engagement Survey saw businesses focusing their efforts on using email newsletters to improve customer engagement. An incredible 69% of companies stated that they had measured a tangible improvement through their e-newsletter campaigns so it was not a surprise that 59% planned to invest heavily in email marketing by the time we came to the third survey. By contrast, investment in social networks – such as Facebook – was down on the list of priorities with only 36% of companies planning to increase their investment in that area. Social Networks See Huge Investment So, what happened now we are on survey four and looking at 2010? Those that took a chance and invested in social networks saw a big return on investment. For companies, email newsletters still rated as the tactic offering the highest tangible improvement (67%) but a whopping 44% – almost double the percentage from 2009 – have discovered that social networks helped increase their online customer engagement. That return on investment has clearly caught the attention of both companies and their agencies. In 2010, the survey predicts that 61% of company executives will be increasing their focus on social networks , while agencies are even more bullish, expecting their clients to spend more on social networking (66%) than even email newsletters (41%). Twitter’s King of Engagement Perhaps the most stunning statistic is the percentage of companies that plan to invest in Twitter as a channel for customer engagement. In last year’s report, Twitter barely registered with survey participants with just 7% of companies realizing improved customer engagement from Twitter, hence only 13% planned to invest in Twitter in 2009. What a difference a year makes! Twitter has seen massive growth and companies are scrambling to make the micro-blogging channel a key part of their customer engagement efforts. In fact, with 35% of companies seeing an improvement in their customer engagement from Twitter in 2009, almost 44% of companies plan to increase their investment in Twitter in 2010. That’s a three-fold improvement over last year! Engagement = Conversations What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, it’s apparent that companies are realizing that customers expect engagement to be a two-way dialogue. Email newsletters are a great way to keep customers updated but they don’t really engage them. Instead, companies are seeing measurable benefits of actually having a conversation with their customers be it via Facebook, Twitter or whatever, making them willing to invest more of their marketing/PR budgets to reap the fruits of that engagement. Want to get your hands on all the data? Get your copy of the cScape/Econsultancy report!

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Customer Engagement Survey Shows Twitter is King of ROI

Social media marketing means when you use all the resources of social networking such as online communities, blogs and so forth in order to market and publicize your products. Social media marketing had been gaining great popularity because of its convenience and wide reach. The most common Social media marketing tools are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. The way that Social media marketing works is to create an awareness and tempo about the vents, videos and blogs so that it is able to attract people’s attention towards it. This is almost like advertisement but in this case you are reaching out to the right people. Social media marketing is a way in which fans themselves talk about the brands that they prefer and in turn get to promote them. It is almost similar to word of mouth publicity. The best thing about Social media marketing is that there is a great amount of influence of the end users. They are able to comment and post articles about their experiences. Therein the control of the organization diminishes and this becomes a first person account. People tend to believe this more than the advertising spiel that they get to hear every day. The way that Social media marketing is headed we are sure that it is going to be around for a long time to come. Therefore when you participate in all the social networks available online you can form an internet marketing tool called Social media marketing. Social media marketing has several advantages linked with it. Let us look at a few of these: * There is an increase in the website traffic and you can track the visitors to your website. * The moment you are able to track your visitors to your website the task of converting them into a sale becomes easy. * You get lots of people viewing specific pages hence the kind of exposure that you get and that to towards people who matter is incomparable to anything else. * The brand value that you are trying to build up gets promoted sooner. As more and more people get to know it they start talking and discussing it. * The feeling of associating with the brand and the brand recollection happens. This helps the customer to retain the brand and build up brand loyalty. * Your business will develop further and you will be able to reach out to a wider range of customers.   In order for you to take advantage of this kind of advertising to the fullest what you need to do is to write and post articles frequently. You can leave comments on other people’s blogs and so forth. In the end you have to gain visibility.

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Getting the maximum out of Social media marketing

As more and more people realize the advantages of Affiliate marketing it is gaining immense amounts of popularity. Everyone out there is looking to make more profits and Affiliate marketing is certainly helping them do so. The key to Affiliate marketing is to drive more traffic and hence to make more profit. The main things that will make you successful in the Affiliate marketing arena are hard work and the ability to remain focused at all times. You might think that most of the niches have been already taken. Yes they are. But still there are several niches that you can tap into to get Affiliate marketing working for you. With Affiliate marketing your main aim is to come up top on the heap of other websites. The content that you have along with worthy information will get you customers who will come repeatedly and start spending more time at the website. All of this will ultimately culminate into great sales and a larger customer base. Affiliate marketing must also include product reviews. Lots of people online are looking for product reviews that might not be found anywhere else. These should be so worded as to ensure that they will provide the customer the right kind of service if bought. In Affiliate marketing you also need to follow your visitors. You must find out what they are buying and from whom. This will enable you to give them the right kind of product. The moment you start promoting the best products and showcase them well enough, you would have got yourself enough constructive traffic. Affiliate marketing will also help you to make your customers tie up with you. The moment you offer them something free they are sure to bite the bait. Try to make them sign up for a newsletter or a free gift of downloading some valuable information. Try and get yourself traffic that is targeted and not just plain old traffic. Do not just get embroiled in numbers. You might have a lot of visitors but they might not be buying from you. On the other hand you have niche customers stopping by and buying. Try and post articles and content in all the article submission directories. This will ensure that you get the right amount of publicity as well as you are able to get enough back links to your website. The moment you start adopting these techniques it can generate huge amounts of revenue for you. The more engaging is your reading material or images the more reader’s will you have which will change into revenue. The content must almost force your reader to take immediate action of buying.

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Affiliate marketing makes great business sense:

Microsoft has announced several new features for its rebranded search engine—I mean, “decision engine”—Bing, including the rollout of Bing Videos, a partnership with Wolfram Alpha and a new hover preview feature. Bing Videos Yesterday, Bing announced a new video site that will take over the old Microsoft Video (yeah, I’d never heard of it, either). In addition to MSN videos, Bing Video will feature content from Hulu, ABC and YouTube. While it’s unlikely that Bing Videos will challenge YouTube in a major way, I think it’s a good idea for them to launch their own site, if their goal is merely to increase time on site, and make Bing even more of a go-to resource. Partnership with Wolfram Alpha A searchable database of information, Wolfram Alpha announced APIs this summer in the wake of rumors of a deal with Bing . The APIs seemed quell the gossip—but now the two really are teaming up. The partnership is limited to the area of diet and nutrition (I’m guessing as a test run for a possible wider deal in the future). Bing says this partnership will help its users make decisions about their food choices. When you search for a food on Bing, nutrition information from Wolfram Alpha will appear in a tab on the SERP. This will also include tools like a BMI calculator. Advanced Hover Preview Feature Bing is also bringing and advanced hover preview feature to their SERPs. The press release states that this feature adds: An actual snapshot of the Web site in question A link to the customer service number (where appropriate) Deep links, the most-often-clicked links on the site A search-within-this-site box that allows you to scour the site to find what you’re looking for. Facebook page previews, from which you can view a person’s picture, see who is in their Facebook network and send them a message or friend request. Conveniently, this preview only shows up when you mouse over a plus-sign on the right side of the screen, rather than every time you mouseover a link (like Snap Preview, which I find so obnoxious). Microsoft made a video so you can see it in action if it’s not on your SERPs yet (warning, it autoplays): Interestingly, this does showcase some feature that have long been a part of Google’s SERPs, including deep links to the most popular pages of a site and a search box to use the site’s internal search. What do you think? Which of these features will you be most likely to use?

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Bada Bing! Bing Adds New Video and SERP Features