Thoughts
Social Media for Business
Feb 19th
The prediction for 2010 is that more businesses will embrace social media marketing in one way or another. As a marketer myself, I see businesses who are not really ready to embrace social media simply because they are more keen on quick results. Social media are not quick fixes to every marketing challenges, in fact they are the short, medium and long term solutions that require strategy, planning and proper execution.
Here’s a list of activities that every marketer (including myself) should take extra attention of when crafting a social media marketing campaign:-
Objective of Social Media Marketing Campaign
Social media cannot deliver results like online advertisements, so it has to be made clearly understood that social media marketing has got different objectives. Amongst them are increasing fan base, a personalized engagement with users/fans, additional tool to deliver messages and more.
Deliverable
What the campaign can deliver, in what intensity and timeframe needs to be spelt out carefully and cannot be over-promised. The bosses expect deliverable with every of their investment (with our without monetary investment) and its important to use some statistics & mathematics before commiting to a deliverables. This is especially if your deliverables are leads generated or total sales generated. Be honest and truthful, there is no point over promising if you already know its impossible or if you are completely not sure of the results.
Monitoring the Results/Deliverable
Any marketer knows that every campaign needs to have ROIs, so make sure that you are fully aware of how your campaign is performing. Some of the items you want to monitor include total clicks on the links you posted, total retweets, total followers/fans and others.
Consistent Plan to Increase Followers/Fans
I always believe that I need to increase followers/fans because this equals reaching deeper and further into the already established base. So, there must be a consistent & persistent plan to increase the total followers and fans. While it is ideal to churn out huge figures to impress the bosses, it is also important to be very level-headed when it comes to commiting such figures.
Daily Monitoring
Its ideal to have tools to monitor the social media for keywords and your business name. Not only will you be able to do damage control if anything negative is being said about your business, but at the same time you can also know what is being said about your competitors or about the industry in general.
Twitter Bulk Unfollow Tools
Dec 19th
I’ve been so busy at work lately that I don’t have time to tweet or manually select those whom I want to follow and unfollow. I set an auto-follow via a twitter tool that I talked about previously, Socialoomph.com. One good thing about using this tool is that it automates the task of following those who follows me. For me, its a courtesy gesture to follow those who follow me. However, there are also those who are following others by the bulk to ‘jack up’ their follower list and those who are plain spammers. So, it gets quite a bit of work when I try to weed out those who really tweets and those who are just blasting endless useless advertisements.
This morning, I searched for tools to do bulk unfollow because I have close to 1,000 followers and going through all these one by one is going to be a very time consuming task. Here are the few that I found :-
Twitter Karma
URL : http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
This tool shows you the whole long list of those whom you are following & whom are following you. You will instantly know whom you are following that are not following you and vice versa. You can tick boxes beside the names to do a bulk follow or bulk unfollow. Oh yes, you need to key in your twitter ID and your password to get this done. Its simple, fast & easy.
Friend or Follow
URL : http://friendorfollow.com
You only need to key in your twitter ID and they will show you a list of (1) FOLLOWING – Those whom you are following but is not following you (2) FANS – Those whom are following you but you are not following them (3) FRIENDS – Those whom are following you and you are also following them . From this list, you can then click on the respective icons that brings you back to their twitter profiles and you can make a decision to follow / unfollow. Ok, so you can’t do a bulk unfollow or follow but you have instant information on your fingertips to make a decision.
Untweeps
URL : http://www.untweeps.com/
With this tool, you can see whom has not been actively updating their tweets. This tool allows you to specify the total days of inactivity ~ so your report is customized according to your own criteria. They call it ’stale tweeps’. With the whole long list, it is by default checked so you can just click on bulk unfollow if you want to. I had a long list, and I was thinking to myself.. if they are not updating their twitter for 30 days, I believe they have permanently abandoned it? If you have a long list of people you are following, you’d be surprised how big this pool of inactive tweeps can be!
Buzzom
URL : http://www.buzzom.com/
Once I key in my twitter ID, it gives me an option to Flush, Grow or Reciprocate. The idea behind it is quite similar to the rest – follow those who follow you stuff. An interesting add on is that it has a Twitter Statistics to measure your influence, retweet efficiency, retweet rank.. etc.
I used Twitter Karma and Friend or Follow to keep my list ‘clean’.
On the other hand, I’m now using Qwitter [URL: http://useqwitter.com/ ] to be notified of whoever is unfollowing me. I just signed up for this service, whereby I only need to key in my twitter ID and email address to be notified of those who unfollow me. I can stop the service anytime by clicking on the link that has been emailed to me.
For now, I just want to keep my Twitter list clean. 
6 Ways Social Media Can Help Businesses
Nov 28th
As a marketer myself, I am very well aware that digital marketing is fast gaining a strong foothold and almost every marketing plan today include as least one of the many social media or some sort of online aspect. But as to really put it into a marketing plan, ensuring that the objectives are met while ensuring that the bosses are happy with the type of resources taken up, it can be a real challenge.
However, having said that, businesses today have to understand how and what social media can do for you before jumping into the bandwagon. Because most do, and for the wrong reasons and later feel that it doesn’t work for them when its not the case. Here’s my list of what social media can do for you :-
(1) Build a network who agrees to receive your broadcast of marketing messages & engaging with your customers & potential customers
Those who has done direct emailing know that every email address must opt-in to receive your marketing messages. Unsolicited messages can lead you to a lot of sticky issues ~ getting a call from the internet provider is not pleasant & damaging, having your domain blacklisted means that even your emails will not reach your customers (these days email servers subscribe to these blacklists to keep spam low) and you definitely don’t want to have your email server blocked (I’ve experienced this in my previous company). But with social media, they are following you voluntarily and you can broadcast your messages to them ~ of course with a proper strategy & execution.
(2) A channel to listen to feedback/comments
The truth hurts, and some companies choose to ignore constructive feedbacks or ‘listen less’ of such feedback, and assume that they are the minority. With social media, even the minority’s voice can become major if not handled carefully. People are talking and sharing thoughts/ideas/experiences all the time ~ you don’t want a multiplication effect for the wrong reasons. So, listening is important, and social media can help you reach out to listen.
(3) Knowing what’s hot / being discussed in your industry
Because of the nature of social media, news and latest updates gets discussed so very quickly and you want to make full use of these conversations – to know the latest trends/issues/challenges so that you can make a business decision on how to react to it.
(4) Opportunity to clarify/correct misconceptions
You can immediately rectify misconceptions by offering clarifications and these messages are going to be read by all who follow you. Your voices gets heard and you can reach out to many at one go.
(5) Participate in the conversations, reinforce your message
When you see a topic concerning you being discussed, this is your opportunity to strike while the iron is hot. Not only are you able to participate, you can even reinforce your message and subtly promote yourself.
(6) Opportunity to be the voice of authority
Its not easy, I know. People don’t trust you overnight, it has to be done consistently over a period of time. Start with providing good information with interesting information and real value. If you can offer tips that can help and yet subtly sell yourself, that would be best! Track your click-through rates for your to know the effectiveness. When you offer tips/interesting information, people tend to take note. Now you’ve got their attention and their trust!
I’ve seen some companies thinking and believing that social media is HARD SELLING when its not. No one wants to be a fan of Facebook to be continuously bombarded with endless promotions and hard-sell marketing messages. You have to engage with your audience, build the trust, and listen in order to get people to buy the idea. Some get impatient by the day because the expectation has been set wrongly in the first place. The other things is also the tendency to OVERDO because its a free tool. A strategy in mind and proper execution is key to successful social media use.