community engagement

5 Keys To Engaging and Driving Online Community Engagement

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Online strategies aren’t just about setting up accounts on the right platforms – your strategy needs to involve true engagement.

Driving online community engagement requires planning, risk management, and a cohesive objective that is clearly stated to all of your key staff members.

1. Word-Of-Mouth Only Goes So Far

You need a plan. Simply signing up for an account on any given social platform does not mean your organization has fulfilled its obligation. Social connections via your chosen networks are not obligations but opportunities to engage directly with your members, prospects, fans, or clients.

As your message spreads and your community grows, how will you feed the appetite for more? Will you be equipped as an organization to create and disseminate your message?

This direct connection requires a clear plan with regard to infrastructure, integration, and, most importantly, a set of rules and policies for disseminating your message. There is nothing more important than a planned and coordinated process for responding to inquiries, comments, and requests.

2. Identify Your Advocates and Feed Them

The key to any community is the full engagement of its members. Early on in your campaign you will discover those advocates who are willing to share your message and push that message to their respective networks. With every Facebook post, tweet, or blog post, your advocates wait to share what your campaign is providing.

Gaining the trust of your online advocates and providing them with a continued stream of shareable content provides ever expanding reach; in turn pulling in more campaign advocates from their respective networks.

Reward their efforts. Recognize and identify your advocates publicly. Thank them whenever, wherever, and however you can. These individuals are the backbone of your campaign’s success.

3. Trust Your Community

Astute observers of successful online campaigns understand the nuances of online communication. Well planned, effectively executed online campaigns have assessed the risks at hand and understand how to mitigate those risks when required.

Just as your community trusts and advocates your campaign, you in turn must trust your community when negative comments or posts arise. Well-fed advocates who have been provided with the right tools will assist in regulating your community – most times without direct intervention.

Ask yourself before you begin: Do you understand how to mitigate risk? Can you identify those in your community who are your advocates? Can you identify those in your community that are Influencers?

4. Rules Of Engagement – Rules / Fears / Clarity Over Control

The rule of online engagement has shifted, placing the power of the message in the hands of the viewer, consumer, or visitor. The intention of a Rules Of Engagement policy is not to handcuff those posting and engaging online.

The intention is to provide a set of guidelines for disseminating content, insuring all messaging is on brand, on target, and true to the core message. Direct brand connections create deep inherent value and keep visitors and advocates coming back.

Community engagement using social media requires a shift in the way organizations view themselves and their relationship with the public. The shift is happening on a cultural, organizational, and individual level. Before committing resources to a social media program, organizations need to know how to mitigate the risks while maximizing the rewards.

The first step is to create a safe space for staff, volunteers, and other stakeholders through clear, effective social media policies. Clarity over control.

When everyone involved knows the purpose of the organization’s social media initiatives—if each individual is clear about his or her role in achieving that purpose and the parameters in which they can participate—those social media initiatives will be that much more successful from the start.

Do you understand the nuances of your community? Have you provided your key internal staff and your community manager with a clear community engagement objective?

5. Tools Don’t Build Communities – People Do

Many times online community engagement continues to fall back on the tools an organization commandeers to share their brand message. However, those tools don’t drive themselves. It’s the people that organize and implement the campaign who are the key to a successful campaign.

Your community manager, the advocates, and the influencers will make or break the success of your online initiatives.

Can you identify those in your community who are your advocates? Can you identify those in your community that are Influencers? Have you empowered your key internal staff with the tools they require to create a successful online campaign?

Google adwords

What’s the ROI on your Google AdWords Spend?

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Google AdWords are an essential form of marketing for many businesses.

However, the world of Google is rotating with blurring speed, which means that unless your campaign is being monitored on a weekly basis you are likely losing efficiency with every passing day. You may be paying far too much for the results you’re getting.

5 Key Questions (to ask yourself and your agency) about your Google AdWords spend:

1. Is your Google AdWords campaign improving your business?

Every marketing dollar should tie directly to revenue. Marketing tools exist to measure and report the results of search, click, and subsequent action. If you’ve created landing pages with compelling content, clear calls-to-action, and submission forms, the entire inbound ecosystem can be measured and optimized for success.

With the right tools and advice, you’ll know exactly how your campaign is impacting your business and what to do to improve the results.

2. Are you paying too much for your Google AdWords?

Do you know which keywords and search terms are you chasing and why? You could be pursuing expensive terms – the ones for which everyone else is vying which drives costs up and puts you in hard fought competition for those terms. It’s often possible to pursue low-cost alternative search terms that will result in better conversion.

A comprehensive keyword and search term analysis will help you increase results and decrease costs. It’s conceivable that might need to spend more but more often than not increasing the efficiency of your campaign and improving after search conversion will allow you to spend less than ever.


3. What insights have you gleaned from your Google AdWords campaign?

Our clients are often surprised about what they learn from their Google AdWords campaign. In some cases, they’re taken aback when they realize the majority of their traffic is coming from mobile. This would highlight the need to optimize the website, landing pages, forms, and eCommerce for mobile devices.

Clients are also more aware that their website infrastructure must reflect the insights gathered from their campaign. For example: Is the most often searched information available at the top of your homepage? If the answer is no, let the work begin.

4. How can my Google Ad campaign be improved?

You can conduct more testing, audience segmenting, and hyper localization and then follow the paths that are most efficient and cost effective. Also be sure to employ Negative Keywords to make sure search results do not appear in a context that may be unfavorable to your product or proposition.

It could be that up to 35% of results display next to unfavorable content if left unchecked.

5. What is considered a good click through rate (CTR)?

CTR’s (the number of clicks versus the number of impressions generated by the campaign) can vary anywhere from 0.6% to 2% depending on the industry and whether the prospect is on desktop or mobile. But the click through rate, although important, can be a false metric. It’s meaningless if no one converts to an inquiry (and ultimately a sale).

If you’re simply letting your homepage do the conversion work and waiting for the phone to ring, your results are likely pretty low. Your campaign could be so much more efficient.

The bottom line is that a business cannot evaluate a CTR without knowing CPA – Cost per Acquisition. For example, if you are paying $150 per click but every click through converts to a sale and you are selling the item for $799 — that’s a great CTR (even though it may look terrible on paper). It’s all in the interpretation of the data.

Your marketing department or marketing agency’s goal should not be to spend your ad budget but to improve your business and garner as much intelligence as possible to help inform your business decisions. Question your ad spend, and demand answers!

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Why B2B Marketers Love To Hate Google

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The Key to Understanding Google’s Robots

It’s virtually impossible to avoid using Google as part of any marketing strategy.

But as every business that uses Google knows, the rewards to be reaped from its services are huge yet dealing with the technology behemoth can be absolutely infuriating. This frustration with Google often reaches its crescendo when it comes to dealing with Google Reviews.

There are a lot of things for the marketing pro to explain. Some helpful tips might even help understand how Google works, but they may not totally remove that feeling of frustration.

Things to know about Google and the online/tech industry in general:

    • Tech giants are not like traditional industries. They never release a finished product. Everything is a big test. They launch broken services (beta) and fix things along the way. New products and services almost never provide a seamless working experience. For example, Google Places, Google Maps, Google+, and Google Reviews were conceived as separate services and when Google decided to merge them the result was complete chaos. Google tries to prioritize and fix problems according to what brings them the most revenue, not what is the best for the users of the service. Frustrating, but understandable.

 

    • Google (the company with employees) is different than the Google we all use every day. The Google we use to search or post a review is really made up of a bunch of computers that work using algorithms that are so complex they would confound us mere mortals. To the average human being, the logic seems completely random and without sense. But there is logic to it. Thousands upon thousands of people at Google work on those algorithms and nothing else. But once the algorithm is instituted, as it were, the robots make decisions about content posted by humans (posts, reviews, etc.) and those decisions are made without any human intervention.

 

  • Let’s just scratch the surface on the review algorithm, for example. The Google computers do a deep background search on the person posting the review. They look for information such as:
    • Is the person posting related to the business in one way or another?
    • Where is the location of the computer used to post the review?
    • How many reviews has that person posted before?
    • Is that person actively using other google products (like YouTube or Gmail)?
    • Does the review contain a specific sequence of words or turns of phrases that have been deemed of low value by Google?

There are literally millions of questions like these that the algorithm is trained to consider when analyzing a review.

The previous paragraph may help to explain why it takes so darned long for Google to post reviews and also why there isn’t really an ETA on when reviews might be posted. All the reviews written about all the businesses on the planet are put on a giant queue. It is impossible to know how long it takes for the Google robot to analyze a review as it depends on all of the above factors, and no human eyes, to know how many reviews are waiting to be posted ahead of the one submitted for your business (could be three thousand or five million).

Then there’s the robot factor. If the review contains something that the robot has been programmed to recognize as spam (not what we think of as spam as the Google definition is a very broad and generic term), it will be dismissed without any notification and without a way to appeal. The algorithm is literally judge, jury, and executioner.

Is the Google system perfect? Absolutely not.

Is Google broken? It sure seems like it sometimes, but let’s not go that far.

Is someone working on it? Yes the humans working at Google understand the value of reviews and their impact on businesses. Furthermore, as the whole, Google Places and Google Reviews represent a HUGE vector of growth for THEIR business and they are working hard on refining the process and making it more efficient for everyone. It might not be relevant to your business in particular, but as an example the Google Places batch verification process is something that didn’t exist not so long ago.

The whole notion of Google is hard thing to wrap one’s head around. Imagine driving a car that is morphing as you hurtle down the freeway. It’s a sedan then it’s a convertible. The size of the wheels is randomly changing. You have no control on the accelerator or the brakes. You’re just a pair of hands on the wheel, doing the best to maintain keep it between the ditches and moving forward. You’re not really the driver.

Frustration with this opaque process is completely understandable.

But there are concrete things you can do to best position your business for success in a Google world. It begins with a basic understanding that the internet is a great equalizer – which puts the start-up, the independent, and the big guys equal footing. There us a huge opportunity for all businesses to reconnect with their customers in a whole new way that inspires engagement and sharing, organically, naturally, and in a way that earns attention of the robot.

In the meantime, talking with experts who live and breathe this connected environment can often make this process smoother and be that missing human link you’re looking for while figuring out how to deal with that faceless monolith.

We speak robot. Let’s talk!

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What is a Digital Strategy?

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A well-conceived and properly developed digital strategy is absolutely critical to most every successful marketing plan. When executed, it will leverage all your internet, social, and content marketing initiatives in a way that will generate leads and result in new revenue incredibly fast.

Every business is different. The only common denominator is that all business –regardless of industry – is evolving at an exponential rate. For this reason, it is critical that marketers access the best expertise available to design and create an effective ecosystem that is optimized to deliver the desired results.

The digital ecosystem schematic will illustrate how internet traffic (demand) will be generated and how it is commandeered and routed between web site, blog, audio, video, ebooks, eNewsletters, as well as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social sharing platforms.

All internet marketing, social media, and content initiatives must facilitate discovery and inspire social sharing across all appropriate platforms. All content should be shaped specifically for the venue in which it is deployed. And above all, clear rules of engagement must be implemented to avoid public relations disasters.

When working with a good digital agency, it’s not necessary that you have all the answers. Your digital experts will guide you through the process and begin delivering results your business needs and deserves.

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How Associations Can Harness The Power Of Social

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Associations, whether national, regional, or local, are essentially communities. They are comprised of groups of tribes or individuals who are united by shared goals, interests, or preferences. Associations are, by their very nature, social.

This presents a unique and especially prescient opportunity for associations to leverage the power of new social communication, marketing, and media techniques to achieve their goals like never before. Whether they are professional, charitable, trade, political, cultural, or otherwise, associations may need to fulfill multiple mandates: advocacy, awareness, fund raising, education, communicating, lobbying, among others.

Chances are your association’s key initiatives include:

• Communicating with members
• Demonstrating value to the membership
• Advocating on behalf of consumers at large

What Social Can Do

Utilizing social marketing can open a community of engaged advocates, both members and non-members, who are willing to share your message across their respective social networks, generate awareness, and solidify your associations mandate with the public at large. However your association will have to engage with those advocates and leverage the power of social channels effectively. Here’s how.

Three Key Factors In Harnessing Social Channels

1. Be In The Community

Your association needs to be an active participant on all of the obvious networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. This means you need to go where your members are, and they are everywhere.

2. You Need A Plan

Simply signing up for an account on any given social platform does not mean your association has fulfilled its obligation. Social connections via your chosen networks are not obligations but opportunities to engage directly with your members. This direct connection requires a clear plan with regard to infrastructure, integration, and most importantly a set rules of engagement policy. There is nothing more important than a planned and coordinated process for responding to negative comments.

3. Content

Well-crafted and professionally produced text, audio, and video that clearly communicate your organization’s message are core to a great content marketing strategy. Content is the essential asset that will drive readers to your association via online and mobile. Since many associations are in the enviable position of having a business model based on providing information to their members, the raw materials for stellar content is often at their fingertips. Niche by definition, associations that create well crafted, shareable, and SEO friendly content can effectively push their message online.

Harness The Power Of Social Channels

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How to Develop a B2B Content Strategy

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Today’s consumers are like proverbial husbands who refuse to pull over and ask for directions. Folks simply want the instant satisfaction of finding their own way to their destination. Your business is the destination. But can you be found?

This phenomenon has put huge marketing emphasis on the notion of discovery. It’s all the more important because consumers are also increasingly eschewing interruption marketing. No wonder 40% of marketing dollars have been shifted to inbound marketing techniques.

It’s critical that marketers embrace content initiatives and blend them with traditional methods. It’s not a question of whether to move in this direction. It’s a matter of survival.

Getting Started With Creative Content Marketing

1. Get Clear About Your Goals

What do you want to happen as a result of mobilizing a content initiative? Do you need to build awareness for your organization? Are you educating consumers? Or do you want to sell a product or service? If the latter, do you want to incorporate a lead generation component that will deliver prospects into your deal funnel? Setting crystal clear goals will best inform your content strategy.

2. Assess Internal Sources for Content

Most businesses don’t think like media companies unless there is a printing press in the basement or an antenna on the roof. Oftentimes, marketers are surprised to find great raw material sources within the organization. Take inventory. Do you produce or commission proprietary research or industry data? Who within your company has specific expertise, industry cache, or public speaking ability and can they serve as a thought leader for your efforts? These assets are often found right under your nose.

3. Identify External Content Sources

Feeding the content machine requires ready access to external raw material. Assess what is already available from industry associations, co-owned companies, partner organizations, even trade media or publications.

4. Get Help From Content Creation Experts

A medical professional would not all of a sudden feel the need to fix their own car. Likewise a licensed mechanic would never offer a triple bypass with an oil change. Executing a creative content strategy depends on your ability to create engaging, compelling, SEO-optimized… even entertaining content on a regular basis. It’s essential to call on experienced media people who are also marketers in order to deploy content that delivers on all of the above.

5. Develop a Plan and Execute

More than article marketing, web content, or public relations, your content marketing strategy will need to be a highly integrated series of blog posts, audio podcasts, video, white papers, and ebooks – the ultimate mix, of course, will depend on the particular goals of your organization.

Get Started With Content Marketing

A stellar content strategy will flow directly from your goals and will take into consideration all the obstacles that face your business as well as capitalize on specific opportunities in your sector. An optimized approach will facilitate discovery on the part of consumers and imbue your business with credibility as a thought leader in your field.

Businesses that employ inbound marketing and content creation initiatives find it much easier to attract pre-qualified prospects that are predisposed to buy. Finally, as any sales professional will tell you, once value has been established price becomes a secondary or even a non-issue.

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The Rebirth of the Living Room Screen = Christmas for Content Providers

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Industry publications love predicting the decline of the living room screen. Sure network television channels suffer from declining viewership, but the living room flat panel has never been more popular with audiences and, especially, advertisers. Even despite the proliferation of a myriad of media content playing devices.

Declines for Networks

Since the arrival of television sixty years ago, the networks have controlled the living room set and enjoyed a monopoly over the advertising shown on it. However, things are changing fast.

When an advertiser buys airtime on a television network, the sole way to measure the effectiveness of the campaign is to rely on Nielsen ratings.

Nielsen ratings are based on a representative sample that is composed of just 25,000 homes (5,000 for national programming and 20,000 for local stations). Collectively they reflect the viewing habits of over 106 million U.S. households in 210 markets. Because TV ratings are based on samples, it’s possible for shows to get a 0.0 rating, despite having an audience (Example: CNBC’s talk show McEnroe). No matter how the sample is selected and how the habits are representative of the population, sample based ratings always are approximations.

Combine these statistical imperfections with the availability of more choices in the living room, and no wonder network is struggling.

Boon for Content Providers

Meanwhile bleeding edge content companies and ad agencies are utilizing the same techniques that have made web advertising a force with which to be reckoned to take over advertising on living room screens.

These content providers have leveraged the smart screen to become an advertising platform that can better target demos and deliver a more reliable set of analytics when it comes to measuring success.

For instance, there are over 27 million Xbox Live subscribers who provided a wide array of information when signing up for the service (name, age, location, etc.). By using their Xbox, and services attached to it, they are constantly providing more data regarding their interests, spending habits, etc.

The way ad placement is sold on screen is not by length of airtime, but per impression, the same way ads are sold online. In the same way that BBC Kids Television can accurately target moms aged 25-54 on Facebook, Nike can target men 25-35 interested in soccer on Xbox Live.

And they have done it! In June 2012, when the NHL Stanley Cup and the UEFA Euro 2012 were overlapping, Nike maximized the efficiency of its ad budget by directly targeting potential customers using Xbox Live. Soccer fans only saw ads relevant to them, and hockey fans weren’t bothered by soccer ads.

In March 2012, The LA Times reported that the amount of time Xbox Live subscribers spent streaming media surpassed the amount of time playing games. Furthermore, Xbox Live media streaming usage was growing 30% yearly, with users spending 84 hours per month connected to the system. This has grown very quickly and now represents more than half the 150 monthly hours the average American family spends watching television networks (according to Nielsen).

Penny Arcade reported that, according to Microsoft, a single ad placement on its console dashboard receives an average 9 million impressions on a weekday and over 15 million on a weekend. Furthermore, their advertising business has grown 142% yearly since 2010.

Lessons for the Networks

Some of the most forward thinking television companies are beginning to see that in order to compete they have to change their ways of targeting and selling advertising.

Tivo’s recent purchase of TRA, a research company that has found success in recent years with a system that matches up television viewing with consumer buying habits, is a clear indication of where things are moving: increasing ad effectiveness.

Evolving Model

The influence of set-top boxes is helping to shape the new business model. Marketing directly to the audience and the harnessing the way in which consumers interact with their televisions is a top priority for agencies and content producers.

Contemplate the opportunity for a moment. Netflix claims that its subscribers viewed over a billion hours of content in the month of June. HBO GO, the streaming video-on-demand app, has achieved success so overwhelming that the premium network is considering offering a streaming only subscription.

Bottom line? The living room screen is new again. It presents a whole new opportunity to connect directly with individuals within the context of the content they choose at the moment they want it with an engagement or offer that’s unique to them. That’s revolutionary.

The living room screen is not only alive and well… it’s where the action is!

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Does SEO Matter Anymore?

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The push is on to put SEO to the bottom of the pile and for good reason. The web has become a sea of discoverability, no longer dictated by outdated SEO placement tactics and replaced with what can only be described as a true content push.

Your users or customers are less and less fooled by the SEO tactics of the past and are now drawn into content that has personal value. Strong content pushed to social circles by friends, followers and business peers is now drawing as much, if not more, audience than any well placed search term.

Large scale online properties, such as The Atlantic, are now pushing traffic through social channels much more effectively than through SEO based placement.

[info]“Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,”
Scott Havens, Senior Vice President of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company.
[/info]

The creation and dissemination of content may be what binds your marketing message together, however, that content now needs to be offered with in the right context. Pushing that content within the right context requires deep, cohesive strategy that goes well beyond key words and a strong headline. Contextual content that your readers are compelled to share to their respective networks is the key to a successful strategy.

There is a deep shift occurring in how people find what they are looking for online. This shift is not solely based on algorithms and programming but also takes into account – location, browsing habits, relevancy and social connections. Users are now provided with web search, particularly Google, that is predictive in nature.

With the advent of Google Now users are beginning to see the shift in how they will search for online content. By combining predictive search technology with real time visualization we can see Google’s continual shift from a simply a search engine to a predictive, personal assistant that will understand what you are searching for within context. Google Now achieves this by accessing your email, calendar, contacts, text messages, location, shopping habits, payment history, music choices, books read and movies you have watched. For some this may seem to be a deep breach of privacy and those privacy parameters are yet to be fully established. For others, like myself, this appears to be the natural progression of technology to become the personal assistant we have only seen in science fiction until now.

The key motivator for this shift in contextual search results is, without a doubt, the deep market penetration of mobile devices. Predictive in its results, this type of search technology is pushing information to you based on what information the device already knows about your likes, habits and social connections.

So how will effective marketing campaigns have to reshape themselves within a world driven by predictive, location aware search results?

Effective marketing campaigns will now have to adopt an active listening approach to fully incorporate customers in the feedback loop. The consumer voice has never been so strong and those businesses that pay attention to active consumer voices will see the rewards. Your companies reputation online has never been as important as is it now. Products and services spoken of favorably online will, without a doubt, see themselves pushed to the top of predictive search results.

In addition to active listening, inbound marketing becomes an important factor in an effective marketing strategy. Focusing on being found by your customers by providing high value content that is relevant to their wants and draws them into contacting you is now the strongest tool in attracting potential clients. As your content takes shape and becomes distributed across networks your offering obtains authenticity. For many marketers this is a drastic shift from the traditional outbound model, however, brands that do not shift a portion of their marketing budget to an inbound marketing model will have more and more difficulty conveying their message.

So does this mean that SEO is still a relevant means to garner traffic for your online properties? Probably yes. However, predictive search technology does create some division in how content will be optimized depending on the platform you are focusing your efforts on. With mobile access now exceeding desktop access for many online services, a deeper focus will be weighed on relevance and reputation in regards to predictive search results.

It’s all about location, location, location.

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