Explore every episode of Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer
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Pub. Date
Title
Duration
13 Jun 2014
Want Social Media Marketing Success? Be an Active Community Member!
00:10:04
If you're not finding success as a member of any given social network, chances are you simply aren't spending enough time there and becoming a true community member. From Twitter to Pinterest to SlideShare, Neal shares the secrets behind social media success.
Key Highlights
[01:01] The Approach I Am Taking
[02:18] Why I've Been Getting A Lot of Traffic in Twitter
[04:07] What Devoting Time to Community Means
[06:38] The Beauty of Infographics
[06:51] My Pinterest Experiment
[08:33] Embed Yourself Deeply in the Community Platform
Notable Quotes
Of the time I've spent in social media, I'm beginning to realize, as I experienced this across a number of social networks, that those who are most devoted to the community in which they're a member of will become the most successful and social.
It's impossible unless you have a staff to be equally active or deeply active on all social networks, you have to pick your poison, as they say.
If you think about it, you know the same business people that are on Twitter, on LinkedIn, there's a lot of them that are on Pinterest. And once you understand the way that Pinterest works, and how viral it can be and how many repins there are, you begin to see how it's very easy for things that you post to appear very, very prominently on the news feeds of a lot of people and the news feeds on Pinterest only show a few on mobile, it only shows two at a time on top, on the desktop editions, four or five or so.
What's amazing with the infographic and this is a slightly divergent topic. But once you have an infographic, it can be shared everywhere. And it's about getting brand recognition by putting your name on the bottom.
The beauty about infographics is not only do people love to read them and share them, but you get access to one of the most influential crowds in social media, which are content creators.
It's all about really deeply embedded in for lack of a better word yourself in the community of that network and truly engaging and sharing liberally, with others and using or I should say, creating a community platform that you can leverage to help others that you respect with as well.
My New Video Workshop: Content Marketing for Social
00:12:28
This week on the podcast, Neal is sharing a new project with you. In his social media consulting business, he gets very broad and occasionally vague requests all the time, and there’s just no way he can help every person that reaches out. So Neal has decided to repackage the content he creates for trainings and make it available to more people. The first version of this is a 9-day online video workshop, complete with videos, worksheets, and a forum where you can chat with Neal. In this week’s episode you can learn more about why he’s starting this project, what this first version will be all about, and how you can join the party.
Key Highlights
[02:58] Role of Social Media
[03:36] Questions You Need to Answer If You Want to Reach Foreign Audience
[04:41] Always Have A Process In Place
[05:18] The Social Media Center of Excellence
[06:45] Understanding the Role of Content in Social Media
[07:03] Content is the Game Changer
[07:28] Different Types of Content
[08:32] The Importance of Visual Content
[09:00] The Role of Content Curation
[09:32] Tools to Trade
[09:57] Choosing the Social Network to Invest Your Time In
[10:08] Paid Social
[11:25] Social Media Is More Than Answering Questions
Notable Quotes
Because at the end of it, and I hate to repeat myself, but social media replaces nothing complements everything. Without social media in the equation. How are you getting leads? How are you promoting your business? Do you even sell to foreign markets?
And what I've learned over time, is that you need to have a process in place in order to test and measure and optimize what you do.
I do want to go through the methodology because I think it can really help you. And it really begins with understanding the role of content in social media, I talk about the convergence of information and communication.
Content is the game changer is the way that companies can level the playing field by offering unique, resourceful educational with entertainment value content. And that's why whenever we talk about what you're going to do on social media, whether it's that company looking to do outreach, or what have you, it's going to come down to the content, the content that they share the content that they use to engage in conversations.
So you really got to decide what is going to be the easiest for you what makes the most sense for your product, and go through on that. And then we get to how we actually once we've decided on the different types of content, how to create content that's going to drive our social media program forward.
It needs to be developed in a way that understands that social media was made for people, not for businesses. And businesses need to understand that and create compelling content that will be engaging in social media. Otherwise, your messages just
How Can Marketers Stay Ahead in a Rapidly Changing Industry? [Yam Regev Interview]
00:56:01
If you are a marketer, especially a digital or social media marketer, it really gets more and more difficult with each passing day to keep track of all of the changes going on in the world of marketing as well as all of the excellent and insightful blog content that are being published. From following social media feeds to subscribing to RSS feeds and newsletters, all of us marketers have our own system that we have created to try to cope, but this approach may not be ideal, especially for the subject matter that we are less familiar with.
This episode #141 features an interview with Yam Regev, CEO and Founder of Zest.is. We discuss all of the changes in marketing that marketers need to be concerned about, how can marketers consume all of the blog content that is being published on a daily basis, as well as how a combination of Community + Content + AI utilizing the free Zest.is app can help support today's marketer. You can access Zest at https://zest.is
As mentioned in the intro, I do host livestream shows with some of the top thought leaders in marketing infrequently, so if you are interested, please make sure you subscribe to my newsletter so that I can let you know the next time I record one. You can do so by going to my website and entering you email address on the sidebar widget or the one at the bottom of each page: https://nealschaffer.com
Key Highlights
[02:57] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Yam Regev
[03:48] What Is Zest?
[08:32] The Heart and Core Of Zest
[17:15] The Learning Management Aspect Of Zest
[20:11] Our Email Feature
[23:10] Does Zest Offer Certification Programs?
[26:55] New Emerging Topics That Are Critical For Marketers
[27:59] The Reality Of Marketing Industry
[30:35] What Zest Provides
[31:13] 2 Key Areas Marketers Need To Be Top Of The Game
[35:59] Built-in Feedback Process
[39:40] Most Searched Tags
Notable Quotes
We feel that we live in a huge global shift, right in the way that we consume content. And it seems that the way that we expect content to be to be it needs to be more personalized, and on demand.
The cheaper it is to create content, the accessible the internet gets the more content and information that will be.
The content creators themselves are creating a lot of content, but they're not necessarily updating the old content, which Google I get gives really, really good authority to If that old content was able to generate a lot of backlinks and engagement.
I think that's the core issue with Google is that even if you find a great piece of content, we tried to be relevant and even knowledge building for you, you know, some maybe someone worked quite hard to get these results, and to target us specifically.
The way that you consume a knowledge or the way that yo
Everything You Wanted to Know about Employee Advocacy [PostBeyond Interview]
00:22:47
Today on the podcast, Neal is sharing an interview he did at the Social Tools Summit in San Francisco with Chad McCaffrey and Daniel Hebert of PostBeyond. Listen in as they talk all about employee advocacy. This episode is full of great reminders for any company thinking about establishing an employee advocacy program, reasons to start one, and tips to help convince your team or executives internally as to why it’s time to try it.
Key Highlights
[00:44] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Chad McCaffrey and Daniel Hebert
[01:45] How SHould Company View Employee Advocacy Now?
[02:43] What To Do Next After Launching Employee Advocacy Program
[05:23] Relevance of Content in Employee Advocacy Program
[07:16] Internal Involvement Needed For Successful Employee Advocacy Campaigns
[09:13] Engagement With HR Professionals
[11:05] What To Teach Employees To Think About Employee Advocacy
[12:35] Use Content To Fuel Relationships
[14:58] The Business Value of Employee Advocacy
[20:06] Final Thoughts
[20:45] Connect With Post Beyond
Notable Quotes
I think was really important today, to note that, you know, what is the training? What is the setup to actually even think about doing this? And so, I think we focus a lot on that, and I certainly haven't talked about in his session, but like, the planning the training, what actually has to go in ahead of time before technology gets involved is really important.
And one of the most important things to remember when employee advocacy is that it is an ongoing effort, it's not a one-off campaign.
It is one of the things that I think it's a mindset for most enterprises to start adopting, an always-on marketing strategy, versus a campaign-based marketing strategy.
I think when it comes to the con everything, the relevance is interesting across different areas. So people care about certain things, they're trying to hit their own goals. And so content certainly in social in general, it's very obvious that it feeds sort of everyone from the executive suite down to people on the on the ground level, if you think about it that way.
I think, you know, you have to tie it to marketing still, because that's where the communication is getting stirred up, and really stemming from the strategy. But if you build a partnership between them, I think with anyone that's doing this successfully right now and the maturity of what's going on, it's, it's tying those two together nicely.
It's sort of a marketing person, but the employer brand, yeah, their focus. They're sitting kind of between the two, they're that bridge. And I think that's the key and you start to think about these things. Ultimately, it's the people it's culture, it's what's going to drive more people to business.
I think is the most beneficial to teach the employees to kind of sell this progr
Reintroducing Agora Pulse: The Social Engagement Dashboard for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
00:24:59
At the Social Media Marketing World event in San Diego last week, Neal Schaffer met all kinds of great people, one of them being Emeric Ernoult. Emeric is the CEO and Co-Founder of Agora Pulse, an engagement dashboard tool for Facebook and Twitter. Agora Pulse allows you to track the most important fans and interactions on social, gathering data unlike any other tool. Luckily, Emeric is going to be joining the Social Tools Summit in Boston in May. Listen to learn more about this great tool, what inspired its creation, and other tools that Emeric loves.
Key Highlights
[01:22] Introduction to Podcast Guest, Emeric Ernoult
[02:40] Business Value of Agorapulse
[08:51] How to Get Started With Agorapulse
[09:31] Agorapulse Functionalities
[10:42] Why You Should Use Agorapulse
[13:03] Historical Tweet Feature
[14:57] Other Agorapulse Facebook Features
[17:10] Agorapulse Plans
[18:34] Final Thoughts
Notable Quotes
Basically save time by engaging with the people who are really, really matter for your business. And were the most important people for your business. That was the way so like, focus on the most important people. And that's my big vision. That's my thing.
And at the end of the day, when I look at what I've created with Social, I'm left with nothing. I've just created the feeling that I had to be there and I did my job. That's it. And and we thought this is a big problem, because it shouldn't feel that way. It should feel like I've done something useful for my business, I've done something that is an asset that is a value.
And that's the key with the right people to make sure that when those right people get to consider what you're doing or when those right people are your client and have to consider buying something else or you know, another tool that they have those relationships in mind and to think twice, before leaving.
We make sure you know what you're building in terms of quality relationship with the right people, things simple we're at 90% they're building the quality and identifying the right people you've you're building relationships with, I'd say we're 65% there and we have a lot still love to build.
And at the end of the day, we can rank your user we can score your user and user scoring is really one thing we're working on very hard and doing a lot of r&d. And that's where the identifying the most important user for your business will come into the picture.
I love all my competitors. That's number one. And I invite embrace them. And I invite them to come and have a beer with me and chat about our metrics and how we're doing and how they're doing and exchange advice and tips and share experiences. And yeah, there is some some kind of an overlap.
But you know, their key strength is really on content discovery, and we're absolutely not do
Youtility: Jay Baer Shares Insights on Mobile, Content Marketing, and Social Media
00:19:22
Jay Baer, the author of Youtility, shares the background to his book as well as his perspectives on mobile, content marketing, social media, and business.
Key Highlights
[00:30] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Jay Baer
[05:02] The Concept of Youtility
[07:40] Why Marcus Sheridan?
[10:27] Jay's Strategic Tips for Mobile
[12:50] The Importance of Identifying Customer Needs
[15:54] Final Thoughts
Notable Quotes
I think a much more viable approach in today's marketing climate is to just be useful, that if you are truly and inherently useful if you create marketing that is so good, and so useful that people would pay for it, which is really the definition of utility, good things will happen.
What I felt we were missing is a strategic framework for why to create content, there's lots of companies out there making lots of stuff, without a real good understanding of what role content really plays and how content really supports other organizational initiatives.
Now that you know, it's not about what are you doing on the web, and then what parts of that can you do effectively via mobile, it really needs to be upside down and say, Let's maximize our mobile experience.
The notion of really drilling down to understand customer needs is perhaps the most important and unfortunately, I think we are largely derelict in that responsibility.
You think that you understand your customers based on data, but in many cases, you really don't. So if you're not having actual conversations with your customers on a regular basis, that, frankly, is the first step to being a utility.
My Social Media Marketing Predictions for the New Year
00:10:37
What social media trends should businesses pay attention to in the new year? I explain the major trends that will help your business continue your social media success into the new year.
Key Highlights
[01:35] Trends Emerged in 2013 that I Think Are Going to Get Stronger in 2014.
[01:55] The Strategic Initiative of Employee Advocacy
[04:33] The Year of Google Plus
[05:27] Companies that Leverage Google Plus
[06:19] Paid Social Will Be Fully Mainstream
[07:51] More Emphasis on Content Creation
[09:15] It's All About Evolution
Notable Quotes
Now, companies are always looking outside corporate walls for brand advocates and social media. But many of your most passionate advocates are also those who have deep ties to your company. They're your employees. Each individual employee has influence in their own unique social network, their own professional and personal graph.
The more employees that can help share your social media messages. The broader reach a company can yield and social media.
I do see that creating a successful employee advocacy program. It has its challenges. But the evolution of both social business, as well as employee advocacy platforms and tools should progress this program forward in many companies in 2014.
Once companies realize that Google Plus is not just a community, like other social networks, but it's also a social layer for all things. Google with many entry ways leading into Google Plus, it becomes an absolute no brainer to establish a presence on the site.
Social media was never free, due to the fact that an investment of time and resources was always needed, right. And if online ad budgets are available, it only makes sense to shift some of this money into social advertisements to help make your social program more effective.
I still believe paid social is one of the most underutilized aspects of social media marketing. But 2014 should see more companies utilizing paid advertising on more social networks, to help make sure above and beyond their legacy social media program, that they are found by relevant audiences throughout social media.
At the end of the day, okay, it is unique, branded content, whether it be in the form of a blog post, a photo, a video, audio, presentation, or other medical format. It's these types of contents that become a shareable corporate asset in social media.
Together with the rise of content marketing, a content centric social media marketing strategy will become all the more important to help businesses rise above the noise, and be more effective in their social media practice.
It's all about this evolution. And the evolution is caused by more and more people using the sites, using them in different ways, and the site's themselves maturing.
9 Concepts to Raise Your Social Media Marketing to the Next Level
00:16:24
Neal gives a preview of his upcoming one day workshop in Bucharest, Romania by focusing in on those advanced social media marketing concepts that you need to dive into to help you raise your social media to the next level.
Key Highlights
[02:23] One Day Social Media Event in Bucharest, Romania
[03:27] How I Help Businesses Get to the Next Level
[04:02] Elementary Workshop
[05:38] It All Starts With the Content
[06:00] Your Content Should Always Be Aligned With Your Brand Objective, Identity, and Culture
[06:15] Think About Your Social Voice
[07:21] Social SEO
[07:56] Ways to Use Paid Social
[08:49] Experimental Social
[09:17] Revamp Your Social Media Strategy
[09:57] Analyze Your Social
[10:22] Importance of Having Baseline Metrics
[11:30] Social Selling
[12:33] Expanding Social Media Through Advocacy
[12:46] 3 Big Ways of Looking at Advocacy
[13:27] Talking About Employee Advocacy
Notable Quotes
That's, you know, social media at the beginning of its evolution is just something that you do because everyone else is doing it. And there's still a lot of companies in United States, probably majority of companies that are still doing this without a strategy, just throwing things up, not really measuring or maybe measuring the wrong things. And really not knowing how well they're doing what they could be doing better, or what is their ROI.
If you do a deep dive analysis of each one of these for your business, and I think each one requires a deep dive to better understand it and understand the potential, you'll get a better idea as to how you can help bring your own social media to the next level.
I always talk about social media being the convergence of information communication, what is the content? Is the content represent your brand? Better yet? Does the content represent your objective? And often we find we begin social media programs with content that aligns with our objectives. And somehow over time, that content gets misaligned.
And when we talk about tone, we don't talk about font or font size, or font style. When we talk about visual, we start to talk about these things and colors and what types of subjects are going to best resonate with your target audience and be best aligned with your content, your objective, obviously, this is no easy thing to do.
This is something that we should all be working towards. And the only way to find out about this is really through experimenting, to understand what works and what doesn't work. But we should always not just be throwing content out there, but seeing how we can appear more prominently how we can be seen by more people organically.
Are we including experiments? And I consider campaigns really a type of experiment on a specific or a group of social networks to test out certain types o
Does your social media branding back up your digital content?
00:09:58
More companies are sharing more content in social media, but when a social media user has a conversation with your business, does your voice branding back up your content - and is it "human" enough to deepen online relationships?
Key Highlights
[00:52] The Notion of Having a Strong Corporate Brand
[02:21] Different Forms of Content
[03:30] You Need to Have A Conversation
[03:52] What Should Your Blog Be
[04:18] How You Engage with Your Audience Is Critical
[04:46] Be Open to Anybody
[05:19] The Dangerous Pitfall We Have
[05:41] Back-Up Your Content With Human Side
[06:49] The Best Test
Notable Quotes
And it's not just LinkedIn, but really the HR industry is talking about this notion of having a strong corporate brand, as an employer, which then will help you really recruit better talent potentially quicker. And at even a less expensive cost.
But the notion of branding obviously, is popular, it's always been popular in marketing. And in social media, we hear a lot about it as well.
Nevertheless is another type of content companies can put out the best looking infographics possible, and attract a lot of people to their social media profiles, and even generate new leads and attract a lot of web site traffic just through the art of relevant content and relevant social media channels.
But at the end of the day, people do business with people that they like people buy products from companies that make them feel good. And there may come a point where you're providing all this content and social media. But then you need to have a conversation.
What you blog about shouldn't be written in web copy like text, but more of a social voice that is representative of your company's brand and social media.
But at the end of the day, it's the social media users that will determine the brand of companies, because they're only going to see limited things of what you post in social media channels, especially on a platform like Twitter, where you only have 140 characters, but even on Facebook, Google Plus what have you, companies aren't posting really long messages.
It's not only your choice of words that you use, but it's also on how you engage whether you engage with people that engage with you is one thing, but how you engage with them.
So you may want to be considered the thought leader in your industry, and you write the most compelling content. But when people engage with you or your company, they feel that there's a gap, because maybe you don't exhibit the same human skills that others would want to see in you.
But you have to back up that content with the person with the human side with how you communicate with people in social media. It is the basic human skills.
Are You Using Social Media for What it's Meant for?
00:09:48
A look into the different ways social media users use Instagram as well as other social networks - and my recommendations for being the most effective on each singular social network with your social media marketing.
Key Highlights
[00:36] How Striving to Use Social Networks for Their Original Intention Can Help You Be More Effective at Social Media Marketing
[01:20] How I Use Social Networks Differently
[01:28] Why Instagram Is One of My Favorite Networks
[02:20] Social Networks Are Always Changing
[06:35] Social Media Are for Human
[06:59] Use Networks for What They Were Originally Intended
[08:48] My Advice for Today
Notable Quotes
But, you know, the social networks are always changing, because in essence, we as users are hijacking them and using them for things they were never intended for.
Instagram was a place where take a picture on your phone, right, and you upload it. And it allows people to see the real you even businesses are using Instagram in many, many different ways.
Pinterest does give you the ability to upload an image from your computer to share and, and I think it creates a great visual memory on my Japan board.
At the end of the day, it's humans that are using social media, it's humans, within businesses that are trying to reach out to other humans, whether they be decision makers in business for b2b, or whether they be consumers.
But I just think you're going to be more successful at your social media marketing, by using these networks for what they were originally intended.
I just think that, you know, Instagram or some of these other places, it's really important to understand who is using them, why they're using them what they were intended for.
I got pretty overwhelming support by a lot of different people that some of them are true social media influencers in themselves, I feel a little bit more confident that there's a lot more people that think this way. And therefore you may want to rethink what you are posting on some of these, especially visual social networks.
Holistic Social Media 101: Asking the Right Social Media Questions
00:13:07
When looking at optimizing your social media program, are you asking the right questions? Neal will provide examples of a holistic mindset to help you ask the right questions that will truly help you Maximize Your Social.
Key Highlights
[02:11] How to Tell If Your Facebook Efforts Are Paying Off?
[02:39] Experiments
[03:33] How Do We Expand Our Reach for Our Page?
[04:49] Is Facebook Really Tied to Your Business?
[06:15] What Differentiates Me from A Lot of People
[06:55] Looking At Social Media As A Whole
[08:31] Are You Asking the Right Social Media Questions?
Notable Quotes
And as you know, well, if you listen to my podcast from last week, and read my recent blog post on six social media productivity tips and 23 tools to help you, you'll know that I like to reserve time for content creation and engagement. And I urge my listeners this podcast and brands to do the same.
And it was a great reminder. And it sort of echoes well, he gives you a specific, you know, tactics that you can do to see what works.
So my response was basically, well, there's, you know, there's a few things you can obviously do, you can promote posts with paid social, which is obviously going to expand your reach, if that's what you want to do, you can post more frequently, which will tend to improve your reach, you can optimize your content, you can obviously try to post different types of content, and you can do an experiment or campaign.
And it really comes down if you've read the chapter maximize your social on social media ROI and social media metrics.
It equates to how effective your social media is, and how you might be wanting to do better at it. But it doesn't equate to this primary objective, it doesn't feed directly into the reason why you have a social media program.
So if we were to look at social media as a whole, it's not just Facebook, right. And it's not just reach and Facebook, either. It's a lot of different things.
You need to think holistically. Different news feeds work differently, different types of fans, on different networks engage differently with different content.
There's loads of communities where your brand can get new engagement, new brand awareness, what have you. So really my question for you. Okay, is are you asking the right social media questions?
But if you're just asking the wrong question, you're digging yourself a hole. And I don't think you're ever going to be effective with your program because you're chasing after the wrong thing.
So let's stop asking, let's start doing and think about the questions that you have. Are they the right questions?
Think of the entirety, think of business objectives, lots of different networks out there lots of different things you can do.
And if you're looking for ideas, by all means, read, maximize your social again, f
It's Time to Ctrl-Alt-Delete How You View LinkedIn
00:11:44
LinkedIn is not about the connections but the engagements and relationships you can build with other professionals and businesses. This episode will change your perspective on LinkedIn for the better.
Key Highlights
[01:48] Engaging on LinkedIn Differently
[02:31] What to Do When LinkedIn Permanently Restricts You?
[03:23] You Don't Need to Have As Many Connections As I Do
[04:17] How LinkedIn Restrictions Happen
[05:06] My Own Epiphany on LinkedIn
[05:48] I Am Not Appearing in LinkedIn Search Results
[07:08] What Happens When You Start A Conversation in A LinkedIn Group
[07:31] LinkedIn Is the Best Place to Engage
[08:44] Publishing Platform on LinkedIn Notable Quotes
Now the short answer to what I said, I said, LinkedIn is always changing the rules, right. And that's social media is always changing. Every single platform is always changing the way that they do business.
But still, you know, everybody should have a robust network, multiplayer age by 10. That's the number of LinkedIn connections you should have. That's the number of new people you should be meeting on the annual basis that you can add to your LinkedIn network. And it really gives you more visibility other people, you become more visible to other people.
My own epiphany when it when it comes to LinkedIn is, you know, what sort of value are you trying to derive out of the network. If you think of adding a connection as putting someone in your marketing funnel, then you obviously have it all wrong.
You know, LinkedIn is where the professionals are, it's about making relationships, connections. And people do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So just the art of connecting have always said was just establishing a virtual connection in a database, right, a virtual data point, for lack of a better word.
And what happens when you start a conversation in a LinkedIn group is that often leads to a connection. And when you connect with someone, where you've you looked at their background, you have a common affinity, a common interest, because you're in the same LinkedIn group, that connection is obviously going to be extremely valuable.
But if you're looking to build up a network of like minded people, of peers that you can call upon in the future, or bounce ideas off of which I think LinkedIn is really all about, you need to be engaging.
And if it's gonna take a little bit more time than just, you know, uploading a database, or, you know, clicking one to one on profiles, but I think it's gonna allow you to more authentically, and increase the quality of those connections that you make on LinkedIn, so that when you want to ask for an introduction, they'll actually do it for you, because you already have rapport with them.
But I would rather have you authentically engage with those people that you want to be
Dynamically Adapting a Changing Content Focus to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
00:09:58
Is your business changing? Offering new products or services or maybe concentrating strategically on one or two products instead of ten? Your content strategy needs to change as well. Learn what you need to do - and what to expect as a result - from this podcast. Key Highlights
[01:03] Shifting Content Midshift
[01:41] Shifting Content Midshift is Natural
[02:58] How to Do It?
[03:35] Another Way of Organizing the Buckets
[04:21] Facts You Will Deal with When Shifting Content
[05:28] Your Readers May Not Be Ready
[07:09] Transitional Period
[07:55] Focus on Relevant Metrics
[08:23] Almost Do A Reset Notable Quotes
But either way, shifting content midstream is natural businesses, organizations are dynamic, the products that you carry may change your industry might change, except if you're obviously very, very well established in a very, very stable industry.
But things change, right. And what's going to happen is if you create your social media strategy, as outlined and maximize your social, and you do your PDCA, and you do your checking on a regular basis, you're going to notice that there's some type of content, invariably, that's going to do better than other types of content.
And therefore, in some ways, you might be shifting a little bit more narrow, because you want to emphasize that content that is really engaging.
It's not hard to do, it really comes down to those content buckets, and the weight of each of those content buckets, and the analyzing them and make sure that that weight and the names of the buckets are aligned with your strategy.
And really emphasize the two or three buckets that you plan to blog most about, you could do something similar to what I did on maximize social business, which is organize all the buckets that I have into four major buckets, four or five major buckets, right platforms, which go over all the different social networks, disciplines, which go over all the internal departments of a company, industries, write themes, and then marketing is one.
But I don't think that you need to do anything different than what you've done. It's just blogging on certain topics more frequently than other ones. But you're going to have two issues that come up.
So be prepared to take a hit.
But really, you want to focus on that content that's going to help you achieve your business objectives. And in doing so, you're going to have to generate a new readership. So expect that engagement to go down and inspect other things to go down as you do that there's going to be a transition period.
I recommend that you do something similar and let people know, you know, going forward, this is this is the plan, this is what we're going to talk about, we look forward to engaging with you and providing you even more resourceful content. So I think that it's not somethin
Neal Schaffer details how his social media accounts recently got hacked - and provides six points of advice to help you avoid the same fate.
Key Highlights
[01:03] What is LastPass
[02:46] The Problem When I Didn't Change All of My Password
[05:12] Digging Around
[06:35] Twitter Being Ahead of Other Networks
[07:29] Create Unique Password for Each Site
[07:49] Change Your Password Regularly
[08:03] Use Two-Step Verification
[08:28] Audit Your Third-Party Apps
Notable Quotes
But it's critical that we somehow figure out how to create a unique password for each social media site we have.
Any dashboard that you have access to gives someone that gains access, the ability to post to several accounts, is a prime target for hackers.
It's funny because even the email from Twitter said, make sure that you reset your password makes you look through all the third party apps, it didn't really talk about not just looking at the third party apps that have authorization, but those trusted social media dashboards and third party websites that have the ability to post to also make sure you change the passwords there.
So really the message of this podcast and it's important, obviously, not only for yourself, but for your business is number one, to have a unique password for each site.
It just gives you an extra layer security, make sure that you have two step verification on every single social network or social media dashboard that you're on.
It's important to educate everybody on the security procedures.
Your Biggest Social Media Marketing Challenge? Internal Recognition
00:13:42
Many find their biggest social media challenge to be an internal one: How to convince your executive team of your social media investment. Here's some advice on how to explain your social media team internally, build consensus, and receive more recognition (and budget) for your activities.
Key Highlights
[00:59] Go Big or Go Home Approach
[02:05] Everybody is Doing Social Media
[02:31] The Two Different Types of Companies I See
[03:59] The Challenge of Selling Social Media Internally
[05:54] Reasons Why Executives Are Fearful of Social Media
[06:30] My Advice on Convincing People Internally
[07:44] Write Internal Reports Regularly
[07:54] Paint Holistic Picture of Your Social Media Program
Notable Quotes
If you're gonna make content, make account instead of just trying to churn out things on a regular basis.
And I think at this point, now, it really depends on what level your social media program or your social media literacy is at. But my feeling as we end 2013 is, look, everybody is doing social media, right?
We need to be where our customers are, we need to be innovative, and we need to be ahead of them. And this is why they have this very innovative and aggressive approach to being whatever platform their customer might be on.
And that is the challenge of selling social media internally, you have these companies that are pretty famous companies that have robust social media presences. Yet, they are not fully understood internally.
Because you as no matter what you represent in your company, you can read books, you can listen to podcasts, you can experiment, and I always say social media isn't rocket science was made for people by people. And therefore when businesses learn to engage alongside other people as people and offer value, I think you will be able to find a lot of different ways to become more effective and achieve whatever objective you have, and there's a lot more tools out there that helped us do that as well.
But convincing people internally is the challenge, because it really requires people to change their mindset. And when we think of people internally, these are people, often in companies, they are older people that have very firm mindsets, they were perhaps successful at a part of their career before social media even existed.
So when I wrote maximize your social X, he wrote it with the intent of both, whether you're an executive, or you're a social media marketer, or what have you, you'll be able to really, you know, improve your social media literacy, and be able to see why you should be investing more and not left in social media.
But I wanted to share with you my advice for the social media director at this consumer brand, as to how to convince people internally and knowing the challenge, it really does come down to education is number one.
LinkedIn's Latest New Premium Features - What are They and Is it Worth the Upgrade?
00:09:37
LinkedIn recently upped the ante of becoming a paid member with the new "Spotlight" account. Is it worth the upgrade? Listen on for Neal's detailed advice on the new features and why you may (or may not) be interested in them.
Key Highlights
[01:03] The Recent Changes LinkedIn Did
[01:47] Should You Pay for LinkedIn Professional Plan
[03:26] What is an Open Link?
[04:06] Spotlight
[04:32] Open Profile
[04:55] What Open Profile Gives You
[05:36] Making Your Profile Appear Larger in Search Results
[06:55] How to Find LinkedIn Spotlight Plan
Notable Quotes
And that just is allowing me to be a little bit more contactable, it raises my contact ability, as I would say, on LinkedIn, which is important because when people are looking for someone for a particular reason, they don't want to have to deal with introductions, they don't want to have to deal with sending constantly in mails, they want to be able to communicate with you directly as easy as possible. That's why the contact ability part of your LinkedIn profile is so important.
And like I said, if you invest in LinkedIn a great deal, you're on it every day, you've developed business from it, it really is a no brainer to pay that a little bit more and get these new premium features.
This is a real podcast, a real person trying to do what I can on my mission to empower you with education and really sharing best practices and questions that I get from my clients and my speaking engagements and trying to really find truth and help you all become more efficient at maximizing your social.
Creatures of Habit and The Business of Social Media
00:14:20
How should small businesses approach an investment in social media? Learn how a social media consultant views how small business should consider what business value they should derive from social - and how to better manage their expectations vis a vis budget spend on social.
Key Highlights
[00:49] The Power of Habit
[01:31] The Concept of Unplugged
[05:01] The Challenge with Social Media
[06:06] My Approach
[06:16] A Role of Social Media Consultant
[09:15] Things I Have Struggled With As Social Media Consultant
[09:57] The Fear I Have As Social Media Consultant
Notable Quotes
And obviously, for those listening to the podcast, we know that that is not the world of social in order to be successful. It takes time to, obviously, create relationships develop relationships as a whole content side. And above and beyond that there's sort of a brand new inside that this doctor or this small business has their own culture, their own brand, their own differentiators in the marketplace.
So my approach has always been company's needs strategy and education.
Let's have an onboarding process so I can train your company. And let's keep an ongoing relationship as a social media adviser. That is basically the role that a social media consultant should play because we are consultative.
I just think that there's an incredible amount of time that goes into crafting a voice crafting content, curating content, engaging, that's a few $100 a month, unless you price yourself very, very inexpensively just would not allow me to do the best job that I could.
So this is something that I present to you in the spirit of being unplugged, and a really opening up my mind to you and the things that I have struggled with as a social media consultant.
But then, at the end of the day They said, well, what's the ROI of doing this? And that's sort of the fear I have for a lot of people that do this sort of job as well, as companies that, you know, put money into an effort that really isn't appropriate for getting business value out of a social media presence.
5 Things You Need for a Successful Social Selling Infrastructure
00:17:59
Neal has talked a lot about the benefits of social selling and some of you are farther down the road of creating a successful social selling program than others. Social allows you to create connections faster and contact prospects you otherwise might not have been able to. If you haven’t started your social selling journey yet, this week Neal wants to help you begin. It can seem overwhelming, but Neal breaks it down, starting by creating the infrastructure and leveraging LinkedIn profiles, connections, recommendations and groups.
Key Highlights
[01:18] What Is Social Selling
[04:45] 5 Things You Should Be Doing For A Successful Social Selling Infrastructure
[04:57] Why Your LinkedIn Profile Is Important
[05:53] Connecting Your Database
[07:16] Get Recommendations!
[10:26] Rules for Endorsements
[11:25] Setting Up Your Infrastructure Group
Notable Quotes
Social selling is not social media marketing, you know, selling marketing sort of the same. It is equipping your salespeople with using social media as another tool in their toolbox to help them do whatever salespeople do, find new leads, get referrals, introductions in the organizations, map out organizations, trying to close deals faster, try to get more money for deals or whatever it might be.
So your social selling infrastructure begins with your LinkedIn profile. We all know that more business decision-makers yours use LinkedIn for professional purposes than any other social network, right. So with that in mind, everything you do within that LinkedIn environment, all is going to link back to your profile. That's what your profile and I always say, it's like your websites, for your professional career, it really is.
The value of networking is in networking outside of people in your network, because you already know the people in your network, but you connect with them on LinkedIn, that's great. But it's who they know.
And we never know were the people we partied with in college, you know, our roommates, people in the high school with people that we started out working with 125 10, 20. 25, 30 years ago, you never know where they end up in life. But once you connect with your database in LinkedIn, you've now created a way of always being able to contact them, regardless of if their email changes, and discovering those hidden connections when we do the advanced people search.
The thing with endorsements, though, is they're attached to skills. And if you say you have experience in something, and it's not showing up and skills, and on the other hand, you know, underwater basket weaving is showing up as a skill that you have 99 endorsements for, there might be a branding problem there.
In recommendations, you're not going to ask people for endorsements, it is not that value, if you're going to ask someone for their support, you want to ask them for recommendation, bec
How to Refine Your Visual Voice and Engage on Instagram
00:22:12
Neal has been in Japan these last few weeks, and he’s been thinking a lot about the power of mobile. This week Neal is talking about the social network that you can only engage in from mobile: Instagram. It’s important for businesses to find their visual voice and be original and organic on this platform. The beautiful thing about Instagram is it’s power to connect with people. So remember, don’t go for the hard sale on Instagram - instead, focus on personality, engagement, and authenticity.
Key Highlights
[00:53] My Thoughts on Instagram
[03:47] Every Company Needs A Visual Voice
[05:50] A Case Study of A Company Doing Well With Visual
[08:57] Why Your Visuals Should Be Connected to Your Brand
[09:11] Quote Images
[12:04] Posting Event Images on Instagram
[13:47] Videos As Part of Visual Voice
[15:27] Popular Tactics
Notable Quotes
So as I like to say, whenever I speak, every company needs a visual voice. And that visual voice is is the visuals that are going to represent you in Facebook, Twitter, and obviously, you know, any social network, but on Instagram and on sites like Pinterest, they're going to become your primary source of visual.
And as I like to say, social media was made for people, not for businesses, so as a business, you're always going to be at a disadvantage. Therefore, the more organic you can become with your visual voice, I believe, the more effective the more successful you will be.
If you have visual content, I don't think it's a challenge. The challenge is, for those that do not have a visual aspect to their product. And this is where you really need to think about how you're going to represent your brand on Instagram.
It was because we had to post things that catch people's eyes, in order to grab their attention, get engagement and increase edge, and it was a tactical tool. You don't need those tactical tools on Instagram.
So, yes, they are eye catching, those beautiful visuals are eye catching the quote, images are eye catching. But are they true to your brand? Right? Is there a more effective way of saying the same thing with a different image with a small number of words, and with more in the description that truly differentiates your brand from the others, because if not, your quotes are going to be lost in the sea of quotes are out there.
A lot of people, a lot of businesses want to be on every social network. But does it make sense to be on every social network?
Get people to connect with you on a personal basis. And then from there, once you see success by posting more business oriented visuals once in a while, you can then take the next step and start a business account. But I really think twice if you don't have a visual product.
The Secret to Getting Content Featured into LinkedIn Pulse
00:15:18
Neal takes a deep dive into LinkedIn Pulse and reveals a "hidden" back door to help you get your content featured into LinkedIn Pulse.
Key Highlights
[01:33] One of the THings I Am Writing About in the Ebook
[02:09] Why Would You Want to Syndicate Your Blog Posts Within LinkedIn
[02:42] What is LinkedIn Pulse?
[03:43] How LinkedIn Pulse Works
[05:00] How to Get Your Content to Be Seen By More People
[07:21] Have Connections
[07:41] Why You Should Never Buy Fake Followers
[08:57] Discover Tab
[10:21] Channels Feature
[10:41] Publishers Feature
[11:45] My AHA Moment
Notable Quotes
LinkedIn is huge. One of the top 10 visited websites in the United States, sure, we'd all love to have guest blog posts on Forbes, but LinkedIn actually gets more traffic than Forbes, believe it or not. So it is a very, very lucrative and attractive demographic. And therefore if we are creating content for ourselves, our personal brands or for our businesses, it makes sense that we would want to publish on LinkedIn now what you publish on LinkedIn, obviously, you want it to be more appropriate for the demographic there.
So you start to get a picture that not only is this a huge audience to serve both polls users on LinkedIn users, but also it's an audience, at least those 30 million people are actively consuming content. And this is where you start seeing why some people get published posts on LinkedIn that gets, you know, hundreds of 1000s of views literally.
So that is something that obviously if you're sharing on LinkedIn, you want to reach out to people, you want to let them know about your posts. You want to write content, that when your connections who automatically become your followers see it, they want to engage with you.
The more connections you have, in general, the more people it's going to be exposed to, although that's not necessarily the case. But it gives you a better chance of getting exposed to more people. But if you've bought fake LinkedIn connections, or you just you know, have fake people that are connected with you, that doesn't do any good either, because they're not going to engage with your content, very similar to why you shouldn't buy fake Facebook fans, and you shouldn't buy fake Twitter followers.
But polls being such a huge asset, you want to get more and more LinkedIn company page followers if your business because the more followers you have, the higher you're gonna show up here in the recommended companies to follow.
So hopefully the light bulb goes on, we need to be focusing more on a LinkedIn company page, we need to attract a bigger following. Because all that is going to add to our company page being more and more recommendable in LinkedIn Pulse in our content from our company page being exposed more and more impulse, as more and more people subscribe to it.
WordPress is free, but if you want to get the most out of your CMS for inbound marketing, here are 10 recommended paid services that you should look into.
Key Highlights
[00:55] Paid Services for WordPress
[02:02] 10 Paid Services That I Think You Should Be Investing
[03:38] Genesis
[04:37] Web Hosting: WP Engine
[08:42] wpsitecare.com
[10:24] Security Plugin
[11:07] Landing Page Plugin
[13:33] Stock Images Site
[14:35] Contact Form Plugin
[15:38] Magic Action Box Pro
Notable Quotes
So a backup service is something you should also consider. But considering the WP Engine included as part of the web hosting, well, it just makes a lot of sense to go with them. And it's not just that I've had security issues like many other sites do.
And that's the advantage of going with a company that is dedicated to WordPress, in fact, automatic, you know, the organization that is responsible for maintaining WordPress, outside of the open source they have invested in WP Engine.
So really, really great and technology that you should really consider paying for if you don't have a great landing page technology.
So these people can immediately be added into your marketing automation funnel, great technology, Gravity Forms something that you should definitely look into having for your own website.
On a similar note, I'm gonna the last three services, I'm going to talk about our actual, you know, pure marketing pure sort of call to action, how do we send out a call to action somewhere in our blog, that's going to get people's attention, that's going to focus them to go into a landing page or click for some sort of action for some sort of objective.
So you want to experiment, put it up for one day, leave it off the other day and you know see what the difference is.
But I hope by showing you what is possible for paying either a monthly or a one time fee. And the fees don't have to be a lot of money. You can easily and efficiently and I believe inexpensively run a very, very high grade always up to date, efficient and efficient from a code perspective as well as a marketing perspective website.
You know, the more you rely on inbound marketing, for generating leads, the more you need to invest in your website, because that's really going to be and your social media, obviously.
But the website becomes your key marketing infrastructure.
Creating Special Moments with Your Social Media Followers / Leveraging the Ever-Changing Visual in Social
00:12:41
The launch of the rebranded Maximize Your Social podcast (formerly Social Business Unplugged) goes into creating the importance of special moments with your social media followers as well as leveraging the ever-changing visual social networks and visual components within social media channels.
Key Highlights
[00:33] Rebranding My Online Presence
[02:35] Giving Back to Your Network, Partner, and Customers in Social Media
[03:28] "Enchantment"
[05:06] Leveraging the Visual
[06:24] Why You Should Be On Pinterest
[07:12] Images Are Now Bigger and Wider
[07:57] What You Need to Do to Optimize?
[08:33] Remember the Recommended Facebook Dimension
[11:06] Why Visuals Are Important
Notable Quotes
As far as content curation, and engaging with influencers, but have we ever taken a step back and said, You know what, let's go out there and just thank those that have supported us that maybe we think before.
It's creating just a very, very special moment that can deepen your relationship with someone by 10x. It's really just going out of your way and thanking people.
But it's really doing these little things that make a big difference in the lives of people and it makes a big difference in the lives of your partners, your customers and, and social media. We forget it's about the people, right?
The thing to note about the visual is it's changing very, very quickly.
It just all the more reason why the visual is more and more important not only as content itself, but as that eye candy to draw others into discovering your content in social networks.
So if search engine optimization and getting discovered as important for your company and your visual company, well gives you even more reason to be on Pinterest, even if you're not a visual company, there are ways of utilizing Pinterest.
How to Maximize Your Facebook Marketing [Interview with Mike Gingerich from TabSite]
00:16:15
Neal interviews Mike Gingerich from TabSite on best practices in maximizing your Facebook marketing for your business regardless of size. Key Highlights
[00:30] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Mike Gingerich
[02:00] Case Studies of Successful Companies Using Tabsite
[04:45] Developing Your First Campaign
[07:40] Mike's Best Advice for Facebook Marketing in 2014
[08:34] Facebook for Business
[09:11] Lookalike Audience
[13:00] The Benefits of Using Tabsite
[15:28] Connect with Mike
Notable Quotes
And the more you engage with the page, the more they will show you contrast that page thinking that's a value to you will show you more of that.
I think you first need to know your What are your end goals? Are you trying to build up your reach on your page? Are you trying to get email signups? You need to determine, you know, exactly what what's going to look like success to you.
So you have to determine what that is, it needs to be something that's going to be relevant, something that's not going to be too high dollar to you, but it is a value to them to get.
So you want to put those as well as communicating that out on your other social channels and your email list and mitt, your website, your blog, that type of thing, then you want to you want to follow up and engage with those people afterwards and know what you're going to do with that information afterwards.
I think with Facebook, marketing 2014, it's going to be key to evaluate your your content, what you're posting on Facebook. And in terms of you need to look at your what your goals are.
And people say oh, you know, Facebook used to be free now you have to pay. But the converse side of that is that you can get a ad on Facebook. And because Facebook knows so much about you what your Likes are your your interest, those types of things, for the individuals that for business, that's that's a very valuable tool, because you can get very specific and who you target and to reach your audience, whether that's a local audience, or whether that's a specific international global audience. Facebook can help you reach just that unique target audience.
Another quote from my visit to Facebook was when you think mobile think Facebook.
Have you ever shared a Circle on Google Plus or seen others sharing one? Learn about their hidden powers and how to leverage what most businesses have yet to figure out!
Key Highlights
[01:43] The Advantage of Google Plus
[02:49] Looking at the Early Days of Twitter
[02:58] The Challenge with Google Plus
[04:18] My Suggestions For You with Google Plus
[04:47] The Initial Step of Engagement You Should Be Doing
[05:11] One of the Interesting Things You Can Do to Engage in Google Plus
[05:24] The Power of Circle Sharing
[06:55] Why Circle Sharing?
[07:55] Circle Sharing As A Form of Engagement
[10:11] The Most Underutilized Aspect of Social Media Marketing
Notable Quotes
I do believe it is starting to reach that tipping point where people are no longer asking, Well, I thought Google Plus was a ghost town, or why should my company be on it? And realizing that it is a natural extension of a communication channel that your social media program should make sure it encompasses, right.
And it hurts me that also, no one is talking about LinkedIn, it's just a place where you go to look for a job, people realize that it is a professional networking environment with, you know, obviously chances to exhibit your thought leadership to learn, and also to develop new business relationships.
I'll talk about my experiment a bit is obviously you want to find those people that are actually engaging on Google Plus.
I saw a lot of people sharing that I thought, you know, what, I want to help other people find those that are actually engaging with my content. In other words, these are people that are plus money that are commenting that are sharing, they're real people. And they have an interest in social media content, which a lot of my other followers do as well, people are on Google Plus not just looking for information, but to find other people to follow into to make new relationships, right.
So by looking at the circles that are shared by the people that you respect, and that you follow, it gives you a good introduction to people that have been vetted, that you may want to follow as well.
It's about really the people and bringing people together because of a common interest. And I believe, and this is one of the most underutilized aspects of social media marketing.
I believe that brands business pages, sharing circles of their fans, ideally, fans that have engaged with them, right, but sharing circles with their fans and highlighting their fans.
I think that can be a very, very special way to engage with your fans to thank your fans, to build a deeper relationship with your fans. And most of all, to create that community so that fans can discover each other. And thank you for that and really build a stronger and deeper community, as a byproduct of that data is something okay, that you can't do
A first look at the newest social network Ello. Should you sign up? Spend much time there? Use it for your business? Listen to Neal's advice and gain some rational perspective on what value Ello might be able to provide you and your business.
Key Highlights
[01:15] New Social Network - ELLO
[02:07] Remain Holistic on Your Approach on Social Media
[02:45] What is ELLO?
[03:56] Experiment on ELLO!
[04:17] How ELLO Works
[06:15] Keep An Eye on ELLO
[06:58] One of the Cool Things About ELLO
[07:28] Another Thing You'll Notice on ELLO
Notable Quotes
While yes, it is growing in certain circles, we have to take a and remain you know holistic about our approach to social media.
And it really is going to depend to see what ello does in order to bring value to businesses who want to leverage it for marketing, even though ellos already said we are going to be an ad free network, which makes sense, I still think that they could offer, you know solutions for businesses.
There's a lot of artists, a lot of creative types that are on the platform. And it's it's a beautiful network, it's just another avenue to engage with people.
So I think as a matter of experimentation, just to get familiar with the network, I don't think it can hurt to actually acquire an invites, which you will need, every user can only invite five people to the network.
It's no different than any other social network. But obviously, social media is about being where your audiences.
But I will say that it's refreshing to be on a network where there's no ads, and where people aren't, you know, where you can have natural conversations and meet new people. It's sort of like the early days, like I said, of any other social network. So you might be able to meet interesting people there. And it's an experimentation, who knows what will happen.
But until then, that is basically what ello is, and what it will become, nobody knows and no one can predict the future. And it really, you know, comes down to, you know, sticking to your guns, sticking to your social media strategy. But you know, keeping an eye on ELLO, and keeping an eye on sort of the leading people that are on our following a few and keeping an eye on the numbers as to how many followers they have.
Experiment with it, try to post something different once a day try to connect with people at a human level= and look at the impressions you're getting.
Guest Blogging is Here to Stay: Respect the Content and the Creators
00:18:02
Some people say that guest blogging is dead, but Neal Schaffer disagrees. Content curation is a great way to have enough content to share, and it’s beneficial for both business and the content creators. How? This week, Neal talks about the importance of building those relationships between brands and influencers: how organizations can strategically partner with bloggers, and work with them to create a mutually beneficial relationship that leverages each of their networks.
Key Highlights
[01:40] Two Parts of Social Media
[02:09] What is Guest Blogging?
[02:36] Why Blog Owners of Businesses Want to Have Guest Bloggers
[03:17] Looking at Guest Posting in Two Different Aspects
[05:35] The ROI of Blogging
[07:00] Save Your Best Content for Blog
[07:32] What to Look for in a Guest Blogger
[08:56] Why I Created Maximize Your Social Business
[10:40] Stick to Unique Content
[12:18] Guest Blogging for Brands
[12:37] It's All About Food Chain
Notable Quotes
We all know that social media is the convergence of information and communication.
And blog owners or businesses with blogs want to have guest bloggers because it helps lessen the burden of content creation, and it's part of a social media program that is probably going to be the most time or resource-intensive part of your operation.
You want to work your way up the food chain, because people don't scale your time is limited. And if you can only have time to write one or two guest posts a month, you want to do it, where you're going to get the most bang for your buck, or in this case, bang for your content to your time.
I really want to have my best content, I maximize social business, but every once in a while if a company reaches out to me, and I haven't guest posted for them before, I will do that if I think it helps me yield thought leadership. You know, it opens up a new crowd to me, and it helps me build a relationship with that company. I'm all about relationships, and that's sort of my background in b2b sales and that's what's helped carry me far in social media.
And when I do things, I want to do things big, you know, I think it was pro blogger Darren Rose, who said, Whenever you guest blog, you want to save your best content for guest blogs, because that's where you reach a new audience.
You want a guest blogger that is obviously an expert in what they do. You want them to write about content that's relevant to your site. And hopefully, you want them to be so proud of their content, that they're going to share it as well, so that you get to access this new network.
And so it really got me thinking and when I started getting more and more of these requests, I thought to myself, you know, I don't want a one night stand with content creators. It leaves no value for a blog to have just one contribution from one person.
The Evolution of Social Media Dashboards: What You Need to Know
00:18:01
An interview with Tammy Kahn Fennell, founder and CEO of MarketMeSuite, on the evolution of social media dashboards and social productivity. Key Highlights
[00:45] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Tammy Kahn Fennell
[02:01] The Evolution of Social Media Dashboards and How Businesses Should Be Using Them
[05:24] The Challenge
[06:30] Where MarketMeSuite Is Trying to Excel
[09:19] Social Media Productivity and Efficiency
[11:04] Tying Social Media Data for Business Efficiency
[13:09] Three Ways Businesses Should Be Making More Use of Social Media Dashboard
Notable Quotes
So I think from a business perspective, businesses are being forced, by just the way social media is evolving to get a little more integrated, and really get organized so that once you organize, you can then prioritize them.
Once you prioritize, you can actually gauge but missing those first two steps, could mean that you're just you know, you're approaching it from all different angles. And you could burn out on that and not actually get the true value out of using something.
Where we found our sweet spot at market me sweet is that we don't want or need our companies to, or small businesses are professionals or solo entrepreneurs or bloggers, we're not expecting them to ever grow up and be Coca Cola, we want them to continue to be the best, you know, business that they are the best, the best social engager that they are. And we tried to build a tool that is very, that fits their unique needs.
But the data that the message is in the prioritization, that that's there when you can figure out the most important conversations, it's incredibly actionable.
I think that the other thing about being a tech startup in this particular lead digital world is that you have to understand that you need to play nicely with other tools and be very understanding of the fact that people do have unique workflows, and that people are going to do it in the way that makes sense for them.
But I think that it's it's a very, it's a very good approach for a startup to have to say, you know, we are a, we are a very important piece of this puzzle. But we know that we fit in with the greater the greater mosaic.
It's called follow up. And you know, that's that's what we do now in the in the social and the digital world is and a lot of people forget it. So if you've engaged with somebody, why not flag them? Why not mark them as a lead? Why not figure that out? By the way, you can do all these things in marketing suite so that you can just remember to interact with them.
It’s Time to Bring Content, Organic Social and Performance Marketing Teams Together [Falcon.io Interview]
00:22:06
I recently keynoted social media enterprise platform company Falcon.io's Spark conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on the topic of influencer marketing. I had a chance to meet with their founder and CEO, Ulrik Bo Larsen, at the event and get his perspective on all things social media marketing. Listen in for his advice.
Key Highlights
[00:48] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Ulrik Bo Larsen
[02:27] Successful Things Jay See That Brands Do In Social and Digital These Days
[05:03] Falcon.io's Core Message of Marketing
[05:46] The Areas Where Marketers Need To Improve On
[09:01] Big Things That Marketers Miss Out Of
[11:13] Bringing The Content Team Together
[16:26] The Focal Points Marketers Should Focus On
[17:28] Three Centers Of Gravity
Notable Quotes
A lot of these great things that people want to achieve on these channels, which is often starts with a marketing message, you want to want to get a specific message out, you want to set on specific product, you want to create a rareness around a brand, a lot of those things are now especially in I would say in the mid market and some of the more innovative enterprise companies, people are starting to realize that a lot of those things are very intertwined.
I think that a lot of things are moving towards you know, visual content. And it obviously you know, sometimes changes the need for kind of the you know, the expertise you need internally to produce that is different than just writing copy but but it's all those things are coming together.
So I think you need to engage with perhaps a new set of agencies to help you out produce some of that content and you need to staff your own your own teams in ways so that you can maneuver what is you know, the changing landscape of what constant formats are working and it's video it's visual video now it's portrait instead of landscape and all those things are constantly happening right and you write us need to be Ready for for that and embrace it as you know, an exciting line of work rather than oh my god, I thought I had it down, because that's never gonna happen.
You may have some, some some difference of, of, you know, personality, and there are differences throughout the states of America for sure. But it is, you know, it's my new compared to the differences in culture over here. So I think that that's important. So you often get into a more more refined set up with, with regional and local markers, local activation, where you take some of those some of the content pieces and really want, you need to localize them to these to these markets over here.
What you want to do, you want to bootstrap them with some tooling, and some platforms, and something to kind of
How To Optimize Your Blog Posts For Higher Search Rankings And Stay Ahead Of The Competition
00:29:26
Getting to the front page in the search rankings is a battlefield - you're fighting a war! The struggle to stay relevant and compete with an ever growing number of competitors requires the right tools and the right approach to revitalizing existing blog content and strategically creating new content.
If you are approaching content from a social media marketing perspective, or from a blogging perspective, today's podcast is going to really resonate with you because I want to give you a hopefully new and really holistic way of thinking about search engine optimization and therefore the content that either you already have on your site or new content that you are going to blog in the future as part of your content marketing and social media marketing efforts
Key Highlights
[03:39] What drives traffic?
[03:47] Why Search Engines Are Relevant And Powerful
[04:46] The Concept Of Freshness
[05:36] Data-driven Approach
[06:19] Why Some Content Outperform And Some Underperform?
[06:57] Minimum Number Of Words for Blog Posts
Notable Quotes
At the end of the day search engines is what drives traffic.
I still think at the end of the day, you know, people read emails, people read blogs, but people do a heck of a lot of searches.
Search engines are still there and are still as powerful and as relevant as ever. And therefore, when we think about content, we should be thinking about search engines.
Why does some content outperform and some underperform? Well, what I've found some of the underperforming content is actually competing with good performing content on your websites.
If you blogged about the same thing over and over again, Google is just going to try to find the best one if you're trying to target the same keyword.
A look at Empire Avenue from a social media marketing perspective. Does it make sense for your brand to have a presence there?
Key Highlights
[00:46] What Is Empire Avenue?
[01:50] Why Empire Avenue Should Matter
[02:59] An Example of Why Empire Avenue Is Interesting for Social Media Marketers
[04:07] Is Your Target Audience on Empire Avenue?
[04:51] Creating Missions
[06:35] My Empire Avenue Ticker
Notable Quotes
Compared to the 10s, or 20s, or hundreds of millions of users that other social networks have it's small, however, because it's based on social media activity, and it's really the only game out there based on social media, if you think about it, and therefore it attracts a lot of very, very active social media users.
Empire Avenue is interesting for social media marketers, and that it gives you a chance to engage with people in a very, very different way than you can on other platforms.
With Empire Avenue, if the person you want to engage with is a daily Empire Avenue user, it's guaranteed that that person is checking in every day. And in fact, compared to a Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus, or maybe comparable to a Facebook or Google Plus, they are checking in on a daily basis, often religiously, and I know from my own experience, and from others that I know that are active users that we are as well.
So part of what a lot of social media marketers try to achieve is amplification of their content and Empire Avenue in addition to all this, giving you a new way to engage to create brand awareness and a community of very, very active social media users.
Maybe your brand has a new campaign, and you want your shareholders to help amplify that campaign to their community, perhaps you have a new blog post that you would like to see more traffic on in hopes that more of these heavier social media active users will actually share that post it cetera, et cetera.
Making the Instagram Transition from Personal to Business
00:16:51
As Instagram continues to gain in popularity, many haven't started to leverage the opportunities that Instagram provides businesses. Neal introduces his own story of the why and how he is transitioning to use Instagram as a more integral part of his social media marketing - and why you should as well.
Key Highlights
[01:35] The Rise of Visual Social Media Marketing
[02:19] Where Does Instagram Fall?
[03:19] Brands That Do Well On Instagram
[04:31] How To Use Instagram?
[06:32] My Issues With People Who Are Just Posting Quotes All the Time
[07:54] Authenticity in Instagram
[09:22] Tools for Utilizing Instagram
[11:38] Social Media Productivity
[12:38] Taking the Step Above Beyond Brand Awareness
[14:03] Retain Authenticity with Instagram
Notable Quotes
With the ability to photo tag, I immediately thought of Instagram as really, if you're a brick and mortar that might be the second best place you want to be after Facebook.
I'm all about trying to contribute original value to social media.
So you know, there's a part of it, which is authenticity, that it is something about you and it is irrelevant to your brand. And curating third party content for any social network is one strategy.
But one thing I was looking for is we have all these social media dashboards come out, why can't they handle Instagram?
So once you have a tool like that, and you begin to consider Instagram more strategic, because there are so many eyeballs on it, you want to maintain a daily basis of engaging with others, not just commenting and liking on, you know, friends, your network, but also being able to post more often.
ut I will say that, you know, for brand awareness, Instagram is extremely important right now. And with the tools, we have the opportunity to take it to the next level.
And I would say to try to avoid that at all costs, if you could, I really do think that it's important to retain the authenticity with Instagram. And I think it's gonna allow you to have a deeper connection with other people. And at the end of the day, it's gonna help you be more effective with your social media marketing.
I think most people and you know there's a lot of savvy social media marketers that may have already been doing this for the past several months. But I think that you know the notion of scheduling unless you're a brand that's been doing a lot on Instagram. I think it's still relatively new to a lot of marketers and a lot of small businesses and I hope that this gives you the knowledge the inspiration Have the courage to go out there and do it yourself and not miss out on the potential there.
Today Neal is talking with Pawan Deshpande, the CEO and Founder of Curata. They discuss Curata on the eve of the Social Tools Summit in Boston. Curata provides tools that help marketers curate content and publish it many channels, as well as provide analytics, best practices, and machine learning to make content curation and creation easier and more effective. Curata can schedule content, build posts from relevant metadata, and even suggest images. Pawan also discusses the company’s history, the value of content curation, and the future of content curation and creation convergence.
Stop outsourcing your social media to consultants and agencies who put a black box around your social media. Instead, start thinking of ways to own your social media strategy and insource your social media activities.
Key Highlights
[00:43] Fire Your Social Media Consultant
[01:24] The Problem With Outsourcing Resources
[02:50] Are You Blindly Throwing Money Away?
[04:00] Own Your Strategy
[04:53] Understand The Basics
[06:11] Do You Really Need A Social Media Consultant?
[06:52] Think Twice And Ask Yourself Questions
Notable Quotes
I took a course very, very early in my career, and I talked about this in an earlier podcast, of actually not implementing social media on behalf of other companies, because I truly believe that it is something that should be done by that company, if they really want to get the most effective use of social media, it really is a no brainer.
But the problem is 99% of the businesses that I talk with, if they're outsourcing it, whether it be an agency or consultant, or what have you, there are not doing it with the right people.
If you're going to outsource, you need to be able to manage them by one owning the strategy. And in terms of owning the strategy, you need to educate yourself on social media.
If you don't understand the basics, you're not gonna be able to cre ate a strategy and you're not going to be able to manage these external resources.
Social media is not rocket science. It's teachable. And if you have good obviously business acumen, you can learn social media and become very proficient at it, it doesn't need to be a full time job either.
So the title of this episode is fire your social media consultant, because most of them are not teaching you anything. It's a black box. And they hold the power by not teaching you because the more you know, the more you realize you may not need their services, because most of them are doing very, very basic thing.
Really think twice. And ask yourself some serious questions if you're hiring someone or outsourcing your current social media. If not, I hope you're successful in sourcing if you haven't, now's the time to start.
How Harvard Medical School Does Visual Social [Jay Shemenski Interview]
00:20:29
Today Neal is mixing it up with an interview as he gets ready to hit the road again in the next couple of months. He’s talking to someone he’ll be meeting at the upcoming Social Tools Summit in Boston, Jay Shemenski, who is the Digital Manager of the Harvard Medical School. Listen in to hear him talk about how he got to Harvard Medical School, what his goals are in managing their social, and what he’s looking forward to talking to at the Social Tools Summit.
Key Highlights
[01:09] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Jay Shemenski
[01:36] Jay's Journey To Social Media Marketing
[05:18] Getting Experience In Google AdWords, PPC, and SEO
[07:16] Jay's Advice For Social Media Practitioners
[09:43] The Use Of Harvard Medical School In Social Media
[11:26] Who Are Jay's Target Audiences?
[12:03] Elements To Look At To Decide Iff A Program Is Possible
[13:52] Social Tool Summit Session That Jay Wanted To Be On
[16:22] Tips On Developing Visual Content
[18:50] Connect With Jay
Notable Quotes
I mean, even now looking at social media, and looking at how you can start to work with native ads and paid ads, and targeting to certain audiences. It's really the same principles. It's really just, you know, how much you know about particular users and how you can engage with them and increase that engagement.
I think it's, you know, everything that you work with, you're going to pick up bits and pieces that enhance that singular focus.
So I think getting that broad base is very important, because nothing happens in a vacuum. And you're going to need to know how all the different pieces work together, in order for you to be able to demonstrate the ROI of social and the impact that social is having, and how it influences all the other pieces.
With us, we take more of a competitive analysis look and say, what's our share of voice? What's our share of engagement? You know, are we driving more attention than our competitors within the field? And then even kind of keeping an eye outside just the medical education field, and really just science media as a whole?
What I'm really keyed into and excited about is, is visual, social, and how people in organizations can be using images, video to really tell their story in a much more emotional way, in a much more connected way.
But I think one thing that was really lacking within our field is visually connecting the stories and the change that institutions organizations are driving through scientific discovery and through medicine. And that was an area where we could really develop a differentiated story about what we're doing here and you potentially connect to audiences in a deeper way, and also reach some new audiences.
So I think, really, the first step is taking a step back and assessing where you are in the field that you're working within, and where you c
Live Streaming: An Essential Component of Content Marketing [Abbson Live Interview]
00:18:44
The Social Tools Summit was a couple of months ago now, but I am still sharing some great conversations I had around the event. On today’s podcast, I'm talking to Chad Abbott, the CEO of Abbson Live, the company that provided all of the live streaming for the Social Tools Summit. Listen in as I go a little deeper with Chad, discussing how and why live video is an essential part of content marketing.
Key Highlights
[01:57] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Chad Abott
[02:59] What is Live Streaming?
[05:15] How Live Streaming Relates to Broader Marketing Strategy
[09:47] Creating Exceptional Content
[11:13] Starting Your Live Streaming Strategy
[12:58] Chad's Suggestion for Consumer Facing Brands
[14:31] How to Leverage Video for Social Media Marketing Services
[17:01] Connect with Chad
Notable Quotes
I think video and especially live video has a power to captivate an audience online, like other forms of media do not.
I think the brands that are being successful with live video right now, are the ones who sort of have a strategy in place. It's sort of easy to just kind of throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And in fact, I think that's a good way to start. But then you need to sort of narrow it down and see what's working with your audience.
We become so visual in social media marketing, and the visual shouldn't stop at the static.
But live video, you'll frequently get people to engage for half an hour or more, which is just when you added an incredible, long amount of time to make a sales pitch compared to any other foreign content that's sitting out there.
I think the assumption is it's enough to just do it because it's so new. And unfortunately, worth we find that's not true. Just like with bad writing, bad photography, bad film, bad television, people don't like bad content. And that's about what you're putting into the live broadcast. But it's also about what it looks like, is it? Is it beautiful? Does it engage people. And that is, is so often overlooked.
If you want to whatever your normal strategy is, but put it on Periscope for the first time and see how your audience engages. And take care when you put it on periscope to make it beautiful, make it engaging, sit somewhere nice and introduce it and and then take people's questions and engage them don't make it a static broadcast, where it's only going one direction, let them contribute and maybe ask questions, and you'll get better content for your blog posts that way.
I think the takeaway point is just that it's okay to just jump in and try it and sort of get a sense of what works with your audience. Every audience is different and just like every other form of content and has to be tailored to the people that you're targeting. So give it a try. Try these different platforms. There's nothing wrong with starting with some of the free
A real-life analogy to help you understand how social selling is all about using social media to find information relevant to selling as well as choose the most effective communication channel to help engage with the prospective buyer.
Key Highlights
[01:12] What is Social Selling / Social Sales
[02:27] What Happened to Me that Illustrates What Social Selling is About
[04:37] An Example of an Aggressive, Awesome Salesperson
[05:36] There's Data Everywhere on the Internet
[06:10] Things You Can Do As Part of Social Selling
[08:16] The Different Channels to Communicate
Notable Quotes
And so this gentleman was very smart. He was reading the data reading the information that was right relevant, that he knew that every single person that's posting a do business as advertisement is one of his potential business banking clients.
But the fact that this person used the data to contact me. In other words, this data appears in a lot of different forms.
But there's lots of hints of people that may be looking to buy a product or service that either you or your competitors can easily find in social media. And that's part of the social selling is, you know, as a salesperson why, you know, I wonder where am I going to develop my next lead marketing can only get you so far, sometimes you need to do a little bit of prospecting, right? And you need to build up your pipeline.
And that business tool allows you to efficiently within a single dashboard, do keyword searches, or perhaps decide if you're already connected to someone which channel you want to use to send them a message. But it's important to understand the concepts, the concepts of sales have not changed.
Social media is not going to help you get 100% of your business. It complements what you've been doing. But if you understand the power of that data, and being able to find that data and contact the person, and the different channels available to you and different ways of engaging with those people, I think you'll see why social selling is a compelling topic for anyone in sales.
Facebook Graph Search and Social Media in the Here & Now
00:07:34
Does Facebook Graph Search matter to your business in the here and now? A look at the importance of sticking to present technology in your social media strategy.
Key Highlights
[00:22] Social Media Here And Now
[01:30] The Facebook Graph Search
[01:43] How Facebook Graph Search Can Affect How We Use Facebook
[02:29] The 2 Things Facebook Graph Search Hinges On
[03:08] The Question On Data
[03:40] My Advice on Maximizing Social Media Presence
[04:49] Understanding The Need for a Historical Perspective
[05:39] Try To Avoid The Noise
Notable Quotes
From an inbound perspective, there is the potential that the more likes we have on our business page, from relevance consumers or potential clients, and the more engagement that we have from them, the higher that's our company, or more prominent that our company will appear and more search results.
On the other hand, from an outbound perspective, we can now use the search engine potentially, if it is implemented the way they say it will be to find out more information, more data about our competitors, about our fans.
If you want to show up in more search results, you need to have more fans, you need to be more engaging, and therefore you need to be doing what you should be doing on Facebook from day one.
In other words, if you want to leverage the future of Facebook, you need to be leveraging the here and now. And instead of trying to predict the future, is there more that you could be maximizing about your social media presence in the here and now.
You stay the course until this new functionality comes out until you start to use it and really understand it, you see how others use it. And slowly, you will get a much better intuitive feel as to how you should be using it for your organization.
So all of this is a combination of doing implementing your social media in the here and now but also an understanding that there is a need for historical perspective to understand And what all these changes might mean when they get rolled out how they get rolled out, and how people end up using them.
So instead of being confused by everything that's out there, really try to avoid the noise and get back to the basics and stick to your social media strategy, which hopefully you have a written document if you read my top 10 tips to optimize your social media audit your social media strategy for 2013 blog post on women on networking.
All You Wanted to Know About Becoming a Social Media Influencer and Influencer Marketing
00:12:31
What does it mean to be an influencer in social media? Why is it important to businesses? And how can people become influencers?
Key Highlights
[01:43] Have A Social Scoring
[03:21] What is Publicly Available Data?
[04:23] The Interesting Thing About Cloud
[05:56] How I Look At Social Scoring
[06:39] Become the Center of Influence
[07:47] Carve Your Own Path
[08:58] Be Natural
[10:19] Be An Influencer and Add Value
[10:49] Be An Utility
Notable Quotes
And it really comes down to, if you're a business and you want to get more amplification from your message, or you want to better segment your audience because you're bombarded with 10s Hundreds 1000s of app mentions direct messages a day, obviously, having some sort of social scoring can be very, very convenient, it can actually help the efficiency of your marketing help the efficiency of your customer service and what have you.
But what it really comes down to I find, and businesses also want to become more influential, but people want to yield influence.
It really comes down to yielding influence means yielding influence for the public to consume. And what are the platforms that are open to the public?
On the other hand, if you've only been active on Facebook, and really haven't done much on Twitter, it really limits the potential and it makes sense because Twitter as a real time search engine is probably number two, or number three in the world only behind Google and perhaps YouTube, if it's not ahead of YouTube.
But the message that I really want to give you all about influence and how to become an influencer is don't follow the influencers, don't necessarily retweet the influencers, become the center of influence become an influencer.
And what you find is that your past relationships that you have in your past friends and fans, you can leverage for whatever new things you want to do on any site.
And that's why a blog is a central part of any social media strategy that I create. But above and beyond the blogging, it's not only sharing your own point of view, but it's also in the type of content that you share, or curate, and who you curate, from what social signals you send, who do you engage with?
But really, if you want to engage with someone that's sort of high up in the influence chain, and you want to get the right Just be natural, read their blog posts, comments, send them a tweet every once in a while retweet their content, share their content on Facebook, tagging them.
And it's this sort of like, do it yourself, be inspired to do something to add value to the world and whatever passion you may have.
Announcing My New Ebook: Maximizing LinkedIn for Business
00:20:19
Today Neal is coming to you from Clearwater, Florida, where he actually did this podcast episode as a Periscope broadcast. And while he does talk a little bit about Periscope in this episode, what he’s mostly discussing is his new ebook which just came out on Kindle. It’s called Maximize LinkedIn for Business, and it came about from his visit to the LinkedIn Headquarters over a year and a half ago. Listen in to today’s episode for a rundown of what you can find in the ebook, and where you can get access to it.
Key Highlights
[01:17] What Is Maximize LinkedIn for Business Is About
[03:10] Table Of Contents
[03:17] How LinkedIn Is Being Used By Corporations and Professionals Today
[04:49] Two Important Things You Need to Know
[05:44] The Importance of Connections
[05:56] Tactical and SEO Benefit of Having Connections
[08:34] The Value of Network
[09:05] Establishing Credibility
[09:25] What Are Recommendations
[10:20] Understanding Skills and Endorsements
[10:57] How to Make LinkedIn Profile Private
[12:44] Pulse Feature
[14:02] Chapter 8
[15:56] LinkedIn Groups
[16:44] Chapter 10
Notable Quotes
One of the big mistakes or I should say one of the big things that people don't understand about LinkedIn is it's just for job search.
So really, every professional and it's not just for job search, like I said, it's for your personal brand for your professional brand. And now more and more as an employee, you really need to have a certain aptitude of LinkedIn, you need to know how it works, and how you can make it work for you.
Number one is really the mindset right, just understanding the value and the things that you're going to be need to do on LinkedIn.
The second thing is The LinkedIn profile. So whatever you do on LinkedIn, it leads people to your profile, right. And I think people take it for granted.
It's a matter of, you know, sending them invites, as a matter of after you meet someone at a meeting of actually doing a follow up and saying, Hey, would you like to connect on LinkedIn, it's printing your LinkedIn URL and your business card, so that it makes it easy for others putting in your email signature, right, I use wise stamp as a way to do that, wisely.
The value of your network is in keeping in daily touch. So you're Top of Mind
And whenever you want to contact someone, or whenever you post something on LinkedIn, or you send out a connection request, people go to your profile, one of the first things they look for, believe it or not, is recommendations.
If you want to be successful on LinkedIn, and you're going to be a lot more successful with the more credibility you have.
Obviously, the whole value of LinkedIn is that it's a public database, right. But understand that there are things you want to keep private ab
9 Things You Should Focus Your Social Media Efforts On in 2015
00:20:14
Where should you focus your social media efforts and budget in 2015? In this episode, Neal Schaffer encourages you to start the year by analyzing your content and process. This means helping you find more places to share your content, explaining the importance of internal education and ownership, and advocating for systems that help you amplify your strategies, like paid social and automation.
Key Highlights
[02:01] My First Social Media Conference -- Social Tools Summit
[03:10] My List of 9 Things You Should Focus Your Social Media Efforts On In 2015
[03:40] Number #1: Content
[04:07] A Positive Move In The Evolution of Content Marketing
[05:47] Central Content
[07:05] Type Of Visual Content You Can Use
[08:42] Why Mobile Personal Line Is Emerging
[10:35] Have A Process If You Want To Scale
[12:09] My Advocacy
[12:49] What's Fueling Employee Advocacy Storm
[13:56] Ownership
[16:14] Start Exploring Paid Social
Notable Quotes
And what I'm going to be talking about is really an extension of that, because some things have changed, but a lot really hasn't. And it takes time for people. And sometimes technology to catch up with some of the trends that I see. And therefore, I don't see it as repetition. I see it as a further evolution of things in 2015. Some of these have evolved more rapidly or are more mainstream than others. But either way, there's always room for improvement for optimization.
You can't talk about marketing these days without talking about content marketing. And you almost can't talk about content marketing without talking about social media marketing, and social media marketing and content marketing as well.
With the convergence of information, communication, brands and companies need to have content to engage with people, right. And that's just a fact. It's a fact of social media.
I believe with most companies, whether it's social media strategy alignment, whether it's a choice of platform, whether it's voice, or just the content itself, or even the frequency of the content, there's always little tweaks you can do to further optimize and improve upon it.
So visual is very important on a number of different levels.
Mobile is prevalent, and in some communities are some target user audiences with demographics, they spend more time on mobile than on the web. So being active and social considering that a lot of people do social from a mobile phone, or smartphone, I should say is a start is part of a mobile strategy.
If you don't have a process, you don't have a product. And you need to have a process around your social media. So you can scale you can teach others to do it.
And what is really fueling the employee advocacy storm right now, from a lot of clients that I have is social selling is the hidden gap between getting salespeople to be sha
LinkedIn for Sales and Social Selling: It All Comes Down to Your LinkedIn Profile
00:12:30
If you're on LinkedIn for sales, business development, or marketing, you need to realize that everything you do on LinkedIn leads back to your profile. Here's advice on how to improve upon it.
Key Highlights
[01:02] How To Better Leverage LinkedIn for Business?
[01:39] The Second Demographic
[02:41] LinkedIn Demographics
[03:18] Think About What Social Media Can Do for You
[03:59] It All Comes Down to Your LinkedIn Profile
[05:43] Why It Is Critical to Put Time and Effort In Your Profile
[06:55] Put A Professional, Well-Branded Headline
[07:32] Expose Your Personal Brand In Your Profile
[08:31] What to Put In Your Profile Summary
[10:36] Data Points that Show the Power of LinkedIn
Notable Quotes
But from a b2b sales perspective, you haven't figured out how best to align it with everything else you're doing to help you find new clients or better engage with your current clients.
It's not everybody. And therefore, when you think of using LinkedIn as a sales tool, you have to understand that you're not going to get access to everybody, right? It is one more tool in your toolbox.
How did you get leads up until now? How did you close business up until now, if it's still effective, keep doing it. If it's not as effective as it used to be, think about what social media can do for you. And if you're already on LinkedIn and see the value, and you just want to see how to apply that value towards b2b sales.
But the point I wanted to bring up today is if you want to use LinkedIn as a serious tool to help you get business now, whether it's for b2b sales, if you think of yourself as a salesperson, or maybe you're in the marketing department, or you think yourself as a marketer, and you want to get more inbound marketing leads from LinkedIn, or you want to do better that whatever you do on LinkedIn, you're more successful on LinkedIn to generate new business. It really comes down to your profile.
It is your homepage on LinkedIn, because anything you do on LinkedIn, whether you're posting a status update, whether you're asking For an introduction, you're sending an InMail, you're in a group, you're looking at LinkedIn news, or you're posting a comment on a LinkedIn company update, it all comes down to your name, we're whatever you do on LinkedIn, whatever engagement you do is think back to your profile.
LinkedIn is where the business decision makers are, I recommend you don't get cheesy, because I don't think those people look down favorably on cheesy things that don't want to be sold to in a professional headline.
So you want to put down a professional headline that is well branded, that will get the right targeted people wanting to click through wanting to say, hey, I want to know more about this person, I want to get to know this person, don't try to make a sale, through your professional head
Neal's Fave Social Media Productivity Tips & Tools
00:13:26
Spending too much time in social and achieving too few business results? Let me share with you my favorite social media productivity tips - and a plethora of tools to help you and your business improve your social media productivity by leaps and bounds. Key Highlights
[01:35] Social Media Has Never Been Free
[02:11] 6 Social Media Productivity Tips
[03:20] The Beauty of Content Curation
[03:46] Content Curation Tools
[04:41] 3 Different Communities of Content Creator that Help Promote Content
[06:03] Schedule Your Posts
[08:11] Use A Dedicated Browser
[08:45] Stick to A Daily Routine
[09:33] Get Analytical
[10:25] Turn Old Into New
Notable Quotes
So the whole advent of paid social, why do we have to pay to get noticed in the Facebook newsfeed and to be honest with you, social has never been free, it's required time, it's required someone's time, right?
At the end of the day, it's the human resource cost that is there. And therefore, if somehow we can be more productive with our use of that time, visa vie social media, that's money in the bank, from my perspective.
If you're going to curate content, why not curate content from people that are actually creating the content, I think you're going to be able to create more direct and engaging relationships than just curating content from the mass media.
Find your vehicle that helps you discover relevant content quickly.
The important thing is to find the tools that work for you that are helping you find the most relevant content and make it easy for you to control when and where your content is posted in the most efficient way.
I think if you can create these daily weekly routines, you're going to be all the better and if you can create those social media boundaries, as I like to call them, and you stick to those daily weekly routines, you're going to get a really really good idea as to how much time you're spending doing what where's the ROI and therefore better at relegating things to a daily or weekly task and therefore becoming more not only productive but effective with your social media.
You can reuse your content for a variety of content marketing, mediums, infographics, ebooks, revising them to create new blog posts, podcasts, you don't always have to reinvent the wheel when you're creating content.
While there are certain things I do to increase my productivity, the engagement always has to be organic, it always has to be natural.
This leaves you time for the actual engaging with other social media users, or actually creating unique content, which I think are two of the most important things that you obviously cannot automate.
Rediscovering the Value of Social Media for Business - in South Africa - Part 2
00:18:52
Neal recently visited South Africa and was interviewed on South Africa FM. Last week, you heard the first half of that interview. This week, listen in to hear a continuation of the conversation about social media for business, and what it might be like if we could start over with social media. What would we do differently? Would we change our priorities? You’ll also hear more about Neal’s story and how he got to where he is, as well as an entertaining countdown of questions.
Key Highlights
[01:59] Changes In Social Media Platforms
[03:06] Can I Use All Platforms At The Same Time And Effectively?
[04:23] Spray and Pray
[05:02] What Did Mark Zuckerberg Do To Outperform MySpace?
[07:22] What I Do To Help Businesses
[08:32] How I Got Into Digital Marketing
[11:00] The Story Of How I Wrote My First Book
[12:07] Acknowledgements I Have Received
[12:57] South African Digital Market
[14:04] Beat The Clock Questions
Notable Quotes
They need to make sure that you want to stick to it, the information you find is new, it's interesting. And they're really devoted to making sure that happens. So when you leave Facebook to go home, they still kept the Sun Microsystems sign that you actually have to see as you go home to as a reminder, we do not want to become the dinosaur. We always want to be fresh. But the problem is, the demographics are changing.
Every network is different.
I try to help businesses, and it's all about best practices. So we have companies that have succeeded, we have companies that have failed. The problem is that most companies start with a disadvantage.
So there's, there's some cleanup work that's often involved, but it's really about, you know, how do we perfect what we do in social? How do we get how do we do best practices? How do we constantly improve?
But you know, social media is, is an experiment, because the people that use it, how we use it, and the functionality being provided, is always changing. And therefore, we need to manage it like an experiment. So we need to have controls in place. And we need to make sure we need to be measuring and making sure that we're always doing our best.
And that's why don't wait until you're in transition for that you should be building that on a daily basis, and really dig your well before you're thirsty.
I have a very practical way. It's no fluff, practical, rational way of looking at social, which I think a lot of people find refreshing.
I think the businesses have have really become one, they've really found a community in social media, they've served that community, whether it's through unique photos, or videos or content, they've allowed the community to decide on what products that they end up making.
Brands in the past, they created this big wall between consumers and the company. And social media is reall
The Only Constant in Your Career is Change: Learn to Embrace It (Part 1)
00:21:48
Neal provides his advice that he recently gave LinkedIn on career change and learning to adapt to - and thrive on - the constant change that is part of our everyday life.
Key Highlights
[00:57] Career Curveball Series
[04:06] How Life Prepare Us to Run the Bases
[06:29] Planning on Starting My Career in China
[08:35] Nothing Is Static
[09:17] Starting My Career with Sales and Marketing
[11:35] Becoming the China Sales Pioneer
[16:32] Facing A New Reality
Notable Quotes
It gave me a chance to really look back into my past into my entire career, and analyze not the one curveball but the many curveballs and how it has affected the way that I look at social media in the way that I hope you look at social media as well.
The only constant in your career is change, learn to embrace it.
I love to talk about social media as being an experiment. You always need to be doing different things and changing things. Because it's always changing. I think a career is the exact same, but I learned to embrace it.
Life will always throw you curves, just keep fouling them off, the right pitch will come. But when it does, be prepared to run the bases.
The more of that experience and all the varied experiences that we have, the better it prepares us to run the bases.
As my father said, business is really about learning how to communicate with people and learning how to communicate your own ideas to other people from various cultural and historical backgrounds.
When I talk with other people in social media, I tell them or you know, small business owners, entrepreneurs, self employed professionals, like myself, make internal deadlines almost on a quarterly basis and try to stick to them.
Now, hopefully, you'll agree with me that sometimes we go through life so quick, that we forget to take a break, and smell the roses.
Understanding the Compelling Power of the LinkedIn Publishing Platform
00:10:33
My firsthand experience of blogging on LinkedIn - and why and how you can leverage the power of the LinkedIn publishing platform.
Key Highlights
[01:41] How Are We Going to Use LinkedIn Platform
[02:04] LinkedIn's Special Audience
[03:33] Give Your LinkedIn Publishing Post Some TLC
[06:02] LinkedIn Send You Lots of Traffic
[06:31] Treat Your LinkedIn Homepage As Your Website
[07:37] LinkedIn is About Quality
[07:58] How to Get Access to LinkedIn Publishing Platform
Notable Quotes
I'm sure you all are as well, even though it's not always possible, of really sending the right message to the right audience. And LinkedIn really is a special audience.
I realized that, you know, the LinkedIn publishing platform is not worthy of a status update. It is worthy of something deeper.
So it's my belief that if you give your LinkedIn publishing posts, a little bit of TLC, and this goes beyond just you know, publishing content, whether it's unique content, or duplicate content, of giving it a little bit of TLC, and really reserving what you publish on LinkedIn to that platform, and you're not just trying to lead people elsewhere.
But I believe that if you do that, and if your audience is receptive, well, the LinkedIn audience is receptive to what you write, and they send social signals where they like it and they share it, and they comment on it. I do believe that you're going to get some pretty wide exposure for your post case in point.
LinkedIn is its own ecosystem, its own ecosystem that can drive a lot of traffic. It's not going to your blog or your website, it's going to your LinkedIn profile, it's going to your content. But I will tell you, I always say, treat your homepage on LinkedIn as if it was your website. It's almost like your second website for personal branding for professionals that don't have their own website, it is their website.
And therefore, if you don't have a website, it's going to be even easier for you to use LinkedIn as your blogging platform. But that is how powerful it is.
So if you're thinking about just diddling with the LinkedIn blogging platform, and just posting links there and republishing your old content there, I really think you should think twice, and really give the LinkedIn platform, some tender loving care, really craft each post for that audience.
You know, LinkedIn is not a matter of quantity, it's amount of quality.
What is the best away to avoid a social media crisis? Listen to Neal Schaffer's advice and, instead of dwelling on the negative, focus on the positive by generating goodwill and brand advocates through growing a social media following.
Key Highlights
[00:26] Social Media and Crisis Management
[01:10] Examples of Social Media Crises
[01:30] What to Do When Faced With Crisis?
[02:54] The Best Way to Prevent Crisis
[04:24] Another Way to Deal With Crisis
[05:53] Preventing Potential Social Media Crisis by Building Goodwill
[06:59] The Mission of Marketing
Notable Quotes
I think that social media crises are the reason that a lot of companies actually started engaging in social media in the first place.
And I think for every crisis that becomes public, there are a number of crises that have been diffused, because companies have handled them in a very, very efficient and swift way.
The best way to prevent crises which you're never going to be able to prevent every single crisis that happens, because you cannot control the uncontrollable, you cannot predict the future.
It's about proactively engaging and building up a social media following it's building up trust with the public through social media engagement on those channels, where the public is, but most importantly, where your audiences where your customers, your partners, your vendors, and your employees are.
And proactively building goodwill fostering goodwill, because if you have that goodwill, and if you foster the creation of brand advocates, what's going to happen is if there's a crisis, there's going to be a lot of people that are going to stand up for you and it will help I don't know about completely diffused this quote unquote, crisis, but it will definitely help a lot of people on social media come to your site without you even having to say anything.
So if you're actively engaged in and actively monitoring and you're on the frontline, and you see something weird going on, it's a potential emergency situation, you have to be in contact with an emergency team.
I'm a believer that there's always going to be negative people out there. But I also believe that people just want to know that their issues are being heard. And that's why consumers feel empowered with the advent of social media, listening and responding.
Customer Experience Marketing: Why You Must Embrace It to Stand Out as a Business [Dan Gingiss Interview]
00:26:59
Customer experience marketing. It's a buzzword that a lot of people throw out, but what exactly does it mean, how important is it to you business today, and what are the first steps you can take to implementing customer experience marketing the right way?
I could not think of a better person than friend and customer experience marketing expert Dan Gingiss to have on my podcast to answer these questions and more for my listeners.
As Dan explains, customer experience marketing is a vital aspect to both your online and offline business. It also could be the one defining thing that can differentiate your brand from your competitors.
Dan takes us through the correct way to implement customer experience marketing. Listen in and read the show notes below to learn more.
Key Highlights
[00:44] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Dan Gingiss
[04:09] What Dan Realized About Social Marketing
[08:03] Defining Customer Experience
[08:44] 2 Keys of Customer Support
[10:57] Why Customer Experience Is Getting A Buzz Just Now?
[13:00] Customer Experience As The True Differentiator For Brands
[13:21] You Need To Compete With Experience
[13:39] Example Of A Company That Provides Great Customer Experience
[16:33] Creating Emotional Attachment With Your Customers
[17:16] Customer Experience Audit
[22:21] Dan's Advice To Companies
[25:01] Connect With Dan
Notable Quotes
By spending time focusing on providing remarkable experiences, you can get more people talking positively about your brand and start drowning out some of that negativity.
The way that I define customer experience is that it is how people feel about every single interaction they have with a brand.
One of the things that I love to say is that I believe today, there's no such thing as an offline customer experience. Because even things that we used to consider being offline, like say, being on an airplane, well, the guy that was dragged off the airplane, showed us that not everything on an airplane is offline anymore, right? Because it can come online in an instant.
I believe that customer experience is going to become the last true differentiator for brands.
When companies treat their customers well, customers don't mind as much, they don't pay as much attention to a sale down the road that you know, is going to get them a 10% discount to what you're charging them, because they know that you're going to take better care of them.
Creating that emotional attachment is, is probably going to be a great way to generate a positive customer experience.
I'm talking about actually becoming a customer and actually going through the process of whatever it is that your company offers to customers.
The harder thing is creating unique, remarkable new experiences. Different
Want to Improve Your Social Media Marketing? Start with These 6 Ideas
00:13:45
This episode goes into depth on what a pre-sales social media consulting call would look like, and with that six ideas to improve your social media that go above and beyond social media.
Key Highlights
[02:04] Importance of Social Proof
[03:10] What Should You Do to Acquire More Followers?
[03:37] Let's First Work on Your Message
[04:24] People Need to Have A Crystal Clear of What You Do When They View Your Website
[05:18] What I Find In A Lot of Startup Businesses
[05:52] Utilizing Your Employee Through Employee Advocacy Program
[06:50] What is Affiliate Marketing
[08:02] Integrating Affiliate Marketing Into Your Website
[08:42] Step #3: Build Your List
[09:35] Step #4: Blog
[10:07] Leveraging the Visual
[11:08] Paid Social
Notable Quotes
I'd rather have a small army of passionate fans than a large army of crickets.
And you may see success stories of some companies that were lucky in the right place at the right time had that one special person find their content and share it to their million followers. But for 99.99% of us, that really doesn't happen. If it did happen, it would just be too easy.
For me, the social media followers, yeah, you can use social media to help amplify your message. But what is your message, let's first work on that.
And that's why with social media, your websites are more important than ever.
Once again, instead of trying to have you go against the world, you then as part of your program, begin to do a blogger outreach program or influencer marketing campaign where you start to reach out to people and say, hey, you know, I have a product that I think would be genuinely aligned with what you do for a living, would you be interested in it.
But genuinely having people promote your product and sharing the wealth with them. And if they believe in your product, they will do that, right.
All you need is a handful of them in social media that can really help amplify your message in a way that you yourself can't because you're a brand and they're a person, and they already have a loyal following.
How can I leverage the visual to create a magnet, that's going to be not only more engaging with my readers, but also that I can utilize social media to help draw more people to my content to my presence?
I'd rather you complement your organic efforts with a little bit of paid, you know, five bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks on Facebook, can help you generate a certain amount of results that can help complement everything else that you're doing.
The background for and importance of auditing your social media, with a concrete example comparing the Facebook presence of two hotels.
Key Highlights
[01:16] Social Media Audits
[01:45] Creating Baseline Numbers
[02:29] Create a Role Model
[02:52] The Notion of Audit
[04:00] Is It A Good Ideal to Compare Yourself with the Competition?
[04:32] Notion of Social Proof
[04:46] Where the Role of Audit Comes In
[06:01] Looking at the Organic Growth Rate
[08:01] Number of Like Is Meaningless
[08:30] Getting A Sense of the Engagement
[10:56] 2 Easy Things You Can Do to Audit Notable Quotes
So part of this feeds into the fact that you have to have a plan, you have to have a social media strategy, you have to be measuring, you have to be optimizing, that's a no brainer. But part of that social media strategy is creating baseline numbers of how others in your industry are doing.
But if there's a new platform that you're not familiar with, your company is just engaging and if you think it may be important for your social media strategy, how are you going to get started, create a role model, right?
Look at other companies in your industry, or similar industries that have seemingly done well, it's always hard to know if a company is doing well or not in social media. Because the number of likes the number of views is meaningless. It comes down to are they meeting their business objectives, and that information is not for public consumption, obviously.
And the audit actually helps you create your social media strategy. It helps you create baseline metrics.
But you know, number of likes in itself is not the only metric. I don't even know how meaningful of a metric it is. But once again, with social proof, I guess there is some value to it.
Now, number of likes is meaningless. We're not going to buy likes, obviously, we're going to target our target audience.
We want to keep our brands fresh in the minds of our fans.
So I'm hoping that this gets you thinking about your own brand, or the brand that you represent, or sell to, or service or what have you. And that it gets you into a habit of doesn't have to be all the time, maybe monthly basis, maybe quarterly basis. Look around and see what your competition is doing. Create some of these baseline metrics for the few of the platforms.
Want to Excel at Social Media Marketing? You Need to be an Active Consumer of Social Media First
00:22:27
For whatever social media channel you want to become proficient at, STOP listening to this podcast and START becoming a user of the channel! As marketers, we sometimes look for new social networks or content mediums to utilize for marketing, but instead of reading blogs or listening to what advice others give us, becoming actual users and consumers of the content on those platforms or of those mediums is probably the single most important thing you can do at the beginning to get better at them.
This episode #140 was inspired by my own podcast and the confession that I personally wasn't a consumer of podcasts yet was a podcast creator. While the positive thing is that I might not have been influenced by other podcasters and thus my podcast might be unique, it also means that I failed to grasp the importance of certain things about my podcast or the needs of podcast audiences.
As mentioned in the intro, if you haven't subscribed to my newsletter, please do so by going to my website and entering you email address on the sidebar widget or the one at the bottom of each page: https://nealschaffer.com
Key Highlights
[03:51] Batching And Repurposing Content
[06:28] The Thing About Podcasting
[07:16] Media Consumption Difference With Every Generation
[10:12] Blogs As Part Of SEO
[10:49] Top 3 Areas I Generate Traffic To My Website
[13:10] An Ineffective Way Of Using Social Media
[14:11] Why People Are In Social Media?
[16:55] The Power Of Podcasting That I Realized
[17:51] What Podcasting Gives Me
[19:40] Be Part Of The Network You Want To Monetize
[20:02] How To Go Deep Into A Platform
Notable Quotes
Blogs, from my perspective, be part of its brandy. But part of its SEO, right. It's like posting a bad photo on Instagram, and it's going to kill your engagement. Bad blog content is going to kill your relationship with Google as well.
You got to be in the platform to know what works, that we repeat that you have to be an active user, you have to want to use the social network and use it on a daily basis and engage in a daily basis and become part of the community if you want it to work for your business.
So you got to be part of the network. And once you're part of the network, and you're actually engaging with people, like you care, you don't see them as $1 sign, because you truly want to help them. Because you know, you can help them better than anyone else, you know that by investing in you, and you're investing in them, they're gonna get tremendous ROI.
For me, the podcast gives me the opportunity to learn from them to get to know them better to be influenced by those I want to be influenced by. And now I'm getting back to thinking you know, all those people who just interview other people, that's why they're doing it, there's nothing wrong with tha
The Importance of Consistency (and How It Relates to Paid Social) in Social Media
00:14:01
Building a brand in social does not happen overnight. Learn about just how important consistency in your social media efforts are and how to use paid social to help accelerate it.
Key Highlights
[01:10] Importance of Consistency in Social Media
[03:33] Other Things You Should Be Consistent About
[04:52] The More Recognition, The More Credibility
[05:35] Accelerating Our Efforts in Social
[06:40] Consistency Supplemented with Paid Social
[06:47] The Wrong Way of Using Paid Social
[07:47] The Best Way to Use Paid Social
[08:27] Success Doesn't Happen Overnight
[09:30] Do Not Buy Fake Followers
Notable Quotes
For normal businesses and brands that are not part of you know, the fortune 50 or consumer vocabulary, it takes time. And it not only takes time, but it's consistency.
See public communities have hundreds of millions of users out there. And once you engage in a relationship with them.
And if you just sit there and talk to yourself, other people may hear you. But when you actually tap on people's shoulders by following them and sending them a social signal, or maybe favoriting, a tweet that really resonated with your content, strategy, whatever it might be, it's the consistent sending of those things, and engaging, that builds up, others engaging with you over time, and it is what I would consider a tumbleweed effect.
Because the bigger that you become others that are looking for sources for content creation, whether it be on Twitter, on Pinterest, or Google Plus, people tend to be attracted or businesses tend to be attracted to those that I refer to as maximize your social are the role models that you want to emulate.
The more that you get recognized, the more credibility you have.
But what I'm trying to say is that consistency, supplementing in the right way with paid social can really help you.
0ut because you lose credibility, and you get clicks when you pay for clicks that don't resonate in the likes or follows.
And people think more followers equals more social proof.
LinkedIn Publishing Platform Tips: Should I Republish My Blog Content on LinkedIn?
00:12:48
Now that you see the value in publishing on LinkedIn, should you simply republish your blog's content on LinkedIn? Or ... ? Neal responds to the question point-blank with advice to help you better understand, leverage, and maximize your LinkedIn content marketing.
Key Highlights
[01:07] Should You Publish the Same Content On LinkedIn As You Do On Your Website?
[02:09] Why Numbers Are Important
[03:23] The Potential of LinkedIn
[04:42] Where Thought Leadership Begins
[06:00] How You Can Replicate Your Content
[07:00] Why Copy-Pasting Is Not A Good Idea
[07:57] The Danger of Publishing Everything On Your Linkedin
[08:30] Customize Your Content for Each Platform!
[10:48] What You Should Be Thinking When Creating Content Marketing on LinkedIn
[11:34] Join My Facebook Group!
Notable Quotes
And the numbers are important, because when you do the analysis of blog posts for your own website, how many views are you getting?
With LinkedIn, you have a very, very lucrative demographic that may find you as well. It's a demographic of decision makers. It's a very, very well defined demographic versus what you have online, which could be a lot of different things.
That's really where thought leadership begins. It begins with people. It's about human interaction.
So I think that it's a great strategy, that you create content specific for the LinkedIn audience, on the LinkedIn publishing platform, if you're able to different shape that content with more general content on your blog that is less targeted towards a lucrative demographic of business decision makers and more targeted to a general online audience of those who may find you through search, you can start to see how you can, you know, leverage segmentation of your content, so that you're really you know, publishing the right content for the right platform.
I think the danger of publishing everything on your blog, again, on your LinkedIn profiles, you could actually be losing traffic to your LinkedIn profile, we all know the conversion is going to happen on your website, not your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn profile should be an additional and augmentive channel for your content marketing for your social media marketing.
And I don't think that content is as easy it just slicing and dicing it, you really need to customize it for each platform. And there are areas in which you may need to create unique things for each platform.
With the LinkedIn Pulse publishing platform, I think it is a similar approach of creating unique content for that community, which showcases the thought leadership of your company through your employees, and making it very specific to the community there.
So when you think of content marketing on LinkedIn, think LinkedIn Pulse, and think employee advocacy. Instead of thinking, should I just copy my blog posts and
Employee Advocacy, Social Selling, and The Missing Alignment Between Sales and Marketing
00:22:59
What is the relationship between social selling and employee advocacy? Neal goes deep into describing the evolution of social business and how it is bringing sales and marketing together with the emergence of these new trends, together with practical advice on how to align your sales and marketing departments for social selling success.
Key Highlights
[01:01] Different Types of Convergence of Trends
[04:19] The Evolution of Social Media
[05:41] What We See Now
[06:01] Where Employee Advocacy Began
[07:02] How Should We Use Employee Advocacy
[08:13] Sales Methodologies
[09:11] What Happens in Sales Trading
[12:26] One of the Things I Learned About Sales and Marketing
[14:53] Everything Needs to Be Crafted
Notable Quotes
I always talk about community managers being like the ultimate quarterbacks in your organization, having to strategize where to throw the ball, do I hand it off?
And, and now what we see as more and more professionals are using social media, and we're all probably using it a little bit more professionally than we did a year or two ago. And with more internal departments using it, there's obviously a lot more collaboration that happens naturally. And I do believe part of that natural collaboration is a collaboration between sales and marketing.
If we're going to do employee advocacy, we can't force people to use social media, we want to be able to work together with those internally that are number one fans of our company, ideally, but number two, that already on social media that would naturally see the benefits the value in sharing our messages to the world because it enhances their personal branding, it makes them look like an expert, or what have you.
The recommendation for social selling is that you want to be sharing content, ideally, you know, part of the content is coming from your own company.
Marketing now has to deliver content. And it's, you know, the alignment is just not about social selling is about employee advocacy in general. You want to create content that others in your organization want to share, because it helps them look better, whatever it might be, whatever reason they're in for doing it.
Everything needs to be crafted, as if it was an art because your employees branding are all on the line and I'm hoping that those in marketing are opening up to that and taking a lot more serious look at the messages they make for employee advocacy, over those general marketing messages that your general outward facing marketing messages that you have.
Social Business: A New Definition. Let me explain my perspective on the evolution from social media as an independent form of media to how it might impact your business, and thus what social business means to your company.
Key Highlights
[00:23] Social Business Defined
[01:12] The Traditional Definition of Social Business
[01:43] My Definition of Social Business
[02:00] How I Began My Social Business
[02:43] What I Provide Companies That Need To Be Consulted
[04:04] One of My First Clients
[04:34] My AHA Moment
[06:07] Think Outside The Box
Notable Quotes
In essence, I realized that companies needed to be consulted, and I needed to provide them the following two things. Number one is strategy, and number two is education.
Education really starts at the top with the executive team and working our way down, I needed to make sure that my clients were up to speed as quickly as possible as to what was possible on social media. What were the best practices? In other words, how can I best replicate my knowledge and really give them a customized brain dump for their own situation?
At the end of the day, what are the sales, what's the profit, but in addition to sales, you got to do the marketing, you got to hire people, customer service, legal issues, administrative issues, it all falls on your responsibility. And that is the experience that if you really want to be a social business consultant, that's the experience you need. And the reason is, as social media permeates industry, it also permeates corporate discipline.
What I would add to the definition is social media began as really an outbound focus, either by marketing and or public relations, to engage with others. But it was primarily a one way broadcast. And we all know that social media is to a communication.
The more engagement that brands and businesses do with social media users, the more feedback they get.
And now I would say my definition of social business would be it's not just the outbound, and it's not just receiving the feedback, but it's actually the input of that feedback into everything your business does.
What I've Learned in Building a New Social Media Community
00:21:27
Neal talks about the launch of his new Social Media Center of Excellence Facebook Group and what he has learned building a new community in social media - and how you can leverage Neal's experience.
Key Highlights
[02:14] My Own Facebook Group
[02:41] What to Expect When You Join My Facebook Group
[04:24] How Started My Group
[05:42] Deciding On Who You Opt-In Your Group
[06:13] How to Get More Followers and Engagement?
[06:45] "Cross-Pollination"
[07:19] Your Group Should Serve Utilitarian Purpose
[08:59] Utilitarian Part of a Facebook Group
[11:10] The Advantage of Engagement on Facebook
[11:58] The Other Side of the Equation: Engagement
[13:02] The Challenge on Engagement
[13:21] The First Thing I Do Whenever We Have a New Group Member
[14:09] Create Rules!
[14:54] Have A Combination
Notable Quotes
Now, obviously, numbers are not everything. It's more about quality versus quantity. I want the right people into the group.
So who would you opt in? Right I'm totally against opting people and I think it goes against a lot of well basic principles of etiquette and of of online social networking, and social media principles.
But also, once you opt them in once they go to the group, you need to have a clear visual clear rules, posting rules, a clear about section, and you need to tell them, hey, you know, if you're offended, please opt out, you have already expressed interest in that's why you're here.
And how do you get more engagement, it's the same themes over and over and over. And there's no one golden rule, because every community is going to be filled with different people with a different objective. It's the whole social media is half science, half art. This is sort of the science, but you all need to be the artist, because we're dealing with people here, and everybody is different, right?
But really, your group, or your community should serve utilitarian purpose. And I think a lot of brands businesses don't really have that utilitarian purpose, because they're looking at purely as a marketing objective.
But you need to have a utilitarian view that it just becomes natural to push people there, right.
So it really is a great place, like I said, engage where people are. And the beautiful thing about this engagement is that EdgeRank actually works in your favor, if groups are getting more of a drink than pages are you can imagine.
The objective of a group is to get actual discussion from people, and not just comments on what you write her answers to your questions, but you want them to submit their own questions.
And I want people to know that we're going to be very focused and I want them to value it. I want them to I want my group to attain mindshare for what it is versus competing groups wherever they may be in social media.
Benchmarking Your Website for Social Media, SEO & Mobile
00:12:53
Neal provides a great resource to allow you to benchmark how well you are Maximizing Your Social, SEO and mobile aspects of your own website.
Key Highlights
[00:27] Benchmarking Your Website's SEO
[02:36] Analyzing Some Data Set
[03:00] Data You Should Be Considering
[03:50] Hummingbird and What Company Should Do
[06:40] SEO Mobile
[06:50] Mobile SEO Statistics
[08:21] Why LinkedIn Is Significant
[10:27] Always Have A Link to Your Socials in Your Website
Notable Quotes
And it's very interesting, the more and those of you that are involved in SEO, or even do website development and get access to web analytics, it's very interesting to see obviously, the differences between those companies that are very active in social and not as well as those companies that seem to do better at SEO than other companies. And I'm really looking for a barometer a benchmark, so that you can compare yourself and see where you may need to be improving things.
But, you know, what I said was, you know, what Google giveth, Google also taketh away. It's an algorithm that's constantly changing, they make mistakes, and they, you know, remedy them in future updates. I know that I have seen some effects from hummingbird as well. And you know, what, you you live with it, and you try to improve everything that you're doing, and especially just creating more unique and great content, right.
I also think that at some point that search engine traffic should convert she you should be getting some more direct traffic. At some point that search engine traffic should convert so that you're getting more backlinks. And if you're getting a heck of a lot of search engine traffic, knowing that it's never any guarantee, you're going to continue to get that I'd really work on those two things.
I don't think that these are good barometers per se, I really think it's going to be different depending on your industry. But I think they're good numbers to consider that LinkedIn indeed, can generate a lot of traffic, but you need to be newsworthy, I think in order to generate that traffic from LinkedIn.
Other than that, you know, you really should have a link to your main social media property somewhere on your website, whether it's above the fold below the fold is a whole different story.
So if you've linked social media profiles to your corporate page, congratulations, you're ahead of two thirds of these companies that were being looked at in this specific report.
You know, whenever I find data like this, I think provides good benchmarking data for you to compare yourself with and for you to include as part of your you know, your KPIs, or your metrics for analyzing both your social media and your entire digital presence.
Wake Up Call: It's Time for Social Media Marketing 2.0
00:22:37
16 days. 6 countries. 2 continents. After a business trip around the world, I pondered what role businesses should play in social media. And then it dawned on me: Social media marketing has been going on for ten years, but brands on average still suck at it. Should businesses keep trying to do the same thing? Or is it time for a next generation, new approach to social media marketing that takes into account the fact that we are now entering our second decade of implementing organic social? Listen on for the conclusion that I have and the advice for you to completely blow up and reconstruct your social media marketing efforts to be more effective in 2019 and beyond.
Key Highlights
[00:49] It's Time For Second Generation Strategies
[03:41] Why Influencer Marketing Is Ahead In Southeast Asia And China
[04:42] How Influential Influencers Are In China And Southeast Asia
[06:03] Brands Moving More Into Paid Social
[06:40] Do Consumers Want To Talk To Brands On Social Media?
[08:28] Influencers Are The Best Content Creators
[10:44] How Most Businesses Started Out
[11:53] Inciting Word Of Mouth
[12:47] Marketers Are Miseducated On Influencer Marketing
[13:38] Redefining Influencer Marketing
[17:07] Invest In Relationship With People
Notable Quotes
I think that businesses really understand the influence that these people have in that part of the world.
We've been doing social media marketing for a decade now. And I think we need to come to the realization, and I keep saying it, but it bears reminding that social media was made for people, not for businesses, right? Businesses really shouldn't be in social media. But I don't think that people want to have conversations with brands in social media, unless they're gonna complain, perhaps if they have a question.
That's what social media is about, is about building relationships with people.
Many businesses started out word of mouth, happy customers, successful customers, they told their friends, and so on. But what's important here is that I applaud falcon.io Because one of the keywords in Spark, that digital marketing conference I spoke at was how going forward? Do we incite conversations that connect? And I think that's what it's about, right? It's about leveraging our customers who 10 years ago, we're not on social media, but they're on social media. Now, it's about spreading word of mouth through social media.
So if business is about word of mouth marketing, and social media should have been about word of mouth marketing, the only way to incite word of mouth marketing is not from the declining reach of your organic posts, nor is it about your advertisements. It's about leveraging people.
What's important is that we need to redefine and the business of influence is going to be all about redefining it. And I think that employee advocacy is
From Windmill Networking to Maximize Social Business
00:10:24
What is the value of guest blog posts on your website? Learn about the history of Windmill Networking along with advice on what type of content you should try to source for your website blog.
Key Highlights
[01:07] Moving From Windmill Networking to Maximize Social Business
[01:29] How I Started Windmill Networking
[03:43] From Personal Blog to Collaborative Blog
[04:18] What I Realized with Guest Blogging
[06:13] The Story of the Term Maximize Your Social
[07:05] The Bigger Benefits of the Switch
[07:17] My Advice
[08:05] The Key Thing on Contributing Notable Quotes
Really, the Concept of windmill networking came about when I was in the shower, in all honesty, and I write about this, I think in the preface of the book, of trying to find a visual concept, if we are windmills and we plug ourselves into this grid, that is social media, we can receive and share energy 24/7 worldwide, something that, you know, maybe something trivial to us could be a godsend to someone else.
And that's really, you know, my base for helping businesses promote social media comes down to that concept that when you are engaging in social media as a brand, it really comes down to those people.
You know, the branding from a business perspective was never any good.
Blogs want to invite guests to blog so that they have access to content and people who want to move their way up in the chain, or in the blogosphere echo system want to be seen on blogs that offer bigger platforms that they have.
But I realized, as I was doing this, and I've written about this, it was almost like a one night stand, people would come contribute a blog post, and that was it. It offered temporary value to my readers, but it didn't really offer any lasting value.
And I realized that because of that, I needed to create a new website that really strips the brand name from my personal brand, it wasn't fair to the other contributors, that yes, they do get value from the platform, but the platform still is tied directly to my personal brand.
But it's completely taking my personal brand, any potential ego that I have, out of the play, insane, subscribe to us read our content for the content. And I think it showcases more of the actual authors of each content, because if you go to share it on social media.
If you have a company blog, you want to bring out the voices of those in your company, I want to have an advisor that is blogging on my site for any industry or any discipline that a potential company might have a problem in. And that's really the core concept.
But I believe with Google authorship and the trends I see out there for content marketing, and Gary Vaynerchuk, now tripling down on content, although there's some debate about that, if you read what Scott Mani said, but it leads to a very, very interesting question as to At what point
How can a B2B company find success in a social network like Pinterest? Find out how and learn some new tips, tricks, and concepts to help you Maximize Your Social in this episode.
Key Highlights
[01:11] What is Pinterest Myth?
[01:27] Why Pinterest?
[05:35] Pinterest Statistics
[06:51] What I Like About The New Pinterest Analytics
[08:34] Looking at Demographics
[11:25] Top 6 Interests of Females in Pinterest
[12:40] Other Pinterest Analytics Feature
[15:43] Social Media Marketing World
Notable Quotes
So you know, when we talk about social media, one of the things is yes, we want to engage with people, we want to engage with influencers, we want to engage with brand advocates, with potential customers in social media. But we also want to bring them back to our website.
And it's really bringing all this together in your mind or on a dashboard, thinking holistically as to where am I going to invest my time and I do this on a weekly basis, right?
Businesses, do business with other businesses, but it's really people inside those businesses doing business with people inside the other business, right.
So if you think about it that way, Pinterest, regardless of the demographic or what people post a lot of is very you know, relevant to I think every business out there.
So that was really an aha moment that there are enough people interested in social media for what I do to be able to generate interest
It sounds like a lot of work, it doesn't have to be you need to come down, you need to create a routine out of all this, and pick and choose the data that you're going to use, and pick and choose how you use it and make a process out of it.
LinkedIn for Students: What Do I Put in My LinkedIn Profile if I am a College Student?
00:27:35
How do you advertise your profile amongst so many professionals while you are still only a college student? And what might professionals learn about their own LinkedIn profile optimization from my advice to college students? Listen on for the details!
Key Highlights
[01:10] What is LinkedIn?
[02:37] LinkedIn Vs Other Social Media Platform
[03:30] Why LinkedIn Profile Is Important
[04:50] Deciding On A Path That You Will Represent On LinkedIn
[05:40] What To Put On Your LinkedIn Profile
[07:06] Navigating LinkedIn
[09:50] What Profile Photo To Use
[11:31] Professional Headline Summary
[13:16] Doing Searches For Other Professionals/Students In LinkedIn
[13:30] LinkedIn Groups
[14:20] About Section
[16:19] Summary Section
[19:36] Work Experience Section
[21:04] Adding Volunteer Experience, Certifications, and Lincenses
[22:08] Recommendation Requests
[23:50] What To Put In Industry
[24:22] Why You Need To Include Your Location
[25:16] Summary
Notable Quotes
LinkedIn is where decision makers are right? People that are executives in businesses that are leaders in their field, professionals in general, I think that LinkedIn says that three quarters of all working professionals are on LinkedIn, and older people, haha, compared to Gen Z, older people treat LinkedIn differently as well.
LinkedIn gives you the ability to enter an incredible amount of information about yourself. And it is really, really important that even as a college student who may not have a lot of professional information, you need to completely fill it out the best you can.
The important thing here is that if you're in college, you need to decide on a path that is going to best represent you on LinkedIn.
I highly recommend you use something because that is going to be when people come to your profile, the number one thing that they see below that now we have your own image, your own photo, this should be as professional as possible.
You definitely want to make a great first impression on LinkedIn like everywhere else. And that first impression is going to come out through that photo of you in addition to that cover photo.
If you're ever wondering about, you know, what is the best way to do this, there's no one wrong or right answer. It's all sort of a gray zone that really comes down to you and your personal branding and the unique people that you're trying to attract.
Part of branding, is talking about your strengths and your experiences. The other part is how you are differentiated than other people.
So once again, those things that especially tie into what you want to do, even if it was a few weeks sort of internship, I highly recommend you put it in here, it's going to gain you more visibility in LinkedIn, it's also going to give you mor
Are you providing true value and building a relationship with your email subscribers? If not, it's time to do a hard reset with this advice from Neal Schaffer.
Key Highlights
[02:27] My Advice on Email
[03:17] Why Email Marketing Is Still Critical
[03:29] Why You Need to be on Multiple Social Media Platforms
[03:57] Build Your List
[05:01] The Other Thing You Should Be Doing
[06:35] Getting to the Core of Your Email Marketing
[06:57] Never Buy List from Third Party
[08:50] Go Big or Go Home Approach
[10:08] What Is Something Unique to Maximize Your Social Business?
Notable Quotes
As you know, social media permeates everything, it it becomes part of what companies naturally do, it becomes part of their infrastructure. Social is being used, regardless of industry, regardless of department.
And my advice really is I really, after you listen to this podcast, I want you to do a hard reset, and alt control, delete on what you've been doing an email and I want to share with you what I've been doing an email.
What I learned that and I talked about this in the podcast was that email is like any other form of relationship building.
First of all, well, let's first understand that email marketing is still critical that even with social media, people are not on social media all the time.
You know, I think a lot of content marketing efforts, people forget about those downloadable resources that can help lead people into your marketing funnel, and they concentrate on blog posts and social media posts.
If you don't have a process for it, you have nothing.
And I want my newsletter to become one of those newsletters, something truly incredible that people will be waiting for.
If you're looking to bootstrap this, to help you really create a compelling email newsletter. So don't just send out email newsletters because you have a list. And don't send them out weekly, because you feel you have to, I want you to do a reset. And I want you to really think about what value is that newsletter providing to your subscribers, not to you as a business, but to your subscribers.
Rediscovering the Value of Social Media for Business - in South Africa - Part 1
00:19:57
Neal is back! You’ve heard him talk about keeping it real in your social and your content, and he wants to keep it real. Neal’s goal is always to do this podcast regularly, but everyone’s busy! Since the last podcast, he’s traveled a lot, successfully launched the second Social Tools Summit in San Francisco in October, and spoken at a conference in South Africa. This episode is part one of a radio interview he did while he was there, and focuses on the value of social media and taking a step back and looking at the big picture.
Key Highlights
[04:44] Introduction
[05:26] Why Business To Be Made From Going Social
[06:27] How I Help Businesses
[07:18] How Small Businesses Can Use Social To Grow Their Businesses
[08:07] The Essence of Social Media
[08:32] How to Start Using Social Media for Business
[10:39] Social Media As A New Channel
[12:38] How To Balance Social Media With Voice of the Company
[13:17] The Advent of Employee Advocacy
[14:06] Tomorrow's Talk
[15:27] How Much Time Should You Allocate To Social Media?
[17:56] Coming Down To Your Objectives
Notable Quotes
Social media has become a major communication channel. But now social media, you have a website and digital, you have TV, radio, and you have social companies investing a lot more in it, because it is the public voice, you have the ability to reach out on a one to many scale that you just couldn't do until now.
Social is not for business, it's for people.
Everybody that's online, is basically using social media. And there are ways for us to engage with them on a one on one basis.
Well, it starts with, like I said, understanding who your customer is, are they even using social media.
And that's really where you start at the basic you need to be, you know, everybody knows the media, you need to be publishing content, because that's how you engage in social media. But you also want to be reaching out to people.
And I like to say social media replaces nothing but compliments everything, right? So it's, it's a new tool, but the old rules of business are still in place.
But now social media is a new channel, and more and more people are using it. So it's going to be important to keep an eye on and understand how you can use it and to help complement whatever else you do.
Companies need to humanize the brand they need to talk like regular people do. And if they're not offering some sort of resource, some sort of utility, some sort of information that's useful to others, people will tune them out.
Social is not, you know, it's a channel you do not want to sell on, it's the channel you want to have a conversation on and engage with others and really build community from
This is where it comes down to your objective, your objective is going to be different than that small business ow
Influencer Marketing for Even the Smallest of Businesses
00:34:04
If you think influencer marketing is just about famous consumer brands spending lots of money to have YouTubers and Instagrammers talk about them, you are far from the truth! Discover how any business in any industry can and should leverage influencers in this episode #142. Learn more about my upcoming book on influencer marketing, The Age of Influence, at https://nealschaffer.com/ageofinfluence.
Key Highlights
[01:36] Can Small Businesses Leverage Influencers?
[03:47] Send Me Questions!
[05:40] Believe in Influencer Marketing
[07:00] Influencer Marketing As An Extension of Celebrity Endorsement
[08:12] Two Ways of Collaboration
[09:42] Knowing the Voices of the Community
[11:11] How to Find the Right People
[14:10] HowTo Become An Influencer?
[16:09] Go Broader with Your Keyword Research
[17:02] The #1 Mistake Small Businesses Make When Reaching Out to Influencers
[18:06] "10-Person Rule"
[20:20] Ways to Categorize Influencers
[22:24] Have A Pool of Influencers
[22:56] Assess Your Pitch
[24:50] The Ideal Way of Reaching Out to Influencers
[26:51] Developing the Relationship
Notable Quotes
Social media algorithms are controlled or managed by supply and demand.
Regardless of how big or small your company is, it really comes down to who are the voices in the community that can help push your product forward in terms of it becoming aware by a new audience that doesn't know you or maybe an existing audience that you want them to get to know you better. This is a universal concept regardless of the size of your business that you should be talking about.
So who is talking about you, or about your competitors or about product names, and from there, you're going to begin to build a list of people that might be influential, you don't just want to look at follower count, you want to look at actually how many people are engaging with that content.
I think it's natural that marketers who get involved in the space want to become more influential.
So at the end of the day, you need to understand the concept of influence and it's really going to help you in your influencer marketing as you become more influential.
It's really about finding a comfortable follower range. Right now, followers alone are not everything, they need to have a certain amount of engagement.
Start small, right? Start with people that actually have less global influence, but still have great influence in their niche.
There are a lot of things you can offer influencers and influencers are only asking for money. That's where I sort of think of that as a red flag, because not every influencer is in it for the money. And if they are only in it for the money, it's more of a business to them. And
Happy new year and welcome to the first solo episode of 2016. I've been thinking a lot about skills of the best social media marketers, and what I should be focusing on this year. The answer is focus: social media marketers wear lots of hats, and the only way to maintain a strategic approach is the ability to focus and keep on track. Listen in to hear how I keep focused, and why focusing on your business objective is crucial to your success.
Key Highlights
[02:19] Focus, Focus, Focus!
[03:41] Create More Vidoe Content
[04:10] The Way I Focus
[05:22] "Big Content"
[05:57] "Other Content"
[06:18] Optimizing My Tools
[06:54] Idea Of Monetizing
[09:03] You Need A Product Or Service
[09:53] Becoming An Influencer Or Brand Advocate
[11:55] Influencer Platforms Examples
[13:29] Launch New Brand
[15:36] Social Media Is About Having An Objective
[16:46] Performing Audits On Your Social Media
Notable Quotes
As social media marketer, we wear a lot of hats, right? Whether it's content creation, engagement, listening, campaign planning, or analyzing the best social media marketers need to wear many hats across many social networks. And the only way to maintain a strategical approach amongst this whirlwind of never ending activity, that is social media, is the ability to focus and keep on track, ensuring that tactical objectives are implemented, and social media activities are strategically aligned. It's one habit, which truly separates the best from the rest.
Social media replaces nothing, but compliments everything.
Just getting lots of followers like a vanity metric, right? It has no business value.
Just because someone likes your company doesn't mean that they have opted into your email or even considering buying from you. They can like you for a lot of different reasons, right? But without a product, there's no business there's influence but it has no power.
The followers give you the credibility, but you need to be able to deliver on the cliques. And if you're on a social network, where you're just unsure as to what sort of clicks you're getting. That's a black hole.
So the bigger the community, the morbidity, you have to cross promote, and therefore the more ability you have to launch new brands, or new offerings from scratch, and I think that's really the exciting thing here is if you can find a product or a service that you can either create or partner with But someone that has a lot of business value to your community, probably in there, you might be able to find another niche or something complementary, where you can branch off.
At the end of the day, right, social media is about having an objective, and it has to be a business objective, and therefore you have to have a business. So that's only a question you can answer.
Yes, There IS a Need for a Social Media Marketing MBA
00:08:19
Is there a need for a social media marketing MBA? Let me describe to you my conceptual approach to social media education - and why there is an ever-growing need for a social media marketing or even socal business MBA.
Key Highlights
[00:22] The Concept of Social Media MBA
[00:54] The First Thing People Tell Me
[02:02] The Core Concepts That Are Not Platform Dependent
[03:12] The Notion of Insourcing Your PR
[04:00] The Relevance of Insourcing Blog Content
[05:19] How You Can Best Leverage Social Media
[05:43] Is There A Need for Social Media MBA?
Notable Quotes
It's not rocket science. If you work enough, with the platform's you're pretty internet savvy, you can figure out a lot of the stuff yourself true. Taking these classes can give you a quicker time to market.
You may learn a few tips and tricks, but it doesn't come down to the mechanics of the car, it comes down to where you can drive that car would probably be the best way to put it. And it comes down to concepts that you can use, you know, the module that I teach is called social media platforms or applied social media.
Obviously, social media is here to stay. And it's about the concepts of how you exploit the opportunity at hand for your business, and really, you know, maximizing social business.
And I really love that term, because the employees that accompany are your biggest brand advocates that companies usually forget about in their social media.
And when you think of the need to create content, and to have people actually engage with others in social media, the immediate knee jerk reaction for a lot of companies is to immediately go the agency route, I obviously think it's going to be much more effective if you INSOURCE in sourcing employees who maybe can share the burden in sourcing employees who can create great content for your blog, or who can shoot videos when they're out in the field?
Got Good Social Media Marketing Apps? [Ian Cleary of Razor Social Interview]
00:09:36
Ian Clearly of Razor Social joins us for a look at the best social media marketing apps for social media management, monitoring, and automation.
Key Highlights
[00:30] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Ian Cleary
[01:22] Defining Different Categories of Apps That Social Media Marketers Can Use
[02:09] Ian's Recommended Platforms
[02:55] Special Features of Nimble
[03:54] Monitoring Tools
[05:08] Recommended Automation Tools
[06:13] The Advantages of Zapier
[08:17] Connect With Ian
[08:32] Final Thoughts
Notable Quotes
I suppose the a lot of it puts in is in the management section. So pure management tools for managing social media. And then like you say, there's the monitoring site for monitoring activity related to social media, and so on, as we talked about, then some automation tools for automating some tasks within social media could be within management or outside of management.
Basically, picking the people that you want to engage with in social whether you're trying to develop new business or new partnerships. So you want to engage the quote unquote, influencers, and really using nimble as a CRM like a Salesforce to really put down your targets your you know, where they are in the pipeline.
They have a different set of rules that you can apply. So there's some of the functionality is quite similar, and others is new functionality that's not provided, but I have TT. Another advantage to Zapier is that if the automation is not available, you can build that automation so you can further develop Zapier yourself. So as a business organization, you can basically do a lot more with Zapier.
It's very good to pick it up content for you. And having the content ready available for you to share really quickly.
So I think the future of social media marketing management tools will be on a mobile device so people will move to using on a mobile device glider is a really interesting application where it provides really nice templates that you can use and update and send out your these nice graphical images out onto Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and everything very easily.
Don't overdo the tools, we give them section tools there, pick the ones that are most relevant to your business, and get it working for one tool properly before you start adding in additional ones.
Social media is beginning to be taught in universities as a core skill that students will need in the business world. Neal Schaffer interviews two professors at NOVA Southeastern University, Jim Barry and John Gironda, on how they got started with their program, what they teach, and the challenges that they and their students face.
Key Highlights
[02:11] Introduction of Podcast Guests
[03:27] How Jim Started in Teaching Social Media Marketing
[05:02] Why You Should Have Courses in Social Media?
[07:03] Why Students Take Courses on Social Media
[08:45] Areas You Can Get Expert On with Social Media Education
[09:55] Hudson Institute for Executive Training
[11:03] The Most Challenging Things for Students to Grasp
[12:53] The Hardest to Teach About Social Media
[14:29] Practical Business Application
[15:05] You Have to Walk the Talk
[15:23] Connect with John and Jimmy Notable Quotes
I would say that starts with it's, it's changed the framework for marketing. And it's a different mindset.
I would start with the transmitted transmission we're making from outbound to inbound marketing, and the role of content in place of cold calling. So starting with it, just conceptually, I think that becomes more important than changing platform.
I think social media marketing is one way to do that to show a tangible field that's growing and popular. And it gives them a chance that no matter what field they go into, I think you've you mentioned that earlier, as we were talking before we started recording no matter what field, you're in having social media expertise can only enhance your marketability.
I think as far as the individual platforms that are changing, we've seen that recently, of more platforms becoming more and more popular, and other ones maybe losing popularity, it's still important to look at some sort of universal need, or universal themes that that consumers are engaging in. So it's still important, it's still very worthwhile to teach courses on social media marketing, because I don't think in general the field is it's still going to be around.
It almost lies in the fact that students don't realize how much work actually goes into the social media marketing itself. Do you think of the actual the perspiration, we call it, where the legwork that you have to put into it and continually updating your content and be and having fresh content that you kind of just want to, you know, do it once and then walk away and not touch it again.
It's difficult to get students to understand how platform works without purpose.
So the challenge a lot of times is like, what do you roll out first. And we finally I think we nailed it with you kind of give them a high level overview, a very advanced information that you see over time, you're gonna get a more enriched understanding, taken out of conte
A blog post recently published on TechCrunch claims that Google Plus is dying. Neal Schaffer analyzes the facts behind the article, the evolution of social media, and yields some insight on the least understood social network today: Google Plus.
Key Highlights
[01:30] The Concept of Google Plus
[03:16] What Will Happen If You Miss Out on Plus
[04:32] What Makes Google Plus Different Than Other Social Network
[05:26] The Other Important Thing About Google Plus
[06:00] Thing that People Misunderstood About Google Plus
[06:15] How to Begin Social Layer
[07:19] What I Think is Happening in Google Plus
[08:06] Why Have Doubt in Google Plus?
[08:58] The Only Way of Determining ROI
Notable Quotes
And in all honesty, I believe that this is questionable this post as to, is it good journalism or not, because if you're going to have a scoop, and you're going to provide analysis, and you're telling people, we have multiple sources that this is happening, you got to know a lot about the product, you got to know a lot about the industry. And you, you really have to understand that unless you can tell us some convincing data.
I always include his quote when I talk about Google Plus to explain just how misunderstood Google Plus is, because Google Plus is both a community and what Google calls a social layer.
But the other important thing about Google pluses, it is this concept, this notion of a social layer. It's tying together all of Google's products, and it's verifying your digital presence.
And the problem that people so much misunderstand about Google Plus is, it was never really this standalone product that was going to compete with Facebook, or compete with Twitter or compete with LinkedIn, it was a social layer.
It's almost like the evolution of social business itself, it sort of mirrors that, where sometimes you start out with a social media person, then you have a social media department.
But at the end of the day, companies are returning back and say we don't need a dedicated social media department, because we do social media, in every department in this company.
And you'll have to read the article read the newsletter to find out what they're doing because of that, but social media is always in flux, right? It's always going to be in flux.
So once again, we need to stick with social media in the here and now even some fairly well respected names out there in the media world.
Introducing Oktopost: The B2B Social Media Marketing Management Tool
00:18:57
This week Neal Schaffer introduces you to Oktopost and the man behind it, CEO and Founder Daniel Kushner. Oktopost is another great social media management tool that specializes in B2B services, tracking relationships and helping you target your marketing. They’ll soon be launching an employee advocacy program as well, helping companies simplify the advocacy process. Learn more about Oktopost, and where Daniel sees social media being used in the sales process in this week’s episode.
Key Highlights
[00:41] Introduction to Podcast Guest, Daniel Kushner
[01:26] Difference Between B2bB, Social Media and Consumer-Facing Social Media
[03:03] Top 5 Things That B2B, and Social Media Marketers Should be Measuring
[05:28] The Problem With Attribution
[07:11] The Different Integrations Oktopost Currently Supports
[10:01] Daniel's Experience with Marketing Automation from their Customers
[11:43] Case Studies
[12:25] Daniel's Vision on the Market for the Next 6-1 Months and on their Product
[16:31] Final Thoughts
Notable Quotes
In every company, the lead is something which is, is different. And maybe it's the same name, but every company has a different meaning of that name, right? The most basic is somebody leaving their information in the system, at minimum, the email, and that becomes a lead.
Where do we get this lead from? I think one of these metrics is one of the hardest today for marketers to measure. Because it's a very vague question, where are my leads coming from?
So it's very hard for the marketer exactly understand where the leads are coming from, although it's one of the most critical things that we need to measure, especially because it's not all linear. It's not all a single point of contact.
I think we, if you're looking at the marketing funnel, social media is used in two places. One, it's used for traffic generation. So to the very top of the funnel, we might say that the first touch point, and it's also used in the middle of the funnel to engage with prospects and into an even customers to push them through the funnel itself.
As a marketer, you can now see which social content is now not only generating traffic to third party websites, like Wall Street Journal, in this case, but also ending up as, as good lead generators on your website.
We definitely very strongly recommend that even if you're using a platform like OB supposed to run your advocacy, that you find somebody who can help you run the program, if it's not something that you have the knowledge and expertise in house, because doing it right, because, you know, when you're testing tools, and you know, marketers, they're like testing new technology and testing things out. And if things fail, that's okay marketing, but we're we're we're taking our technology and our new ways of doing things and e
The (Social Media) Marketing Trends You Need to Understand Today [Matt Navarra Interview]
00:23:37
Social media keeps changing. It seems that every few weeks you hear that Facebook has some new algorithm that messes up all the energy you’ve been putting into it. Then a new feature appears and everyone tells you how amazing it is for branding and marketing. And then it turns out that it’s not as amazing as everyone says (remember Periscope?). How do we keep track of the social media marketing trends? How do we adapt? How do make sure to stay atop of the ever-flowing changes but at the same time never waste too much energy on them either? Today I interview an expert to help you answer all those questions about social media marketing trends. During my recent trip around the world, I was able to go to the Falcon.io "Spark" conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I finally had a chance to meet up with someone I've known and respected in social media for quite some time: Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and former social media director for the The Next Web as well as consultant to organizations such as the United Nations and BBC. In this interview I talk with Matt about what has happened to social media in the past 12 months and what’s next for the future with regards to social media marketing trends. Should businesses continue experimenting with Facebook? How can brands make use of both Instagram and Facebook Stories? What is the next big thing? Listen to find out!
Key Highlights
[01:09] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Matt Navarra
[02:47] Areas Where Matt Is Shifting Focus On
[03:48] Is Facebook Underutilized By Brands?
[05:08] How Matt Helps Brands Create Visual Content Strategy Around Stories
[06:39] Tools That Matt Recommends
[08:27] The Instagram Swipe Up Feature and Facebook Stories
[11:33] Matt's Take on Pinterest
[13:35] Trends That Brands Should Be Focusing Now
[18:57] Matt's Advice on Creating Strategy
[20:35] Final Thoughts
[22:00] Connect With Matt
Notable Quotes
So the big thing that most people are talking about at the moment is really moving away more than ever, from focusing on Facebook pages, and also post pages and profiles in general. And it's that trend of people wanting to understand the value and how to leverage the value from stories as a format, which is not new, per see.
Well, the first thing is that, you know, there's you don't always have to do all yourself and sometimes I think brands and both small and large organizations try and do everything themselves.
I think that some of the best stuff that's created is often the simplest, and the little things that look more most authentic. It's not a medium that needs to be polished, I think the more polished it is, the less authentic it becomes. And that's when it kind of loses its value.
It all comes down ultimately to how creative you've been in kind of steering people towards swipe up, also giving them a reason or inn
Neal reveals his "aha!" moment from his recent blog post on LinkedIn and offers advice on better understanding the unique demographic that is viewing your blog posts on LinkedIn. Key Highlights
[00:40] Understanding the Audience for Your LinkedIn Blog Posts
[00:56] My LinkedIn Resources
[01:54] How I Consider LinkedIn
[02:11] My AHA Moment
[02:53] My Free Ebook
[03:47] What I Did to Introduce My New Ebook on LinkedIn
[05:48] The Power of Comments on LinkedIn
[07:35] LinkedIn Is A Unique Community
Notable Quotes
There's a lot of people who say, Well, I have a blog, I don't want to create special content for LinkedIn, that's just a waste of time, I'll just, you know, republish my own content on LinkedIn. And you know, there's a lot of people that are doing that, in all honesty, and some of them have been really successful, I have not taken that approach. I love the approach. And if you're going to make content, make it work. And if you're going to publish the same content, at least, you need to rephrase it for the LinkedIn community.
I'm not saying that I copy and pasted a particular blog post and publish it on LinkedIn for the first time.
But it's really interesting to see the quality and the power of the comments I got, because they weren't coming from just blog readers who happen to find me on Pinterest or stumble upon these were coming from decision makers, former CEOs and CMOS on LinkedIn.
So to me, I'm just giving a preview of what's coming in mainstream corporate America, but on LinkedIn to others that are not part of the social media world that I'm in. It was quote, unquote, a thought provoking piece.
And it's sort of repeated what I thought are reiterated what I thought that is, if you're just gonna cut and paste what you blog, on your blog, or LinkedIn, it's not gonna be nearly as effective if you have the topic and the tone and the perspective that these decision makers are looking for on LinkedIn.
B ut once you guest blog somewhere else, whether it be on LinkedIn publishing platform or on someone else's platform, you need to retool your content, your perspective, even your call to action for that unique community. But regardless, it just goes to show you that you blog for your community, if it's on your own blog, you none, you understand your community, your target user.
My Best Social Media Advice? Ignore Everyone's Social Media Advice.
00:12:19
Coming to you from the Women’s Business Symposium, sponsored by Comerica Bank, and benefitting Girls, Inc., this week Neal is discussing when to listen to advice, and when to ignore it. Last week, he held the event that he’s been talking about for months, the Social Tools Summit. It got him thinking about why it’s important to be unique in the world of business and social media. When planning the summit, Neal got lots of advice from his peers about how to run the event. Yes, it’s good to listen to advice from peers and role models, but it’s also good to know that you don’t always have to take that advice.
Key Highlights
[02:02] Creating the Idea for Social Tools Summit
[02:41] Ignore Everyone Else
[03:06] Why I Think the Social Tool Summit Was A Success
[03:22] My Approach to Business and Social Media
[04:42] Social Media Replaces Nothing But Compliments Everything
[05:36] Data-Driven Approach
[05:47] Leveraging Social Media As A Tool
[06:36] You Need to Do Something Different
[07:27] Lead Through Innovation
[09:02] Social Media Center of Excellence
Notable Quotes
With social media to say you got to do this, you got to do that. I don't think people are ill-intentioned when they give us this advice. But at the end of the day, you have to stick with what's right for you.
Because if you're doing what everyone else has already done, you're not going to be successful, you have to do something different. And if you're true to your brand, and to your business, into your experience, into your capabilities into your limited resources, you will be able to do that. But it's not going to come from a copy and paste effort. It's going to take some soul searching, it's going to take some experimentation.
And everyone said it was unique, but I think they meant it in a good way, hopefully. But we did something different. Because I had a vision. And I felt there was a need in the market for this type of information, and executed on that vision. And I did not let anybody get in the way. I was a man on a mission. And that's actually always been my approach to business. And it's my approach to social media. And it's my approach to social media consulting.
But at the end of the day, I want to do what's right. And that's the approach I want you to have for social media.
The first one is social media replaces nothing but compliments everything.
Social media is new tools, old rules, doesn't matter how late you are out of the game, doesn't matter how old you are. When you use social media as a business tool, those that have more business experience will tend to leverage social media as a tool more effectively.
You may not want to be innovative. But to be successful, you need to
How to Take Your Employee Advocacy to the Next Level: An Interview with GaggleAMP
00:23:19
Neal interviews Glenn Gaudet, CEO and founder of GaggleAMP, and talks about the history of employee advocacy and the challenges that face companies that try to launch such a program internally.
Key Highlights
[00:51] The Primary Use of GaggleAmp
[01:32] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Glenn Gaudet
[02:42] How Glenn Got the Idea of the GaggleAmp Notable Quotes
[06:52] How the Market Evolved
[07:47] What Lacks in Understand Social Media
[08:19] Why You Need to Understand the Value of Social Media
[10:38] The Trap into Employee Advocacy
[12:54] Free Trial
[13:34] The Power of Feedback
[14:26] Why Companies Sometimes Get Disappointed in Employee Advocacy
[19:59] How GaggleAmp Works
[20:43] Connect with Glenn
Notable Quotes
And then from that was really the idea of having a platform that was designed to do this in a way that it was super easy for the employee to share the content, yet maintain their privacy, and provide rich tracking information for the company and to balance all those different pieces.
And what was lacking in that was the understanding of how social media fits into the broader marketing mix. And now what we're seeing is we're seeing social media professionals who truly are coming out of that understanding of the marketing mix, rather than somebody who's just often off on their own doing social media.
If you don't understand the value of social media, why would you want to amplify it? Right? Because that's what our platform does. It amplifies what you're already doing. And if you're already doing nothing, you multiply that times zero, you still get nothing.
But it really is really does allow companies to scale their amplification, yes, in an organic way, that is just very, very different than anything else out there.
They think that all of their employees are going to be social media managers, they're going to have these complex dashboards, and they're going to be figuring out what they're going to say, and, and that's just not the case, the rank and file employee, just want you to make it really super easy for them to either share it or say no thanks.
I think that the biggest one that pops up is a certain expectation. And this, this is why we do a free trial, we want you to actually use it. And as part of the free trial, we want you to invite various stakeholders that are employees.
Because your expectations of what they want, are probably going to be different. And so with, by going through the trial, you not only get the results in terms of the amplification, but you're going to get the feedback from those other stakeholder types within your organization.
And so when when when marketing expects certain things from other types of employees, they oftentimes get disappointed because they're expecting them to do all this additional work.
How to Create Processes for Your Social Media Program
00:23:46
Today’s show is about something I'm very passionate about both for my clients and for my own brand: taking social media seriously. Social is becoming a bigger part for businesses large and small, and they are spending more and more resources on it, but it’s important to take it seriously and look at what you’re getting out of it. Putting processes in place can help you streamline your social media program and examine what is the best strategy for your business, which will in turn provide more ROI.
Key Highlights
[01:25] Take Social Media Seriously
[03:36] Think About Your Processes And Protect Them
[05:19] Find The Right Time For You
[05:32] Re-read Maximize Your Social
[07:14] Improving Your SEO
[07:58] Re-doing Your Approach To Email
[08:35] 2 Ways Of Looking At The Actual Social Networks
[09:31] Look At Your Role Models
[11:09] Look At Your Facebook Insights
[11:47] Working on Pinterest
[14:29] My Snapchat Presence
[14:51] Own Your Hashtag
[15:11] Loom At The Resource Part
[15:50] 4 Ways To Scale
[16:22] Leverage Your People In The Right Way
[16:43] When To Outsource Task
[19:39] Define Your Process
Notable Quotes
When I talk about getting series, that means really taking a step back. It's really about putting processes into your social media program.
It's about the operations of social media, about making sure you're doing the right things, you're measuring the right things, and therefore you're delivering on what you need to do in order to make your social media program sustainable for whatever objective you're measuring it for.
What I mean by this is really what is the objective, if you are trying to generate more leads, or you're trying to get more website traffic, which is often an objective, look at where your leads have been coming from over the last 12 months. And you might be surprised that this often surprises people.
There's so much market to get out there. And it's going to come down to relationships and your audience and your community.
You really need to balance everything because social complements, everything replaces nothing, maybe you need to take another look at that right?
Whatever communities that you're involved in, okay, how much time you put into it, what are you getting out of it? And what are you posting and what's the frequency you're posting for things want you to look out.
I am now actually trying to focus more on the quality and less than the frequency.
I want you to bridge that gap by refocusing what you're doing. And you can use different techniques to do that.
You can't outsource everything. But you can have the right people do the right jobs.
You need to be in the right places with the right content, the content has to be powerful, valuable, resourceful. But m
Pinterest Community Boards have a unique role in the world of social media. Find out why you should be leveraging them as part of your social media strategy. Key Highlights
[01:26] Great Way of Sharing Passion
[02:05] community Board in Pinterest
[02:20] How Pinterest Works
[04:24] My AHA Moment
[04:47] Pinning Together
[05:35] The Advantage of Opening My Boards to Others
[06:27] How to Audit Your Boards
[07:57] The Interesting Thing About Community Boards
Notable Quotes
What a great way to bring the world together, just like social media is. Think about it social is about people and engaging with people and the social signals that you send to people. And when you share someone else's content, it is an amazing thing you are putting your brand on the line to share with someone else.
These are things were creating a community board, if you're a brand that already has an established user base that's engaging with you on Pinterest is really at this point, I think a no brainer.
So instead of me carrying the burden of you know, whenever I see things, I will organically pin them. Why not enlist their help as well. And when I enlist their help, that means I allow them to pin to the board I invite them to pin The board.
And the benefits of me are it allows them to scale in that when they pin it to their followers, it's going to be seen, but my board is going to be seen by their followers, right.
So that's really the interesting thing of the community boards. It really allows you to scale. It also allows you to support others I created maximize social business as a platform to support our bloggers that everyone benefits from. And really the Pinterest community board is the next best thing to it.
But if you just go back and listen to the last five minutes of me describing Pinterest community boards, you begin to feel that they are something that is very, very special in the world of social media, a special way of extending your reach for your content, a special way of creating and extending relationships within Pinterest.
The Amazing Similarities Between Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing
00:10:57
Engagement, relevance and relationships are as important in social media marketing as they are in email marketing.
Key Highlights
[00:41] My AHA Moments on Best Practices with Email Marketing
[02:18] Email Providers Getting Better at Filtering Spam
[02:48] What Gmail Has Done Recently
[03:35] What Happens When You Send A Lot of Emails
[04:06] More Engagement, Better Relationships
[05:01] Make People Stay Longer in Your Site
[05:30] Best Practice in Email Marketing
[05:58] Create Engaging and Relevant Content
[08:09] Broad Terms that People Overuse or Overgeneralize
Notable Quotes
But it was interesting, because what's happening in the world of email marketing, is that the old days of just blasting a message out and it getting into the inboxes of people are obviously gone.
But really what happens is every list that is out there has a reputation that is attached to it, brands have reputations. We have social media reputations, right? Well, lists are the same.
The providers are trying to deliver good service to their customers trying to keep the spam out.
And they're trying to make you realize that your list has a reputation attached to it. And the higher that reputation is, in other words, the more relevant that content is to your audience that you send out to, the fewer notices of spam you get, the more clicks you get within your emails.
So the more engagement you have within those emails, the better relationships you have, you know, it's about engagement, relevance, and relationships, right? The more deliverable those emails are going to come.
In other words, from a search engine perspective, you would rather introduce content that is more engaging, more relevant, and therefore, people are staying on your page longer.
It really comes down to that same notion of engagement. Is your content engaging or people engaging with it? Whether it's a share a link that's clicked or even a comment? And is it relevant? are they sticking around, you know, checking out your site for other pages?
But the more engaging your content is, the more people show to right, it's really as simple as that. So you need to create content that's relevant. And that's something that people engage with. And you need to ask people to engage with it sometimes.
But at the end of the day, for these social networking sites to survive, because one of the primary forms of revenue that they get or generate is from advertising, they need to make sure that your content is engaging, or they're only showing engaging content.
It comes down to creating engaging content and engaging with others. And from that, creating relationships, obviously, the deeper relationships you have with your readers, with your followers, the more engagement you're going to get right.
Enterprise-Wide Employee Advocacy is a Natural Outcome of Social Business [Sociabble Interview]
00:22:07
Today Neal is sharing an interview he did with Marylin Montoya of Sociabble. Sociabble, one of the sponsors of the 2015 Social Tools Summits, is an employee advocacy platform that uses content marketing and social media networks to connect relevant content to employees in order to showcase their company’s brand. Marylin is sharing her insider perspective and offering valuable information and advice based on lots of experience helping large clients plan and implement employee advocacy programs. Listen in to hear her talk about the value of employee advocacy, why your employees are your best assets, and why enterprise-wide employee advocacy is a natural progression of social business.
Key Highlights
[00:35] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Marilyn Montoya
[02:48] What is Sociabble?
[05:17] Why Employees Are The Company's Best Assets?
[09:21] Ways Employee Advocacy Benefit Company
[11:50] Evolution of Employee Advocacy Internally
[15:16] How Sociabble Helps With Training The Company Set Up Employee Advocacy Program
[17:00] Employee Advocacy In Europe Vs North America
[20:28] Connect With Marilyn
Notable Quotes
It's a technology that uses content marketing, and social media networks, to connect relevant content to employees in order to showcase their company's brand.
The main reasons are to obviously, amplify the message of the brand through the voice of the employees, and also, to allow those employees to engage in personal branding, with social networks, That means kind of develop a thought leadership through the content that the company is helping provide those employees and then, you know, also have them understand what it means to build your brand on social media.
Business is done between people, not between company and people. So, the idea is, you know, let's, let's allow employees to engage with audiences on social media network through the help of tool.
The reality is that, you know, companies must now be on social media, you know, almost everybody has a LinkedIn company page or an official Twitter handle. And then it's just a natural evolution and natural progression of that of that logic that, okay, well, actually, it's really important to be active on social media.
I think the idea is that your employees are your best asset, you know, they're the people that understand your company, understand your brand. And they're also the people that engage with, you know, prospects and clients in real life.
For the most part, you know, unless you have a very disgruntled employee, which does happen, most people want to showcase what they're doing, what they're working on, in their company, what role they're playing, you know, what projects they're working on. So the idea is, okay, let's allow people to share that, and to position themselves that as somebody that is an expert in something.
The Only Constant in Your Career is Change: Learn to Embrace It (Part 2)
00:16:52
Neal continues providing his advice that he recently gave LinkedIn on career change and learning to adapt to – and thrive on – the constant change that is part of our everyday life.
Key Highlights
[01:09] Losing the Big Customer
[02:44] Focusing On New Pipeline
[03:13] Importance of Personal Relationships in Sales
[04:17] Unplugging From A Career
[05:59] Adjusting to the Curveball
[06:57] Finding My Passion
[07:37] Establishing My Brand
[08:34] Launching My Career in a New Direction
[09:27] Becoming An Author
[10:11] Launching Windmills Marketing LLC
[11:32] What I Learned From My Experience
Notable Quotes
So being in sales, and if you're in sales, you you get it means that you learn to face constant rejection. But in the belief that every lost deal, or telephone call that wasn't returned, would bring me one step closer to closing, real business.
I realized the absolute importance of personal relationships and sales, relationships, supersede contracts in China, at least at that time, when I was doing business there, as well as maintaining a very, very long term approach in relationship building, this time would be no different.
I've talked about the biggest changes that have happened in my career, triggered by a number of different events that have occurred. Sometimes, though, we have career curveballs thrown at us internally.
Putting family in front of career was something I had never done before in all honesty, but it was a natural reminder about what is the most important thing in life, and what we work for, to support our families, right.
I learned to adjust to this situation, like other curveballs before this one, it wasn't easy. After achieving all that I achieved, I was ready to go to that next level. But I knew that there was something more important than once again, that long term perspective, that there are all these external and internal things that are going to be throwing curveballs out to you and affecting your career. But at the end, building up your experience, focusing your energy, and taking that long term perspective on career on life, was only going to work in my favor.
And it's really the constant change and adapting to the change with a combination of maintaining a long term view of my career, while creating short term deadlines, that has allowed me to understand the timing of the right pitch, and being prepared to run those bases.
Change in your career is inevitable, generate your own change and learn to accept change brought upon you embrace the challenges and the new knowledge that can be obtained from them for your future. Sometimes this change will make you rethink your own career plans for the better, it becomes part of an education that better prepares you for any future challenge you might face.
How Cathay Pacific Built a Global Employee Advocacy Program
00:24:22
This week Neal is coming to you from Japan, and he’s talking to Dennis Owen, from Cathay Pacific. The two are talking about Cathay Pacific’s extremely successful employee advocacy program, which Dennis launched simultaneously with their brand campaign “Life Well Traveled.” Dennis explains how he got the higher ups behind him, the platform they use, what kind of content is successful, and the rewards they give for engaging in the program. This is a great episode to listen to if you’ve been trying to figure out how to factor an employee advocacy program into your business plan.
Key Highlights
[00:30] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Dennis Owen
[03:05] How Dennis Got Into Employee Advocacy
[05:40] How Employee Advocacy Started in Cathay Pacific
[09:46] The Lack of Understanding in Employee Advocacy
[10:36] The Planning Process
[13:34] The Approach on Rewards
[17:24] Measuring KPIs
[20:18] Final Thoughts
[22:57] Connect With Dennis
Notable Quotes
And I think the main reason I wanted to do it is because it ties very nicely to our new brand campaign, which is called life all traveled. And as an airline, employees we traveled, we have the opportunity to travel for free. So we ourselves, live lives well traveled. And people are interested in travel, people liked to talk about travel, they'd like to see photos, and I thought what a great opportunity to tie internal brand advocacy to this new brand. Campaign life well traveled. So it's been a really nice fit.
I think it's, it's a matter of just having something fun for people like, it doesn't have to be super expensive, because I think people that are, that are going to get involved with internal brand advocacy, are already sharing things. And they find the joy of that work that as well.
When you look at a company like Cathay Pacific, we tend to be fairly understated. We're not a company that's out there bragging about ourselves. But there are other entities talking about us all the time, in terms of awards that we've gotten, or the new services. So I haven't found that that's been a real problem of finding content around Cathay Pacific and Dragonair. And sure, we have our own content, as well as we will definitely share that, like I said, with the lawful travel campaign.
You know, we want people to understand that we're a premium airline. And there's value in terms of flying on Cathay Pacific Dragonair. So I think those were, you know, that's a it's a great story that I just wanted to share.
Get out there and look and see what other people are saying about your brand. I think it's really valuable when you are able to share stories from other people, not the brand.
Is Social Media Marketing World the Best Social Media Conference? [Michael Stelzner Interview]
00:13:41
I am honored in this episode to interview the one and only Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, as he talks about the upcoming 2nd Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, California in late March, 2014. Learn what differentiates his social media conference from others.
Key Highlights
[00:29] Introduction of Podcast Guests, Mike Stelzner
[01:13] Who is Mike and What Mike Does
[02:15] Wat Made Mike Launch from Blog into Physical Social Media Marketing Summits
[03:43] The Value of Attending Physical Social Media Conferences
[05:07] How Mike Differentiated His Conference from Others
[07:01] Mike's Little Secret
[08:58] Improving from Last Conferences
[10:34] New Speakers Coming In
[12:26] Final Thoughts
[12:44] Connect with Mike
Notable Quotes
When people ask me about the value of going to social media, conferences, physical ones, you do have the education, but then you do have the networking and you meet people that you may end up working together with, you may end up end up hiring, they may end up hiring you or you make friends for life, it's really a magical thing when you bring people together, so I couldn't agree with you more.
I'd thrive on on being able to meet people face to face and actually have conversations and not just like in nightclubs where the music is blaring, and a lot of these other conferences, they had their parties, but they were in nightclubs. And you could you just couldn't hear anything, you know, and it was impossible to network.
And you know, it just goes to show that we often forget, but social media is about the social part, right? It's totally about meeting each other. And a lot of people forget about that.
But I think the real stuff that happens is when you make those kinds of connections, that could lead to future you know, collaborations, or, like you said, employees or, or just, you know, building deeper relationships with people that you love and respect so that you never know what will happen.
I wanted the speakers because this is a social media conference, I wanted the speakers to actually be accessible. So we didn't actually give them a place to go just for them. Instead, we gave everyone the same place to go, which was this massively big place
How to Pivot Your Digital Marketing Strategy for 2022
00:34:32
With all of the changes that society, technology, and social media undergoes at a frenzied pace, have you taken a step back to analyze your results from the previous year and use that insight to pivot your digital marketing strategy?
This podcast provides you a living example of how I balance my own digital marketing channels, what I learn from the data, and how I plan on applying it to all of my digital marketing this year.
I hope this episode both inspires you and provides you with a concrete example to help you truly Maximize Your Digital (and Social, of course!)
Key Highlights
[02:34] A Little Personal Story
[08:06] How to Pivot Your Digital Marketing Strategy For 2022
[10:04] Looking At The Output in 2021
[11:26] Blogging As Part of R&D
[12:33] My YouTube Output
[13:44] My Podcast Output
[14:52] Rebranding My Podcast
[15:45] My Email Marketing Output
[17:05] The Big Three Areas of Digital Marketing
[17:53] Initial Results for my Blogging
[19:40] Initial Results for my YouTube
[20:07] Initial Results for my Podcast
[21:21] Initial Results for my Email Marketing
[22:26] Conversions On My Website
[25:11] My Fractional CMO Services
[25:34] My Mastermind Community
[26:12] Plans for 2022
[28:15] Outlines
[29:31] Giving Social Media Algorithm What They Want
[30:50] Summary
Notable Quotes
But for me, this is the output I needed, I'm not going to go overboard and say I'm going to blog twice a day, I think blogging four times a week, over the course of a year, says that in my library of content, I have 200 pieces of content. And for most companies that that is enough, you don't even need to blog four times a week. That's just me.
And you know, the goal for 2022 is to stay consistent.
For me, it's really about building that strategy. And making sure that the content has impact. There's a lot of different directions I can go.
As I learned early on in my career, part of a strategy is also deciding what not to do. You really need to stay focused.
What I want to do this year is really be more strategic, and raise the quality of both my own content, and those guests that I invite to be on the podcast.
I like to keep things really, really simple. I like to provide you clarity, but clarity with impact.
To me, it's all about conversions. It's all about getting people on my email list, so that I can communicate with them a little bit more frequently, and promote what I'm doing a little bit more frequently as well.
And it really mimics the advice that I've been giving you on this podcast is to focus on non-social evergreen content outlets, my blog, my podcast, and YouTube.
But it's also about giving social media algorithms what they want, and they want video.
How Influencer Marketing Will Change in 2022 [P.J. Leimgruber Interview]
00:32:12
Today I have a special guest who is also an influencer marketing expert discussing the past and future trends of influencer marketing. P.J. Leimgruber is the founder of one of the leading influencer marketing platforms, NeoReach, and he most recently founded the Clash App.
He developed this new app because he feels that the existing brand deal system that is prominent in influencer marketing is broken. That's why PJ recently joined forces with former Vine sensation, Brendon McNerney, to launch Clash, a short-form video app with built-in creator monetization tools, to solve the problem, and provide the infrastructure necessary to create a more sustainable brand-deal ecosystem.
Some of the things we discussed include:
How social media user behavior is changing going into 2022, and why that's a good thing (creating more authentic interactions, building off of connections to niche audiences and devoted fanbases)
How brands can leverage "microtransactions" and tools like Clash drops to connect with target audiences
What changes we will see in 2022 in influencer marketing trends
Key Highlights
[02:08] Introduction of Podcast Guest, P.J. Leimgruber
[04:28] P.J's Journey To Founding Neoreach and Digital Marketing
[07:49] Using Influencers Instead Of Traditional Ads
[10:28] The Difference of Social Media Now Compared Before
[12:49] Creating More Authentic Interactions
[13:53] Why Brand-Deal Relationships Are Broken Today
[15:49] The Problem With How Influencers Are Treated
[16:51] What Are Microtransactions And How Brands Can Leverage Them
[19:07] What Clash App Does
[25:25] The Shift For Influencer Marketing Next Year
[28:48] Connect With PJ
Notable Quotes
It doesn't necessarily need to be in the sense of scale, in terms of millions of followers, you know, we're seeing these small micro creators have had great success doing what they love. And that's encouraging to see.
I think that creators now more than before, really understanding that distinction, and really think about how do they cultivate those relationships with those top fans.
I encourage the folks that are on the brand side, to really rethink their influencer strategy and that lens and think less about the performance metrics and the views and the numbers and really think about the creation of the fostering a connection between the brand and the creator, the same way that the craters foster that connection with their fans.
What we want to start thinking is not what the creators think about is how do I break away from needing to fit the mold of what the brands are looking for, into saying that I just want to be me, and I want to build relationships with my fans, I want to build my digital community, I want to connect with my ride or die fans.
The Number ONE Thing You Can Do to Create IMPACTFUL Content for Digital and Social Media Marketing
00:22:12
Content creators are able to generate engagement and influence because they are not always using their content to promote a product or service, but they are using their content to connect with their community and provide value.
Just as businesses are at a disadvantage in social media, with the growth of the creator economy, I would argue that the tables are turning against businesses in all of digital media.
I want to share with you what I have learned over the last two years of post-COVID digital marketing and why the creator economy will continue to eat into the mindshare that businesses have had in digital marketing.
Once you understand this, even if you are a business there is still a way to gain mindshare and compete with content creators.
The secret is the one thing that this episode is all about, and you'll have to listen in to find out what it is and the various examples I use to help you see the light!
Key Highlights
[01:26] Why I Keep Going
[03:03] My Library of Content Around Influencer Marketing
[03:51] Content Marketing 101
[05:00] Who Are We Creating Content For?
[06:07] My Blogging and Author Journey
[06:57] Revising My LinkedIn For Business Ebook
[08:17] Why I Select My Podcast Guest Carefully
[10:32] Be Part Of The Process
[11:09] Why You Should Not Outsource Critical Tasks To Your Brand
[11:36] What Drives Me?
[13:18] See Whatever You Do In Digital Social Differently
[16:01] Why Email Is Still The Best Way To Engage With People
[18:26] Infuse Concept Of Caring For Other Others In Your Content
Notable Quotes
I always say content is the currency of digital media content is the currency of social media.
But the important thing is, when we're creating this content, is it all about us? Or is it all about them? Are we creating it to have a one sided transaction so that we are the ones profiting? Or do we truly care about that other person?
But the important thing is, I've always wanted to give out my best content, and have always wanted to not hide anything and give what I thought was the best advice, whether or not it made me money. Because I know that this is the information that my community needs.
But the central part is I care about I select these people that want to be on my podcast very, very carefully. I am very, very careful as to who I accept, because the whole lens is will this person provide you valuable information?
There's nothing wrong with having writers as part of your team. But at the end of the day, you need to be part of that process, you need to be an integral part of that process.
What drives me, ladies and gentlemen, is that I want to leave the earth a better place than it was without me. That's what drives me is leaving whatever legacy I can.
Everybody Says This is the Year of Video. But What Exactly Should My Business Do to Best Leverage Video? [Scott Miller Interview]
00:26:30
Every year we come out saying that this is the year of video.
Seems that way doesn't it?
Even if you know you SHOULD be doing more video as part of your marketing, it can be challenging if you don't know exactly what you SHOULD do.
I also face this challenge, which is why I'm excited to present to you this interview I had with Scott Miller, content marketing expert and Founder and CEO of Centerpost Media.
We discussed:
Understanding the power that video can have for your marketing.
Did you know, for instance, that 64% of internet users are more likely to buy a product after watching a video?
How to create the perfect video.
If budget allows, hire a professional to help you with videos, but if you are going to produce the videos yourself, there's a LOT to consider.
How to best use your videos on social media
and more!
Needless to say if you are trying to play catch up with video, this episode is for you!
Key Highlights
[01:35] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Scott Miller
[06:48] Why We Need To Focus On Video Today?
[09:25] How To Create A Perfect Video?
[12:28] Balancing Professionality With Authenticity
[14:22] Tips And Tricks On Preparing Recorded Videos
[16:00] Scott's Suggestions On How To Come Up With Ideas For The Video
[16:37] Expert Marketing
[18:00] How To Best Use Videos On Social Media
[20:53] Balancing Videos With Other Content Type
[23:32] Connect With Scott
Notable Quotes
I think it goes back to one of the trends we're seeing in marketing is being authentic. And so more and more consumers want to know, what does the CEO stand for? How are they treating their employees? Video allows you to convey who you are and tell your story. And I think that's the reason why it's so powerful.
I think for me, it always starts with what are you trying to accomplish? I think that's that's step one. When we talk about creating video, you do not have to have video on every single platform.
It doesn't have to be huge, you know, it doesn't have to be complicated Neil, it just has to be something that if I'm watching your video, am I getting your message? Is that coming clear? Are you communicating that? And certainly the video does it. But I think having a closed captioning and having the text helps with that as well.
80% of the content needs to be free advice. So think to yourself, what are some things I can offer for free, and that scares business owners, right? If you give me something for free, and I try it, and it works, and I want a deeper level, who am I going to go to? This is really about you know, you call it expert marketing, it's about you are already expert in your field.
Stop worrying about following the social media trends that do not bring you additional business.
If you are not building out an email list, you are leaving money on the table.
And if you have an email list but are not regularly engaging with your email subscribers, you are leaving money on the table.
Listen to this episode to learn why email marketing is so important, has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel, and a preview of my new free ebook to help you understand best practices in how to "do" email marketing right.
Download my free ebook, The Definitive Guide to Email Marketing, here:
https://nealschaffer.com/email-marketing-guide/
Key Highlights
[01:54] Introduction to My Newsletter
[03:04] What I Realized About Influencer Marketing
[04:34] My First Ebook On Email Marketing
[05:18] How Email Marketing Benefit Your Business
[05:25] Choosing the Right Email Marketing Software
[07:17] Why You Have To Build An Email List
[07:46] Email Marketing ROI Example
[09:11] Another Data Point
[09:35] How To Know the ROI of What You're Doing
[12:06] Podcast Data Points
[12:42] How to Engage and Build Relationship With People?
[14:46] How to Build Email List
[16:08] How to Leverage Sequences
[16:38] Keeping It Human
[17:31] Make Every Email A Love Letter
Notable Quotes
Based on their business objectives, I realized that influencer marketing wasn't the only way in which they could reach their goals. And in fact, in some cases, it might even be the best choice.
And at the end of the day, everything else you do is on rented land, social media is rented land. If you're trying to get better search engine rankings, it's rented to YouTube, Apple podcasts, it's all rented land, we don't own it, the only thing we own our own websites, more importantly, our own email lists, right, which give us direct communication.
And we could say the same thing on a podcast and YouTube as well. This is content, it's gonna live forever in the search engines. It's out of your control, but you're building asset.
They continue to develop a deeper relationship with their customers, their customers continue to open their emails, and they continue to act upon what those calls to action are.
Because once again, they may see us on social media, they may not they may see us in search engines, they may not they may come to our website, they may not. But the email, we know that we can get in front of people, right. And when we get in front of people, we need to be strategic about how we do it. But if we are given the privilege to directly communicate with people, that gives us an opportunity to deepen the relationship on our timeline, rather than the timeline of an arbitrary algorithm.
I realized there was a gap in the market marketers were being misled on what influencer marketing was, they were missing out on an extremely impactful way of
What is the Link Between the Creator Economy and Content Marketing? [Joe Pulizzi Interview]
00:35:30
I talked about my perspective on the Creator Economy with its relationship to influencer marketing on episode 241 literally 10 episodes ago, but seeing how it is a trending buzzword these days, I wanted to invite on an old friend to give us his perspective, as he is literally launching the first event around the Creator Economy called the Creator Economy Expo (go here for a $150 discount: https://nealschaffer.com/cex)
And this guest, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing World, knows something both about content marketing and launching and running successful events.
Listen in to learn Joe's perspective on where things have gone with content marketing and where they are heading with the Creator Economy. We covered a LOT of ground on this podcast, even touching upon the metaverse / Web 3.0 and NFTs.
If you want to understand the future of social media marketing, you'll want to listen to the end!
Key Highlights
[01:29] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Joe Pulizzi
[04:19] Evolution From Content Marketing to Creator Economy
[08:27] What is Creator Economy Expo?
[09:42] Why Content Creators Shouldn't Be So Focused on Social Platforms
[12:11] What is a Content Creator?
[13:45] Why Creator Economy Expo Was Created
[15:16] The Ultimate of Creator Economy
[18:47] You Need to Build Audience First!
[20:04] The Best Way to Generate Revenue
[22:54] Focus On One Platform and Master It
[25:50] Tilt Niching Vs Tilt Differentiation
[29:17] The Mission Of Creator Economy
Notable Quotes
And really, when it comes down to my take may be versus a lot of different people is I don't like what's going on with content creators being so focused on social platforms, when those social platforms then make the changes as they always do.
What I found over COVID was what was old is new again.
The core really is to be content entrepreneur.
You had a lot of great things that are happening. And I don't want people to miss that. So my recommendation is let's experiment. Let's see. But this is really something new that can move content creators from being totally dependent on social platforms.
Look at the ones that aren't, the ones that are successful, already have an audience and get this, they usually have a pretty good email list.L
Let's get rid of some of this stuff. Let's focus on being great at one or two things instead of just throwing your content all over everywhere.
What are the two biggest problems with companies that try to build an audience, one is they don't have a content till they don't have a true differentiation area. And the second is they don't deliver consistently over a long period of time.
And what might you be missing out on that is relevant for LinkedIn in 2022?
I have written 2 books on LinkedIn, and more recently have written a free ebook, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business, that I try to update every year according to the latest trends of LinkedIn and features it offers.
I just came out with my latest version of the free ebook, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business, which is now available for immediate download here:
Learn what the latest LinkedIn features that I recommend you focus on are in this episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Key Highlights
[00:16] My Definitive Guide to Email Marketing Ebook
[07:17] LinkedIn Can Deliver Results
[10:08] My LinkedIn Data Points
[14:30] Main Newest Features of LinkedIn
[14:46] Freebies On My Website!
[15:24] First Thing I Would Prioritize Now On LinkedIn
[16:22] Generating Emotional Connection
[18:24] Featured Section
[20:44] Visuals Attract!
[22:14] Creator Mode
[24:00] Benefits You Will Get On Creator Mode
[26:05] Speculations on LinkedIn
[26:37] Newsletter Feature
[28:15] How To Turn On Creator Mode
[29:55] LinkedIn Automation Tools
[32:11] How To Get Massive Exposure On LinkedIn
[34:42] Summary
Notable Quotes
LinkedIn is delivering 13x more traffic to my YouTube channel, then Facebook is at a pretty comparable follower size, which goes to show you that organic content published on LinkedIn can perform really well.
You want to share information that's going to generate leads. But the other side of it is your human side. The ability to generate an emotional connection with people that together with brand awareness does lead to that content that you want to convert on being seen by more people.
LinkedIn is still not Twitter. And it's not Facebook. But you can get more personal. You can share more personal stories, and more personal things about yourself that are inspirational.
So think a little bit differently with your content, continue what you've been doing, but try to mix in more of that personal content. And I think you're going to get more engagement and with that, all of your other content afterwards is going to get more visibility.
So my recommendation is it can only benefit you turn it on and at a minimum just put those hashtags that are relevant to you and or your brand up on your profile.
If you want to get massive exposure on LinkedIn, and you want to start building out a big network.
So I'm not going to say LinkedIn automation tools don't exist, because they do, I'm not going to say they can't be efficient, because
TikTok vs Instagram: What the Best Platform for Influencer Marketing is in 2022 [Justin Kline Interview]
00:36:20
Instagram has always been the King of influencer marketing, i.e. where a majority of influencer marketing budgets have been going, but with the emergence of TikTok, which is the best place to engage with and activate influencers?
Joining me today is influencer marketing expert, and Founder and CEO of one of the leading companies in the influencer marketing space, Markerly. We go deep into what makes TikTok such an appealing venue for influencer marketing, including:
Why TikTok is the place to be for young people.
Why it's more engaging than any of the incumbents.
The amazing value you can get working with TikTokers and how competitive their ad platform is for brands.
Key Highlights
[02:07] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Justin Kline
[05:03] How Justin Get Into Influencer Marketing
[07:26] Transitioning From Social Network to Influencer Marketing
[10:26] The Growth of Tiktok Over The Last Years
[13:10] Changes in Tiktok Demographics
[14:53] The Rise of Tiktok During Pandemic
[18:00] What Makes Tiktok Special?
[20:03] The Role of Influencers
[22:00] The Differences of Going Into Influencer Marketplace
[25:16] Tiktok Ads
[27:07] Tapping Into Creative Force of Influencers
[28:40] Branded Partnership in Tiktok
[29:57] Knowing the Demographics to Invest Into
[33:46] Connect with Justin
Notable Quotes
It's just crazy how, how much the pandemic has changed things. It's really fascinating. And yeah, and I look at Tiktok is very much an entertainment platform.
I think it's just this never ending stream of stuff that they're predicting, you're going to like, and the more you, you know, the more you use the app, the better it gets at, at suggesting content to you.
Influencers are keeping people interested in making content that, you know, is going to capture people's attention. And, you know, that's a hard job.
Tapping into this creative force, that enables you to think of ideas and to come up with content that you wouldn't have been able to come up with on your own. That is more likely to engage people because they on a daily basis, they're putting out content, and they're getting instant feedback as to how effective that content is, and how much that content resonates with their followers.
That's sort of a unique type of entertainment that just didn't exist in social media until Tik Tok. Right. So an example of raising the bar now other people are probably trying to do the same thing. And now we're going to see new things. So it just continues to evolve at a very, very quick pace. So I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, working with influences become so critical.
Twitter is an often forgotten about but potentially extremely powerful option for your social media marketing.
What impact can Twitter have on your marketing? What businesses should utilize it? And how to go about best using it?
Find out all you want to know about Twitter marketing on this episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast!
Key Highlights
[05:13] Why I Invest Time and Energy On Twitter
[07:08] Twitter as A Great Discovery Tool for News
[07:48] The Magic of Twitter
[08:33] The Value of Twitter
[09:08] Importance of Twitter Ads
[10:23] Connecting and Engaging Is Easy On Twitter
[11:52] Twitter's Content
[13:48] Share Natively!
[16:04] Hidden Engagement
[16:32] Things You Can Do To Start A Conversation
[17:23] Why It Is Easier Develop Relationships On Twitter
[19:04] Summary
Notable Quotes
Now, a lot of us marketers publish a lot to Twitter. And we tend to use tools to do that. And when you use a tool on a platform, you sort of lose touch with the reality of the platform. And I definitely realize that with Twitter, really as a place to monitor the news, Twitter does a good job of pointing out news that's going on from reputable sources.
Once again, that happens on Twitter, it's because it's where the news breaks. And it's where the media is. And if you're a business, or if you're a solopreneur. entrepreneur, you want to get covered by the media.
The life span of a tweet is very short. It's the repetitive gesture of checking it on Twitter, if you're doing it organically, several times a day, if you're tweeting a few times a day is going to be the cadence that you need, I believe in order to make impact there because it is so noisy.
And there's very few platforms today that we can say that about, but compared to a tick tock, or any other platform, Twitter really is the easiest platform to connect and engage with others on to have conversations.
So if you want to go a little bit further with Twitter, assuming that you're already publishing content on LinkedIn, on a Facebook, or on an Instagram, or even on a tick tock, you can take that exact same content and publish it on Twitter, that would be my number one recommendation for you.
The magic starts when you engage with others, when you engage with influencers with thought leaders with your followers. And the more you tweet, and the more you engage, and that engagement should also include proactively following, the more things tend to happen over time, like anything else in social media, it has a tumbleweed effect.
And part of me is like when everybody talks about going to LinkedIn or a tick tock or an Instagram, there's always value in all these other social networks that a lot of people have forgotten about. They're all equally important.
How to Measure Your Digital Marketing Ads ROI in a Non-Trackable World [Elijah Kirsch Interview]
00:40:16
Yes, there are big changes underway in the world of Facebook and Google Ads, in case you hadn't heard. Beginning with GDPR, the trends are slowly moving in the favor of consumers, and advertisers are being challenged in accessing the same amount of rich data they used to be able to more easily obtain effective digital marketing advertising results.
What should your business do to measure your digital marketing ads ROI in a non-trackable world?
This is the topic of an informative interview I had with Elijah Kirsch, CEO and Founder of Zonder Marketing and also one of the leading consultants at Mayple Marketing Solutions.
Some of the things we discussed include:
How to understand the current digital and social media advertising situation and further push for privacy and its impact on your advertising
Learn how to measure ROI through a variety of A/B testing methods
Discover "hidden" ROI measurements in your data
Key Highlights
[02:42] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Elijah Kirsch
[04:42] Elijah's Journey to Digital Marketing
[06:27] The Evolution of Digital Marketing
[10:32] Look Alikes and Remarketing
[12:10] Changes in Social Media Platforms
[13:03] Changes in Paid Digital Marketing
[15:00] Things That Businesses Should Be Doing Now
[19:44] Attribution On Multiple Touchpoints
[23:12] Elijah's Favorite AV Testing Methods
[26:42] Hidden ROI Measurements
[30:57] How Mayple Helps Businesses
[34:15] What To Look Foward In The Next Years
[36:30] Connect With Elijah
Notable Quotes
And one thing that I believe in is when you're taking over a client that already exists, and they already have campaigns, don't just run your own. I've seen that happens so many times where agencies consultants are like, hey, I've got a better idea.
While this year is tough, just because you have that year over year comparison, I think going forwards with these, you're going to see much smarter implementations much, much more cohesive stories doing putting more effort into those areas than I think what often got done in the past.
And so I think what the businesses are going to start to do is really understand what that incrementality is.
I think we as marketers need to be much more integrated, no longer can we just look at return on adspend and call it a day, another client of working with doing Google Shopping, I've reset up all their campaigns based on their actual margin.
You can completely change how a company works and operates by understanding that data, it takes a lot more effort, it takes time, and it takes understanding. But I find it extremely helpful.
You can't have mediocre creatives anymore. They have to be on point. You have to be working with people and be integrated into that brand team.
The Simple Formula to Social Media Marketing Success
00:24:47
I just came back from speaking at Berkshire Hathaway Homeservices, the leading real estate company in the United States and the World, annual convention. Working with realtors I have realized 2 truths:
They are entrepreneurs and need to build their own business like any other business owner
Like most entrepreneurs, a lot of them simply don't have the time and/or resource to consistently show up on social media
While there are some EXTREMELY savvy real estate pros when it comes to social media, from a numbers perspective, my experience is that an overwhelming majority are still looking for the magic bullet to help them gain value from social media, where they know they need to be more often.
Whether or not you are in social media, I am hoping this message resonates with you as well!
With that in mind, in this episode I share with you a simple formula to give you some boundaries yet concrete guidance to make the most of social media marketing in the smallest amount of time necessary.
I hope this inspires YOU to ACTION!
Key Highlights
[03:50] What I Noticed On Successful Real Estate Agents And Salespeople
[05:36] Reimagining Content for More Impactful Social Media Marketing
[07:43] People Want To Engage With People, Not Objects
[08:4] It's All About Action
[09:35] Include Yourself More In Your Content
[10:15] Visualize Everything That You Do
[11:42] Stick With Big 3 Platforms
[15:00] When To Customize Content For Every Platform
[15:47] Things to Remember If You Want to Publish Same Content Across Platform
[20:00] It's Okay to Include Yourself In Your Content
Notable Quotes
I find that a lot of real estate agents, a lot of salespeople, and a lot of businesses are self promotional in their content and social media, which tells me, they don't look at social media as this golden arena where we can develop relationships of value with all sorts of entities, all sorts of people.
But more than often, people want to see you they want to engage with you, they engage more with people than they do with logos or inanimate objects. It is just the general rule of human beings and, and how and why we engage with people. And this is what social media is all about.
I want to challenge you to be 100% visual, with your content. This is what social networks want. This is what people engage with more. And at the end of the day, this is going to get you the most eyeballs.
this is what I want you to think about when it comes to your social media marketing. It should be a process, it should be a system because I want you to save time for the actual engagement for the proactive engagement of finding new people reaching out to new people and the reactive engagement of obviously being there when people engage with you.
Top 5 B2B Content Marketing-Aligned Lead Generation Strategies [Jeff Baker Interview]
00:48:43
Content Marketing. Blogging. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Email Marketing. How do these all fit together seamlessly and strategically to help generate new leads and business?
This is the broad topic that I speak with Jeff Baker, CMO of the leading content marketing agency Brafton, about.
By the end of this conversation you will:
Understand B2B leads: from the buyer persona to the user intent.
Learn how to create a cohesive content marketing strategy that drives leads.
Learn the differences amongst the top 5 strategies: Lead magnet, Free tools, Original research, Case studies, Newsletter.
Key Highlights
[01:37] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Jeff Baker
[02:43] Jeff's Journey to Digital Marketing
[05:32] What is SEO?
[09:30] Should I Create Content Using AI?
[15:10] Looking At Search Intent and Buyer Persona
[19:13] The Importance of Adding Value to Your Audience
[19:35] Why Blogs Exist?
[20:07] Selling by Teaching
[22:51] What is a Lead Magnet?
[23:00] Five Strategies to Lead Magnet
[27:02] One of the Best Lead Magnets
[28:55] Tool that Jeff Recommends for Lead Magnets
[31:01] Creating Original Research
[35:57] Writing Case Studies
[39:02] How to be Successful on Newsletter
[45:25] Connect with Jeff
Notable Quotes
The new SEO strategist is going to be a content strategist.
The soul and really caring about the topic, and showing the unique perspective is what really is going to differentiate that content and which is going to help not just in search engine rankings, but generate leads as well.
Most of the time, when I see people getting this wrong with lead generation, it's they're mismatching the intent of their users with the goal that they're trying to accomplish.
So for me, my best recommendation is to follow the intent all the way through to the end. So understand that my intent for this particular topic, this search is information, I'm just looking to learn and don't break that pathway and offer me something that adds value to my current mindset.
When creating the strategy, the informational, and just understanding those intersection points, and really trying to knowing that some of that content is going to more directly generate the leads, and the remainder is really going to indirectly.
Same point with the lead magnets. It doesn't need to be an earth shattering, lead magnet or tool that nobody's created, or nobody's ever thought about. It just needs to add some value, you know. And the good point is that, we always assume we need to provide a lot more than the user does.
Start with the assumption that nobody wants to read it. And what that's going to do is it's going to force you to create something way out of the box with your subject line and with the content that yo
The 10 Areas of Your LinkedIn Profile Where a Majority of You Are Failing
00:37:27
Working with corporate clients I have developed my own 100-point LinkedIn profile audit score that looks at 20 different areas of a LinkedIn profile. And, year in and year out, most professionals underperform in these 10 areas.
Listen in for some tangible and actionable LinkedIn profile advice!
Key Highlights
[02:23] LinkedIn Profile Completeness
[03:30] Social Selling Index
[04:09] What Social Selling Index Does?
[05:21] My 100 Point System
[07:26] Searching for People
[08:00] Top 10 Areas Where Majority of Professionals Underperform
[08:55] Personalized URL
[11:15] Creator Mode
[15:10] Featured Section
[16:31] Past Company Experience
[20:29] Concept of Waiting
[21:44] Volunteering/Organizations
[24:03] 5 First Priority Areas
[24:16] Professional Summary
[26:20] Write Your Professional Summary in First Person
[28:31] Publish More Content on Linkedin!
[31:09] Current Company Experience
[31:59] Gain Recommendations
[33:27] Summary
Notable Quotes
I'm finding that a majority of employees, and these are generally primarily sales-focused people, they are falling short, in pretty much the same 10 areas, year in and year out every time I do this.
This proprietary methodology that I think really brings your LinkedIn profile into alignment with the high performers in your industry. And as you all know, all roads on LinkedIn lead to your profile. That's why it's so critical that you get it right.
The LinkedIn profile is almost like your second website. In fact, if you do not have a website, your LinkedIn profile pretty much is your own website. And that's why you want to make sure that your profile is up to par.
I always say claim your personal URL before someone with a similar name does.
I would bet that LinkedIn by limiting you to high five hashtags, it's really saying that you specialize. You're an expert in these areas, and therefore, when you publish content around those areas, it would make sense that maybe it gets a little bit more priority than people that don't have those hashtags that are publishing content with those hashtags.
LinkedIn is an inbound marketing tool, the more data you give it, the more places that you said you worked, the more keywords you can add in those places, the broader the connections you can make with other people.
It was my wife who said, you know, all those past relationships that you have, add up to who you are today. They've made you who you are today, they are a part of you. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. I would say about all your past experiences, add up to who you are. And you never know when that past experience is going to come in handy.
By putting volunteering/organizations in your profile, you're not only building that potential data poin
A Fresh New Perspective on Instagram Marketing: How to Blog on Instagram [Terri Nakamura Interview]
00:48:50
Are you looking for creative angles to your Instagram marketing?
Today's guest, Author of Blogging on Instagram, Terri Nakamura, will introduce you to a refreshingly unique way of looking at the platform that will spark some new creative ideas for your own Instagram marketing.
You don't have to start a blog to be successful on Instagram, but following Terri's advice will undoubtedly help improve your Instagram marketing game!
Key Highlights
[02:44] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Terri Nakamura
[06:36] Who is Terri?
[11:21] Why and How Terri Started Blogging on Instagram
[12:17] Courses Terri Took in Digital Marketing
[14:48] Why Terri Wrote a Book
[17:57] How Terri Found Her Publisher
[25:04] The Value of Publisher
[27:07] The Route Terri Took
[33:06] Evolving Blogging for Instagram to Book
[36:52] Terri's Advice to Those Who Take Advantage of Instagram as a Blogging Platform
[39:17] "Make EveryEmail a Love Letter"
[40:16] Impact of Instagram on Developing Relationships
[42:27] How to get the most of Instagram
[44:11] Connect with Terri
Notable Quotes
I think some people just feel like social media is there to be an advertising platform and they don't deliver any value.
Understanding the value in education and the other things that you deliver to your audience are the things that draw them to you.
I think blogging [on Instagram] is a really great place to experiment for people who want to write and have and engage with the audience.
You don't make money off the book, you make money off people who read the book, who reach out and want to hire you.
If you have a visual way of representing what you do, or you have a visual product or service, it's even better for that platform. You can't be everywhere. You don't need to be everywhere.
You have to prioritize and know where your time is going to be the most valuable. You can collect other kinds of data that will indicate whether or not you're on the right track and what kinds of things resonate, and how many times you get on to the Explore page and stuff like that.
And it's really important to build an audience and awareness, so you get other benefits.
So you can imagine that if you treat social media and Instagram in that way, and you are putting your attention creating a blog post and every post you publish there, it can be really impactful because it really is a personal platform. And you can personally connect with people and engage with people in that way.
We've been hearing for some time that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change not only the way we do business but society as well.
The truth is, marketers have already started to use AI, many time without knowing it. This is because many tools are already including AI algorithms in their analytics, such as the social media analytics tool Social Insider.
Lately there has been a lot of buzz around using AI to actually create content. How far have these platforms come? Listen in as I literally tell you what AI-generated content sounds like so you can come to your own conclusion as to if and how you decide to leverage the technology for yourself.
What I feel are the most compelling use case scenario for these tools, which are ads, Facebook ad headline, Facebook, ad primary text, you want to have some variations of different ad copy, will, this can actually shoot out a lot of different variations very, very quickly,
I recommend and I enjoy the fact that there are multiple outputs for this. But you get a sense that with some correction, we can actually leverage this and it sort of spices up our language.
I think the best content is content that triggers on people's emotions, that has your own unique perspective that has more of a human element to it.
But anyway, I just wanted to plant a seed in your head that, whether it's email copy, whether it's blog post or ad copy, I don't think that these tools are going to replace human beings. But I do believe that as a helper, to help you do research, help you make sure you're covering your bases in terms of content, because if the AI can find content that they think you should include in your blog post that you're not including, then maybe you don't have all your bases covered, right?
I think now is the time to start embracing these tools not to replace human beings. But as helpers, to help you make better content in less time.
And writing is an art. And I would never publish anything without running it by human editors, or my own human eyes and making my own human corrections. But I do believe when you're just your creativity, well is running dry, when you have nothing to say, using one of these tools is
How Product-Led SEO Will Help You Reap Real ROI from Search Engine Optimization [Eli Schwartz Interview]
00:42:53
Have you ever wanted to pick the brain of an SEO expert and get the real scoop on what makes for good - and bad - search engine optimization and even understand for what situations SEO might not be the best investment of your marketing budget?
If so you are going to love this interview with Eli Schwarz, author of Product-Led SEO. I guarantee you after listening to this episode you will see SEO in a brand new insightful light!
Key Highlights
[02:19] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Eli Schwartz
[03:38] How Eli Got Into SEO
[06:45] Going Beyond Keywords
[10:10] How to Identify SEO Opportunities
[14:23] Types of B2B Companies that Best Fit SEO
[19:03] Eli's Definition of Investing
[22:17] Productled SEO
[24:19] Example of Succesful Businesses
[28:27] Programmility and Scalability
[29:56] Things People Overlook SEO
[34:12] Smarter AI in SEO]
[35:26] Final Advice
[37:43] Connect with Eli
Notable Quotes
I think the idea is in the idea for all marketing, social media, SEO, paid media, brand media is users, you want to sell something, even if you're not selling an actual product, you're selling eyeballs, you're selling your media, you're selling retention, you're selling on brain authority.
I want to bring SEO back to that which is search is just a medium for people to find us.
So I think if you think about search as a medium and search as a concept, then you're focusing on the user, which is how do I create the best content, the best material for the users that are going to be using searches immediately, not how am I going to understand Google's algorithm of today and improve upon that so I show up as high as possible.
Know where you are in the funnel and build the effort around that.
So that's all I'm saying is do the basics, but don't make it an investment. If it's not a channel, don't spend money on advertising if you're not going to get users from it.
When I say product lead SEO, I mean that your understanding that there is a user out there on search that is looking for something that you can sell, and you build an entire product around it.
So educational content, again, if if it doesn't scale, then you're limited by how much content you can create.
90% of websites don't do SEO. That's a fact. I think it's probably 99% of websites in the world don't do SEO. So all the rules that Google has, has to work for the 100%, not just the 90%
If you can't justify your spend on SEO, if you don't see how the amount of money you're spending on SEO will ever repaid back, you can't put it in a spreadsheet.
Guest blogging is something that has been around for awhile but misunderstood by many. What is the benefit of blogging on someone else's site or inviting someone to blog on yours? And does Google approve of this?
Listen in as I give you my own perspective on the topic, and why you'll want to think a little more strategically about guest blogging going forward.
The resource that I mention in the episode, my newest free book, The Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging: The Most Effective Link Building Strategy, can be downloaded here:
[08:27] My Newest Ebook: The Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging
[09:20] Relationship Building With Those that Have Influence
[10:35] Example of an Influence
[12:51] Influence of Blogs or Blogging
[14:36] How Guest Blogging Can Nurture Positive Relationship
[15:37] Best Practice for Linking Out
Notable Quotes
Guest Blogging is the single most important way to build links, and getting links to your content or to your website is one of the most important things you can do to improve the SEO of your website.
For me, relevance is the ultimate. And when I bring on a guest blog, or when I guess, blog myself, that is the number one thing I look for, they don't have to necessarily have the highest domain authority or authority in Google's eyes. But if they're extremely relevant to my audience, and the content is extremely relevant to my website, that's when there is a match made in heaven.
So guest blogging is often misunderstood or gets a bad rap for a variety of reasons, as I talked about, I want you to understand the value of guest blogging, so that you can decide if and how to make it work for your business.
Influence is not defined by how many followers you have on Instagram. Influence is equally defined by how many followers you have on YouTube, or what is the domain authority of your website, or how many podcast downloads you get per episode. It is everywhere across digital media.
Social media does not work that way. Organic clicks are the hardest things to get.
Blogs or bloggers have tremendous influence, especially when we talk about clickability. But it's for brand awareness as well.
So if I'm going to link out, because it's the best practice, and with every link, I want to educate my audience more about that anchor text, whatever it is, I'd rather link out to someone that I like know, and trust, right. And that's where the relationship building the influence and marketing aspect really kicks in, and can be really, really powerful.
How to Use Content Marketing To Establish Your Own Category
00:34:56
Content is the currency of digital and social media, but it can actually even be more strategic than being a mere currency.
Content marketing can not only help build your business, but it can play an instrumental role in building out a category that you own and deliver long-term digital benefits for your company.
Think Hubspot - they "own" the term for inbound marketing.
If you want to achieve similar results for your company, you'll want to listen in to this interview.
Key Highlights
[01:24] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Mark Raffan
[03:00] How Mark Got Into Content Marketing
[08:04] What Does Establishing Your Own Category Means?
[13:30] Importance of Content Marketing in Establishing Own Category
[14:36] Create Quality Content
[17:00] Timeline and Strategies for Establishing Category
[21:01] Don't Forget About the Traditional Pieces
[22:38] Difference between Content Marketing Agency from an SEO Agency
[24:32] How to Structure Overall Strategy and Choosing the Platform to Post Content On
Notable Quotes
What's interesting about negotiation, that a lot of marketers don't understand is that negotiation and marketing are very, very similar, because they're both built on the same foundational elements. They're both built on persuasion, they're both built on influence. And when you think of those foundational elements, there's a lot of overlap between those two.
It's one thing to rank and it's another thing entirely to maintain, as a low bounce rate so that people actually read your stuff and engage with it and consume it on a regular basis. And that's what you have to create sort of long term. And also the same thing applies when it goes to social when it goes to video. It's got to be stuff that people actually want to consume.
Don't create a category unless you can afford to. And what I mean by that is, if you, if you don't have any decent funding, whether it's seed or series funding, this is a task best left to those who do.
It all starts with the strategy, get the strategy down first, try and think about who you're going to reach out to, and whether or not this category that you're creating is going to stick within that target group. And then dedicate yourself to building enough content that sort of an upswell gets created.
You don't have to do everything all at once you can start off in phases. But if you're just starting out in the Content Marketing World, just look at it through those lenses. Is it interesting? Is it educational? Is it informative? Everything will come from there.
What a High School Shark Tank Competition Can Teach You About Marketing
00:19:31
Can you summarize your current marketing program in a 30-second elevator pitch?
And if you could what would it include?
This episode is inspired by a shark tank competition for high schoolers that my children competed in and looking at your marketing in fresh eyes through the perspective of teenagers!
You are guaranteed to look at your marketing in a different way after listening to this episode...
Key Highlights
[01:54] What is a High School Shark Tank Competition
[04:38] The Gaps Between Digital Marketing Resources and Materials
[05:32] The Approach to Determining a Product to Sell
[06:30] Some Compelling Presentations and Projects in the Competition
[07:35] The Stages of Funnel
[08:16] Stages of Funnel That Were Common From All Pitches
[10:01] How Should We Do Influencer Marketing?
[10:36] Leveraging UGC To Gain Credibility
[10:47] Where Influence Becomes Important
[11:58] The Biggest No-Brainer For Marketing Today
[12:54] An Example of Simple Lead Magnet Equation
[15:01] Do Your Own Shark Tank
[15:36] The Component that Helps Me Build People Relationship
[16:52] How Can You Start to Better Leverage Influencers? Notable Quotes
Sometimes we really need to dumb down what we are doing.
When I was in high school and thinking about business, it was really about what were my needs? What were the needs of high school friends, and what can I sell to them, right. And I think that these high schoolers had really the same approach just based on their own experiences as to what sort of product that they could sell.
If you think about it in the funnel, in terms of brand awareness, search is a great way to get brand awareness.
it's such a no brainer in 2022 that it still shocks me that a lot of brands still ask, well, what's the ROI? Why do we need to do influencer marketing and it really brings me back to the early days of social media marketing, where people We're asking the same thing. The question isn't, do we need to do influencer marketing? The question is, well, how do we do it?
But at the end of the day, it's going to become more pay to play until you actually have customers where you can republish their content.So until you get to that point, it's really, really hard to break through the noise, starting from zero followers and get that brand awareness that we all want to get on social media. And that's where the influence has become even more important, especially at the beginning, when you don't have brand awareness.
And to me, it was sort of a pat on the back that riding the age of influence, and evangelizing influencer marketing is the wave of the future.
It comes down to a combination of all these. Yu can't have one without the other.
But really, it's the email component that allows me to build that deeper r
Partnership Marketing It's Time to Diversify Your Digital Marketing and Invest in Relationships [Matt Wool Interview]
00:38:10
Of all of the marketing channels that exist, partnership marketing is one of the most under-utilized yet high potential opportunities that exist for businesses today.
Best represented by affiliate marketing, when done right, affiliate marketing provides you with an army of incentivized influencers that are selling on your behalf and only paid when a sale is made on a 24/7 basis.
Furthermore, there are a plethora of other "halo effect" benefits from this type of partnership marketing.
Intrigued? Learn all about partnership from co-author, Matt Wool, who wrote the book on partnership marketing, Moving to Outcomes, and is also the CEO of the leading partnership marketing firm Acceleration Partners.
Key Highlights
[02:21] Introduction to the Podcast Guest, Matt Wool
[03:42] How Matt Got Into Marketing and Writing Book
[06:48] The Issues Matt Found With Affiliate Marketing
[10:47] The Emergence of Influencer and Creator Economy
[14:30] Affiliations on NFTs and Cryptocurrencies
[16:57] What Prompted Matt to Write the Book
[20:39] What is Partnership Marketing?
[21:49] How to Scale This Type of Relationship?
[23:25] How to Get Started
[26:30] Recommended Platforms for Startups
[27:03] Main Areas to be Aware Of
Notable Quotes
And you know, our, our philosophy has long been it's not necessarily should you work with someone, it's more how you worked with someone.
What I think we really see is that this is going to have a significant impact on the overall partnership marketing landscape and One of the things that I think it is going to do is it is going to, in a lot of ways decentralize affiliate and influencer marketing.
There's this potential for these kinds of limitless numbers have like many affiliate programs that are enabled by certain smart contracts over time, which will be available to individual creators and that way, so it's a little bit of a different place that we're playing in, because we're working more with enterprise clients, but I think it's fascinating, and there's a lot that's going to happen there.
The main crux of this book is that we see too many marketers and too many companies with a hugely disproportionate amount of their eggs in one or two baskets, from a marketing budget perspective, right, they are shoveling money into Google, they are shoveling money into meta, whether it's Instagram, or you know, the regular platform, maybe they've got a few other things going in a couple of other channels.
But one thing I think a lot of people forget is affiliate marketing is also good for us.
So having those tiers and really understanding how you are presenting yourself to those publishers, are the keys to scaling the program and effective way.
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