Better Business Blog

The 3 Essential Qualities of a TRUE Social Media Expert

No, really, I'm awesome with this social media stuff...

Right now, there are literally thousands of businesses out there in the world looking for social media help, advice, and guidance. And like any other industry, the social media realm is full of “legit experts,” “not-so-legit experts,” and “please-call-me-a-guru-even-though-I’m-not experts.”

Personally, over the last 3 years, I’ve seen many “experts” in this industry come and go. I’ve also seen many companies hire smart people and get huge results while at the same time there have been handfuls of others hire supposed “experts” that have done nothing but put a hurt on the company’s P & L statement with their false promises and frankly stupid social media strategies.

Throughout this process, I’ve seen definitive trends and qualities that dictate the most successful social media (including content marketing here) experts and the ones that might talk big but have very little to back it up.

3 Essential Qualities of a True Social Media Expert

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B2B Lead Generation vs B2B Advertising: What You Need to Know

Among paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.

For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.

In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions.

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12 Timeless Link Building Tips for Business Blogs

Link Building for Business Blogs Doesn't Need to Be Risky

As a key component of a hub and spoke online marketing strategy, blogs can be very effective for social media network engagement, online PR, customer service, and as search engine optimization assets. While there are numerous cases studies of business blogs (I like to think Online Marketing Blog is one) providing tremendous value, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them is in proportion to how well you know how to use them.  One of the common areas of lost opportunity with business blogs is link building.

Despite Panda, Penguin and maybe someday “Zebra?”, updates from Google to further filter out what constitutes useful content and links on the web, links will always be valuable for attracting traffic.  Some online marketers chase exploits, tricks or shortcuts only to get spanked by a black and white named-animal update from Google.  Why not spend that creativity on something of value and competitive advantage that withstands the advancing filters applied by search engines?

Here are a few timeless tips for building natural links that will attract and engage customers to your business blog:

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Small Business in a Tizzy Over Big Google Changes?

The latest Google shakeup, called the Penguin update, has some online small business owners scratching their heads. The purpose, experts say, is to punish over-optimization, but what does the change really mean in practice and what specifically does it mean for your business? Don’t panic! We’ve rounded up some of the best resources on the Web to help you understand things better.

Inside Penguin

From the horse’s mouth. Want to know what’s really behind the new changes at Google? Why not start with a post from Google’s Matt Cutts about what’s going on from the search engine’s perspective. Google Webmaster Central Blog

Overview of the latest update. So, what is the latest Google update all about? What does it mean, why do you need to be concerned about it and what will it ultimately mean to you? Read a detailed look at the changes in store. Business2Community

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How to Create and Grow Your Influence on a Global Social Web

We are living in a world where influence is migrating from offline to online.

The ability to influence is also moving from local to global. Its reach is also transitioning to mobile devices.

Reputation and influence can now be gained faster and reach further than in any other time in history.

One definition of Influence is “the capacity to have an effect on the character, development or behavior of someone or something”

To be truly successful you must have the ability and power to influence.

Mass Media was the Platform

The development and popularity of movies and mass media over the past century has provided people such as politicians, business people and movie stars the platforms for creating and sustaining influence.

But we are still used to the traditional paradigms and ideas of influence. In the past it was vital to enrol at the “right” school or university, attend the right networking events or cocktail parties or belong to the right golf club

These are still important but the power of online influence and new media is starting to make itself felt as the social web shares ideas and content globally in real time.

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10 Top Trends in Social Media

I visited Italy recently and as we know the Italians are a very stylish bunch. They seem to know what fashion is really about.

They can wear a scarf with fabulous flair, choose the cool hat that sets off the outfit or select a pair of sexy shoes that make them look like a fashion model and that is just the men!

The Italians have taken “style” to a level that the rest of the world can only aspire to.

Trends in Shoes

Now on the topic of shoes it appears that there is a trend that if it doesn’t stop very soon, it is going to lead to many injuries and even possible death as fashionista women fall from great heights after stumbling in their 30 centimeter high heels!

This will lend a whole new meaning to the term “Fashion Tragics“.

I have to admit though that the shoes in the windows of the fashion brand stores of Rome and Florence were not just fashion items but objects of style, art and creativity. Just not very comfortable or sensible to wear but who said that fashion should be sensible.

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3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your Business Website

If you’re running a company website without an analytics dashboard, you may as well be stumbling around in the dark. Building a viable and sustainable web presence in any industry is all about understanding the needs of your users and tailoring your service to fit their needs — how can you do that if you don’t even know what your users are looking at or how they got to your website?

The good news is that analytics dashboards simple to implement, and they also come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit the needs and goals of your small business. While some people swear by Google Analytics or the tracking plug-ins found organically within their specific web hosting or content managing service (think WordPress analytics), there’s a lot of information you may not be getting from these sources. For example, while Google Analytics does a great job tracking individual page vies, it doesn’t necessarily break down any meaningful social sharing or referrals. You may want to know why a specific webpage on your site garners major traffic, but Google Analytics will only note that it comes from Facebook.

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A Clever Way to Spy on Your Competitors

Get to know what your rivals are up to online. Don't worry--it's legal.

Knowledge, as they say, is gold—particularly when it comes to knowing what your competitors are up to.

So I'm going to share a little golden tip on how to use the Web to spy on your competitors. Don't worry, it's perfectly legal.

One way to dig up details on a rival is to mine its link-building strategy. You want to look at inbound links, which are links coming to that website directly from outside sources.

What is the value of these links?

Here's what the Google Webmaster Central Blog has to say about inbound links: "Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they're also one of the positive signals to Google about your site's importance."

Those "positive signals" result in a higher ranking in search results for keywords relating to the website. There are a number of ways businesses acquire inbound links: getting press coverage, creating content that is picked up by other sites–in other words, by getting attention.

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Putting the Social Back into Social Media: 40 Ways to Build a Loyal Audience

Is your blog a lonely place?

Maybe no one is visiting. Or, if they visit, maybe they don’t comment.

Maybe they don’t share your post on social networking sites. Or they don’t subscribe to your email list.

Or maybe you’ve got the big problem — you can’t convert the traffic you do get into buying customers.

Yesterday we talked about creating the kind of content that attracts a loyal audience. But the problem doesn’t always lie with your content. Your content could be truly useful and valuable. But without one critical element, you could find yourself writing to the wind for years.

What is that one element?

And how do you use it to build an engaged and responsive audience?

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Setting Your Business Free Through the Practice of Systematic Delegation

After owning a business for over twenty years now, here’s something I firmly believe. Your business is worthless until it can operate without you.

Now that may seem a bit harsh to some, but until you’ve created a system that allows others to bring in the business and provide the products and services without the need for you to make it happen, you’re stuck in a job. It may even be a well paying job, but it’s probably not one that you could convince someone else to come in a buy some day.

In many ways, your business is stuck to the degree you can successfully delegate the work you do today to others. Others may mean key employees or it may mean other companies or virtual support staff, but your goal as the owner of the business should be to actually rise to the level of CEO.

We could all argue about what CEO work is, but I’m guessing you spend large parts of your day not doing it. I get that, the printer gets jammed, the package needs to be shipped, the copy must be proofread, and then it’s time to go home.

One of keys to growing your business to the point where you can rise to the level of CEO, the place where you can focus on the highest payoff work, is to adopt a mindset of systematic delegation.

The first step in creating this mindset is to analyze the work you currently do each day and assign a value to it in a way that creates priority.

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5 Best Practices for Creating Viral Branded Videos

 

Chris Schreiber is vice president of marketing at Sharethrough. Chris has managed communications for key social media initiatives at Google and helped drive content strategy for major entertainment brands like Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

There has never been more opportunity for marketers to generate creative video campaigns that go viral. YouTube recently noted that more than 500 years worth of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook every day, and 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute.

And yet, going viral still remains an elusive outcome for the vast majority of brand campaigns. What’s missing?

While many people have an opinion about what causes videos to go viral, there is now a growing body of knowledge based on publisher data analysis, YouTube trends and academic research that can help marketers understand what viral marketing is really about. Here are a few great insights to consider when creating a brand video that will thrive on the social web.

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The Three Essential Steps to a Socially Engaged Enterprise

 

Social media is democratizing marketing and is enabling the aspirational brands to challenge major brands for global mind and market share.

The CEO in most organisations has been raised on a diet of mass media and traditional marketing. Their paradigm in the past has often been to stick with the known because it was safe.

The gap between how companies market with media and how customers consume media is significant. In some industries, especially  technology, up to 90% of buying decisions start with an online search. Despite this, the marketing budget for digital media as a share of overall advertising spend is only 8%.

The CEO and the Socially Engaged Enterprise

Slowly but surely the “C-Suite” generation is realizing that social media is much more than just having a Facebook page and are starting to wake up to the fact that a well planned and resourced social media marketingt strategy can lead to closer engagement with customers that is changing customer  service and how the business sells and markets its brand.

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7 Practical Marketing Productivity Links

This week on The Lede …

• When Should We Add Marketing?
• The Best Procrastination Tip Ever
• Take a Hot Shower. Get Creative.
• Want More Social Shares? Don’t Ignore These 3 Things …
• The 13 Minute, 33 Second Website
• 20 Days to a High-Quality, Highly-Engaged Twitter Following
• One Piece of Indispensable Writing Advice

If you want to grab more useful links (than the seven we highlight here) every week, follow @copyblogger on Twitter.

When Should We Add Marketing?
Mr. Godin’s answer to this question is simple, but not easy. He argues that the age we now inhabit has turned the tables on the discipline of marketing products, services, and ideas. The Mad Men are gone, as is the way they brought products into the public eye.

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The Total Package: A Marketing Message That Resonates

Your company focus and marketing message should be so clear that it’s driven home in every opportunity you get. When clients experience:

• your print media (business cards, posters, flyers, etc.)
• your online media (websites and social media sites)
• your office space

There should be a consistency in the message and that’s where your branding pieces come in to play. But before you start printing things, the message has to be core and clear.

What is your company about? 

Can you explain it in a simple to understand mission statement or tagline? Be clear about:

1. what your company is
2. who it serves and
3. how it gets it done

If you do that, you can relay this standard to your team and this clear message becomes a measuring stick in your business. If you don’t live up to it, then you’re off track and you know it. And when you know, then you can do something about it.

To get to the core of your company, tackle it from different angles. Understand what your company looks like and feels like from a client’s perspective. Then, dig a little deeper and find out what your prospects see and feel. But don’t stop there.

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5 Easy Ways to Get Started On 5 Different Social Networks

 

Let’s face it, there are a lot of social networks out there and more are popping up every day. For a small business owner, that can get a little intimidating. If only there was an easy way to start getting involved in each. One little thing or activity that could help spur a future of more engaged results and interaction.

Why not start right here?

Below are five ways to ease your way into five different social networks.

1. Twitter

Twitter is a great platform for small business owners who need to get their message out there, but don’t necessarily have the resources to do it through more traditional channels. Twitter can get you that network by investing time, not dollars. Each time you send a tweet it’s blasted out to the people in your network, who then have the ability to share your content with their unique network and so on. The stronger the network that you build, the greater potential reach for your content.

So where do you start? By building a local audience. How?

 

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In a world overflowing with information, what is the key to curation? [Video]

Today, Percolate’s co-founder Noah Brier sent me the first in a series of videos explaining the shifts we’re seeing in the world of content creation. “Curation has exploded with the growth of Twitter, Tumblr and now Pinterest. In this video, we wanted to try to get into the heads of some of our favorite curators to understand what makes them tick,” he explains.

Read More: In a world overflowing with information, what is the key to curation? [Video]

Psych! 5 Brain Tricks to Make Customers Buy

Want to increase your revenue? It's time to get smarter about how your customers' minds really work, suggests a new book.

Fact No. 1: People aren't always rational thinkers. In truth, research shows that a huge amount of decision-making is actually based on subconscious factors.

In both his new book, Brainfluence, and in a recent interview, Dooley offered several ways to use "neuromarketing" to do a better job persuading consumers.

 

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12 Lessons from KONY 2012 from Social Media Power Users

The KONY 2012 video has clocked more than 43 million views in only two days on YouTube (and millions more since appearing on Vimeo two weeks ago), which is fairly amazing considering 1) it’s about something most people have never heard of and 2) it’s a half-an-hour long. (The average viral video on YouTube is two minutes or less.) This earnest effort to bring Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony to justice and free the thousands of “invisible children” that he has abducted and pressed into soldiering and sex-slavery has encountered a fair amount of blowback as well.

Read More: 12 Lessons from KONY 2012 from Social Media Power Users

Does Your Business Need a DBA?

Have you ever wondered about the meaning behind those seemingly endless listings of ‘Fictitious Business Name’ entries in the newspaper classifieds? Do you know if your business needs to file one? Read on to learn all about the DBA or Fictitious Business name.

Fictitious Business Name: An Overview

Sometimes called a Fictitious Business Name, Doing Business As (DBA), assumed business name, or trade name, these filings let the public know the true owner of a business. Note that I’ll be using DBA and Fictitious Business Name interchangeably throughout this article.

Read More: Does Your Business Need a DBA?

How to Harness the Power of LinkedIn – INFOGRAPHIC

A presentation on the topic of how to cook a chocolate tart is  going to “bomb”at a cheese maker’s  convention.

 

It will be the wrong audience for an interesting topic, but the cheesemakers didn’t pay $1,200 for a conference ticket to hear information about “Tarts”!

A paying participant at a car dealer expo will want to hear about horsepower and handbrakes and will either leave the hall or fall asleep if the speakers start talking about knitting and slipper making.

Read More: How to Harness the Power of LinkedIn – INFOGRAPHIC

What You Need to Know About Using Hashtags on Twitter

If you're new to Twitter, or even if you've been using it for years, you may wonder what all those words preceded by the # sign are. They're hashtags. And you should consider using them if you want to potentially get more out of your experience.

Problem is, many people don't use hashtags correctly. Here's a primer on hashtags, plus some recommendations for using them effectively for your business.

 

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What Companies Need To Know About Leveraging Facebook Timeline For Brands

Now that Facebook Timeline is available for brands, companies have access to a compelling new marketing tool.

It allows brands to make an even bolder statement, and engage users in a whole new way.

Companies like Starbucks and Red Bull have already rolled out their new Pages, and everyone else has until March 30 to make the switch.

Here's everything you need to know about using Timeline for your brand:

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How to Build Great Collaborations

The power of cooperation and comedy to make useful products.

As much as we may love the romantic idea of creativity as a solo, heroic activity, the truth more often is that innovation requires collaboration. We need other people to refine, develop, and test our ideas; that's one of the reasons we do so much work in teams.

Read More: How to Build Great Collaborations

Four Keys to Building a Successful Social Network

Social networking is big business. Based on trading on SharesPost, Facebook has a valuation of about $98 billion, though the enthusiasm also exists for other social media companies, such as Zynga, which has a valuation over $9 billion. Of course, the social game maker has built its tremendous business on the Facebook platform.

While leveraging a social network can be smart (here’s a recent piece where I discussed this), there still are opportunities to create independent social networks.

Read More: Four Keys to Building a Successful Social Network

10 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using -- Now

Social media is everywhere. It's in our homes, places of worship, schools and, of course, our businesses. Everywhere you look, people are using social media and are talking about it. And it seems that every week a new type of social site pops up.

And as the number of social networking sites grows, so does the number of services that are created to measure, track and monitor those services. What's a marketing professional to do?

Read More: 10 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using -- Now