At Email Summit 2012, Luke Thorpe, Multimedia Specialist, MECLABS, grabbed his camera, I grabbed a mic, and we traveled the vast recesses of the expo floor at Caesars Palace to ask attendees and sponsors where the low-hanging fruit is for email marketers. Here’s what they had to say …
I have a good buddy, and our friendship dates way back to middle school. We don’t get to talk on the phone much anymore, but when we do, I really value it. Just getting to focus on him and his BUY VIAGRA! life and see how YOU SHOULD BEGIN WITH CHEAP RALPH LAUREN CLOTHES!
As you can see, the topic of today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is social spam. Social media is, inherently, a conversation. And, some marketers really understand that. They speak to their customers, listen to them, and don’t engage in antisocial media.
Even for the marketers who do get it, it’s so frustrating to deal with social spam. You’re trying to have a real conversation with your customers, and then some knucklehead autobot posts 50 comments about cheap Ralph Lauren clothes.
It’s an issue we deal with here on the MarketingSherpa blog. We use Akismet to filter out obvious spam, and monitor the rest of the comments manually. We have a high standard, so occasionally real comments get accidentally blocked (if that ever happens to you, just email me). Our goal is to make sure you draw value from the conversations taking place on this blog, not to simply up our comment counter.
To help you deal with social spam in your own social media marketing efforts, I talked to a few experts in the field.
The social spam challenge
“Email spam is a well-understood problem for which a large number of commercial solutions exist,” said Mark Risher, co-founder and CEO, Impermium. “Conversely, it’s still early days for social spam. Most social platforms lack an adequate content cleansing solution to address the multiple forms of abuse.”
That is why social spam is so prevalent. Mandi Frishman, Marketing Manager, Make Me Social, ran a quick test for the MarketingSherpa blog.
“I just went to Pinterest and typed ‘eggplant’ into the search bar. Of the first 14 pins, eight were from spam accounts. I’m overwhelmed by the sheer volume of social spam that I see each day, especially when running data pulls on behalf of clients.”
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Of course, Pinterest isn’t the only social sharing website facing this challenge. Tim Howell, Community Manager, Make Me Social, created a brief chart showing the prevalence of spam and Tweet Zombies in the electrical industry.
“We pulled 60 days’ worth of data from Twitter, which is typically the most common source of social spam,” he said.
“In the first pull, we brought in the full, unfiltered flow of posts from Twitter on a wide range of topics, brands and products in the electrical industry,” Tim said. “For the second pull, we applied a few filters to remove the most common signs of spam activity. It’s nearly impossible to remove all spam posts from this data, but even the most basic filters reduced the amount of spam by over 130,000 posts.”
But, you don’t only have to worry about competing with social spam on well-known social networking services — you have to keep your own sites clean as well.
“It not only plagues major platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but it affects the comment sections and forum boards of practically every news site and blog with a decent page rank,” Mark said.
“The Q1 samples we pulled from the Impermium global defense network revealed 4-8% of social Web traffic is spam, up from 2-5% just six months prior. While these numbers may sound relatively small, consider that in 2011, 90% of all social media users experienced some form abuse.”
How can small and medium businesses take advantage of mobile marketing? Aman Devgan, VP of Marketing, Web.com, joined us in the studio for the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action to talk about how you can apply discoveries from recent research by Web.com and MarketingSherpa …
If you’d like to jump ahead in the video, here is what Aman and I discussed:
0:32 – 84% of SMBs saw an increase in new business activity due to their mobile marketing efforts
1:12 – Surprisingly, providing better service to existing customers is a bigger motivator to invest in a mobile presence than attracting more local customers
1:54 – Top 2 hurdles in leveraging mobile marketing
“Focus on what people value.” That is my main takeaway from my interview with Brian Solis, principal, The Altimeter Group. As he sees it, Facebook is a democracy, and you can’t simply shove marketing messages down your followers’ throats (or in this case, into their Timelines) and expect to be successful.
In our 10 minutes together, he discussed so much more, including why many social media marketers are misinterpreting the movie “Moneyball” …
Luke Thorpe, multimedia specialist, MECLABS, and I grabbed Brian Solis after his keynote at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, and he graciously gave us 10 minutes packed with interesting marketing insights.
Here are a few key points in the video, in case you want to jump ahead:
0:09 – Social media marketing metrics and Facebook EdgeRank
1:30 – The unlike button
2:24 – How to find out what your customers want
3:56 – The American Express Link > Like > Love campaign
4:38 – How to talk to business leaders about what really matters in your social media marketing campaign
8:46 – Social media is not just conversations; it is business data
Related Resources:
Email Summit 2012 DVD Combo Special (includes the Brian Solis keynote)
In Social Media, Your Return Represents Your Investment
Social Media Marketing: Finding and winning hyper-social consumers
Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels
We asked for your nominations, tallied up the results, and now we want to know who has earned your vote … for the marketing industry blogs that you find most helpful.
What blogs have made you better at your job? Helped you garner impressive results for your company or clients? Reward those blogs by using the poll feature to vote for your favorites in the poll below, a list of the most-nominated blogs chosen by you, the MarketingSherpa audience.
It’s an interesting list. Some very established industry blogs; some I had personally never heard of before. You can vote in the poll below (in just one category, or in all the categories) and then scroll below the poll for links to these blogs if you’d like to learn more.
The top vote getters will receive the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Award in their category, as well as be invited for a very rare opportunity – to write a guest post on the MarketingSherpa Blog.
UPDATE: Voting has now ended. We’re now tallying up the votes, so be sure to check back later for the winners.
On the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action, I discuss research about content marketing from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition (free excerpt at that link), with Ninan Chacko, Global Chief Executive Officer, PR Newswire …
Here’s a look at what Ninan and I discussed. Feel free to use these links to jump straight to that point in the video.
1:06 – Webpages
1:38 – Social media (other than blogs)
2:28 – Press releases
4:34 – How a press release should look in 2012
6:35 – Using a press release to promote other content marketing channels
8:22 – The benefit of cross-media integration
And here is a closer look at that data from the SEO Benchmark Report …
Content marketing products, by organization size
Related Resources
Brand TV: Using Video to Engage Audiences (via PR Newswire)
Overall Content Marketing Strategy Leads to 2,000% Lift in Blog Traffic, 40% Boost in Revenue
MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition
“It’s not enough that we win; all others must lose.” – Larry Ellison
Personally, I disagree with Larry, and I think that the focus should be on the customer winning. Hopefully that’s often through your product or service offering, but sometimes your competitors can serve customers looking for a solution better than you can. In those cases, I think all parties (your company, your competitor and your customer) are better served by acknowledging that.
In fairness, Larry Ellison is the fifth richest man in the world, so if that’s how you keep score, he has much more credibility than I. On the other hand, he was paraphrasing Genghis Khan with his quote, so I guess it all depends whom you want to emulate with your marketing.
Learning from the competition
But, whether you agree with Larry or me (or even Genghis), I’m sure that we can all see the value in better understanding what competitors are doing.
So you can conduct a competitive analysis for the obvious reasons — to bludgeon the competition and raze their villages. However, you can also conduct a competitive analysis to help you better communicate with your customers about how you can best serve them (and even tell them what you can’t do) while perhaps honing the fine art of “coopetition.”
Moreover, a competitive analysis is an especially helpful tool to help you craft your value proposition.
Free competitive analysis templates
To help you conduct a competitive analysis, we’ve created a few free templates loosely based on the Summary Competitive Analyses we conduct for our own Research Partners here at MECLABS.
Read more…
In our most recent episode of Marketing Research in Action, I discussed how lead nurturing could help your B2B marketing efforts with Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, based on data from her 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt here).
Here is a look at some of the research Jen and I discussed with direct links to that part of the video.
0:38 – Organizations that are engaged in lead nurturing realize higher ROIs on their lead generation efforts.
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2:01 – Top tactics for creating engaging lead nurturing content
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5:40 – Frequency of lead nurturing touches
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Related Resources
Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex B2B sale
Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails
Lead Nurturing: You could be losing as much as 80% of your sales; here’s how you keep them
I’m a fan of gallows humor. So, as a Borders shareholder (until it went bankrupt), I love the sign a Borders store employee posted as the chain was going out of business …
Sorry
No Public Restroom
Try Amazon.com
It’s hard to deny that e-commerce has significant advantages over the traditional brick-and-mortar store:
But now it’s time for B&Ms to fight back … at least when it comes to that last advantage. As this infographic created by Kaci Bower, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, shows, 72% of smartphone users look for information on the go.
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I bet you could get a lot more actual work done without meetings, eh?
An example of this is David Meerman Scott’s answer to the question, “How are you so prolific?” He lists several reasons, but my favorite is, “I don’t have to sit in any damn meetings (unless I want to).”
However, you are probably not like Mr. Meerman Scott. If you are the average marketer, you have to sit through many, many meetings. Let’s take a look at how to make your meetings more effective and efficient (and feel free to pass this advice anonymously to the biggest time wasters in your organization).
The problem – unorganized meetings
Of course, this isn’t the only problem, but one major issue torpedoing many meetings is that they are unorganized and the facilitator put in little prep work on the front end. This is why so many meetings are ineffective, underutilized, unnecessary and just plain, well, time wasters.
To help you improve your own meetings, here is a free meeting agenda template. It’s what we use here at MECLABS. Feel free to replace our logo with your own if you use it internally or externally.
Let’s walk through the elements of the template. This advice isn’t based on research or reporting, simply what I’ve personally learned in my career. And I’d love to hear what you’ve learned as well.
