MarketingSherpa Blog

Cisco’s social efforts regarding Cisco Live, a popular event the company throws yearly, was recently covered by a MarketingSherpa case study. Kathleen Mudge, Social Media Marketing Manager and consultant, Cisco, agreed to speak further with us on how she views and uses specific social networks.

With the effort featured in the case study, Cisco was looking for a way to extend the excitement that surrounded the event through the entire year using social media channels.

Facebook proved to be the tactic with the greatest reach with Cisco’s audience, above LinkedIn, which was a bit surprising for a B2B effort.

Mudge’s view of the results is that while Facebook pulls in a larger audience, they are both effective in accomplishing her communication goals.

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If someone were to enter your name into Google, what results would they find?

Establishing your personal brand online has become increasingly important, as more HR professionals and hiring managers turn to search engines for information on applicants. Some reports indicate upward of 90% of recruiters regularly research candidates on Google.

Moreover, realize that your competition has already taken action to improve their search engine results. According to ExecuNet’s 2012 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report, 67% of executives have actively worked to become more visible online.

These executives are working on their results, but what about you? In a best case scenario, you will earn a few results on one of the top search engine result pages (SERPs). Worst case scenario? You find that you share a name with a slew of more established, accomplished and published people — at least according to Google results.

So, what can you do to improve your search engine results? Here are three tips for boosting the search ranking of your name.

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There are many valuable social media platforms for marketing: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ being the most well-known and popular. But, arguably the hottest and most talked about platform right now is Pinterest.

From its website: “Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.” At least a little bit confusing from a marketer’s standpoint, right?

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I recently had the chance to speak with two self-described Pinterest “power users,” who also happen to be marketers with some ideas on how practitioners should approach the social platform.

Jessica Best, Community Director, emfluence, a digital marketing services company, and Tiffany Monhollon, Senior Manager of Content Marketing, ReachLocal , an online marketing company, provided their insight on Pinterest.

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Living in the U.S., we often use social media to reach domestic customers. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were popular here first, and that sticks with us. But as social networking expands worldwide, the size of the audience we could be reaching has multiplied.

Focusing exclusively on the U.S. would ignore 80% of the people on Facebook and Twitter, according to “It’s a Social World,” a report from comScore. On LinkedIn, it would ignore more than 60% of the audience (Note: You’ll need to provide an email address to download the report. It’s worth it.)

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The report is full of mindboggling stats like, “social networking captures nearly 1 out of every 5 minutes spent online worldwide,” and “social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population, representing 1.2 billion users.”

If your company sells anywhere outside the U.S. (or ever hopes to), and you’re marketing through social media, then the report points to a world of opportunity. Social penetration among online audiences is above 90% in 35 of the 43 countries measured.

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As a culture, we are rarely separated from our mobile phones. We take them to work, grocery stores, restaurants, the gym — you name it. Whenever there’s a timeout at a kid’s soccer game, mom pulls out her phone to decide where to take the kids afterward.

In April 2011, Google found that 89% of smartphone users fiddled with the device throughout the day. Pew Research Center found that 42% of cell-owning adults used their devices to cure boredom, and that figure hit 72% in the 18-to-29 age category.

R.J. Talyor, Senior Director, Mobile Products, ExactTarget, summed up the typical consumer attitude toward mobile phones when he shared the following image last week at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012.

“It’s a great metaphor for the consumers we are marketing to these days,” Talyor said. “They have the phones almost embedded in their arms, always with them.”

Rather than assuming what people will be doing at certain times of day and building a mobile marketing campaign around that assumption, Talyor suggests that marketers try targeting “granular moments,” or specific situations the audience encounters.

“How can I take advantage about the location of that individual, and how can I take advantage of what I know about that individual’s market?” Talyor said.

He provided these two examples.

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Yesterday’s blog post featured the thoughts of Larry Drebes, founder and CEO of Janrain, a social user Web management platform, on the social media channel and marketing over the next six to 12 months.

Today we have insight and advice from Loren McDonald, Vice President of Industry Relations, Silverpop, an email and marketing automation vendor.

Loren will be joining us next week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, and will participate in the innovation panel Wednesday afternoon, February 8^th.

Social media marketing is an important channel for both B2B and B2C marketers, and Loren offers up a valuable perspective on the topic and some actionable takeaways to maximize that channel over the rest of this year.

This chart illustrates Silverpop research on where all marketers are utilizing social media:

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Here are Loren’s thoughts on social media marketing:

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The landing tab for the MarketingSherpa group on LinkedIn is called “Discussions.” Except, it was pretty much false advertising because there wasn’t a lot of discussion happening. It was mostly social spam … blatant self-promotion.

And this self-promotion went far beyond pushing products or special offers, it was promotion of blog posts, webinars, articles, etc … not quite as bad as promotional offers or the SEO phishing we get from comments here on the MarketingSherpa blog.

But still, it prevented conversation. So, Bethany Caudell, Customer Service, MECLABS, and I sat down to discuss the right approach forward. Beth manages the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn group, along with the MarketingExperiments Optimization group on LinkedIn.

Social media shades of gray

When it comes to managing social media communities, there are always shades of gray as to what, exactly, is appropriate. Then, once you set ground rules, the social media platform changes on you (ah, innovation).

For example, the challenge I’m talking about here only arose because LinkedIn did away with the “News” tab in its groups, leaving members with no dedicated place to post links they thought were newsworthy. So on the one hand, I did feel for them.

On the other hand, again, all of this “news” was killing the true point of the tab – discussions.

So at the end of the day we bit the bullet, sent out a warning letter about the new change, and Beth whipped out her virtual machete and started cleaning the groups of all that social spam. I expected some negative kickback, but I was extremely surprised when the feedback was overwhelming positive (in case you have to clean house yourself one day, you can see copy for the letter I sent using that link as well).

So the question arises … how do you combat social spam? How far should marketers go as policemen and women for their LinkedIn Groups, Facebook fan pages, and the like? These social media pages, originally meant for discussion, can be easily filled with junk thanks to a self-promoting audience … or simply inappropriate content.

Below you’ll find a very basic six-step process to help with your own efforts.

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It’s a tough job market out there. According to Bernhart Associates’ Quarterly Digital and Direct Marketing Employment Report, only 40% of companies reported plans to add staff in the fourth quarter, down from 52% at the beginning of the year. And while decreasing numbers may tempt you to apply for every marketing job you do find, that’s certainly not the most effective way to conduct your job search.

You know from your marketing experience that “batch and blast” and “dialing for dollars” doesn’t work, so why spam potential employers? Instead, prioritize your job search by focusing on positions that will get you on the career path you have in mind to effectively get the most out of each resume you send.

This is where Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People comes in. While not a job seeker advice book, Covey’s book does outline seven habits that easily and wholly apply to the job hunting process. Over the course of four blog posts, I will explain each habit and provide useful ways to apply each to your job search.

I have also spoken with Scott Howard, Executive Director of Operations, MECLABS, and a big fan of Covey’s book. Scott oversees all operations across MECLABS Primary and Applied Research groups, including hiring approximately 60 new employees over the next year. He was kind enough to share some additional job seeking tips you can derive from the “7 Habits.”

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Last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter article covered social media advertising. In gathering information for that story, I had the chance to interview three social media experts. One area that came up in each interview, but didn’t make it into the story, was Google+.

Obviously, that platform wasn’t included in the article because Google+ does not currently offer advertising.  But, since Google is such a major player in online advertising, and its struggles with social media are well-known (see: Wave, Orkut, Buzz), it was interesting to find out what our three practitioners thought about the latest splash in the social media world.

Google’s social track record is not great and the jury is very much still out on how effective Google+ will be in regard to making inroads into Facebook’s channel domination. Even Orkut, which was quite popular in specific countries such as India, Iran, Brazil and Estonia, has been steamrolled by Facebook in recent years.

With all this in mind, Google is still Google, and it is worth a few minutes of your time to think about how Google+ might fit into an overall digital marketing strategy. Read more…

You have likely experimented with social sharing buttons in your emails. You know, they’re the buttons readers click to share your emails on Facebook, Twitter or another social network.

And how’s that working for you?

All kidding aside, many email marketers struggle to get the audience to use these buttons. As you can see in the chart below from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, “social sharing buttons” are one of the least effective tactics you can use to build your list.

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