By Alexandra Reid
Yesterday’s Zone5ive was a hot ticket. In fact, the near-capacity crowd Tweeted about it so much it trended on Twitter. The event’s success can be owed to the fact that co-presenters, our own Francis Moran and Kathryn Schwab of Cyan Solutions, demonstrated what they were talking about by producing a content-rich presentation that they – and attendees and event organizers from OCRI – promoted aggressively, predominantly through social media.
In their presentation, Moran and Schwab laid out the necessary ingredients that companies need to garner media coverage in both traditional and new media. According to Moran and Schwab, the two key elements are strategy and content. Companies must have their PR resources – either internal or external – research and then target relevant media and provide them with irresistibly rich content in order to ensure their stories get told. Blasting news releases out in hopes of getting covered simply don’t work. The media landscape is shrinking, budgets are being slashed, and the pressure on journalists to produce unique and brilliant stories is weighing down more than ever before. Don’t make them do any more work than they have to. Plan out your story and package it for them. By providing the right journalist with the right story at the right time, you can vastly increase your chances of getting your clients’ story told. New media channels are no different. By providing the right audience in the right forum with the right story at the right time, you can help ensure your content gets shared through reposts, retweets, comments and mentions, which can also boost the relevance of your content in the eyes of journalists.
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By Alexandra Reid
Last Saturday, I experienced one of the greatest excursions of my life: dog sledding down hills, through forests and over a frozen lake for an entire afternoon. It was a very cold day with heavy snowfall, so my boyfriend and I bundled up accordingly in balaclavas, long johns, layered shirts, snow pants, heavy jackets, double socks, high boots, thick mitts and scarves. All prepared and tucky-warm, we ventured out into the rolling, snow-covered hills of Quebec’s backcountry.
It was here that we experienced our first roadblock. Our car is rear-wheel drive and struggled to get up the hills. We spun out, slid side-to-side and nearly ended up in a ditch before we made it to the final and steepest hill before our destination. We looked up the hill and admitted our defeat. I called the folks at Nordik Adventures to tell them we couldn’t make it.
“That’s not a problem at all,” said France Robertson, co-owner of the business along with her husband, Eric. “I’ll come and pick you up in my truck. Be there in five.”
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By Alexandra Reid
Quora’s rise to popularity is abuzz on Twitter, blogs and other media sites as a surge of people are trying out the social networking tool for the first time. Poking around the site myself this past week, my first impressions found it to be rather unintuitive. It seems that I am not alone in my opinion, as questions about how to use Quora and why it is important are being frequently asked, rather ironically, on the site itself. More importantly for my ongoing social media research for clients, I noticed that very little discussion has developed to provide insight as to why Quora is important for B2B companies and how it could be used to best effect.
First, what exactly is Quora?
Quora is “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” Like Wikipedia, Quora is a collaborative effort, where users are meant to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow until almost everything that everyone wants to know is available in the system. Over the last couple of weeks, Quora’s traffic has doubled, likely making it the new “breakout site” of 2011.
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By Alexandra Reid
Facebook has raised US$500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, according to the New York Times.
The injection of cash values Facebook at about $50 billion. The social network now has a bigger capitalization than Boeing, at $48.7 billion, and Time Warner, at about $36 billion. The deal has reportedly fueled the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s examination of the growing trade of privately held shares of well-known social networking sites. The concern is that Goldman is planning to craft a “special purpose vehicle” that may be able to dodge the 500-shareholder rule, which requires a company to disclose certain financial information to the public, even if it hasn’t filed for an initial public offering. Through this vehicle, the investment would be managed solely by Goldman and therefore would be considered just one investment, even though it could potentially pool investments from thousands of clients.
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By Alexandra Reid
Delaney Turner, Worldwide Social Media Marketing Manager for IBM Business Analytics, presented his lessons from the launch of IBM Cognos 10 at Zone5ive yesterday afternoon. Turner, also a primary contributor to Performance Perspectives Blog, admited he was a skeptic of social media and that he initially didn’t even see the point. However, he stood yesterday as a devout convert to the business value of social media as he discussed the success of the Cognos 10 launch. Here are Turner’s five core elements for social media success for business.
1. Find a problem that you can solve and measure the results
Turner said that, before adopting social media, the number of unique monthly visitors to IBM’s website were going down and that its newsletter was seeing diminishing click-through rates. To solve this problem, Turner built and delivered a social media model that would drive traffic to IMB’s content. He used a model similar to the marketing funnel as a starting point to increase top-line traffic to the site through social media awareness building. The goal was to turn views from social media sites into business deals as people clicked-through to offers and completed an offer form.
Twitter proved to be the perfect platform to share these offers with prospects, giving Turner the ability to instantly track click-throughs. According to Turner, Twitter can:
- Act as the connection point between various web properties;
- Bring new people into the conversation;
- Provide insights into what clients are thinking;
- Keep visitors on your site(s); and
- Increase the chances of visitors filling out forms.
2. Build a model that includes measurement
Turner’s biggest challenge was to generate a significant amount of buzz before the launch of Cognos 10 while also working within legal parameters that forbade him sharing certain content. While social media would allow him to reach the most people with a limited amount of information, measurement was needed to understand and steer the campaign’s impact. His plan was cross-functional, incorporating blogs, Twitter and a website. Essentially, Turner steered traffic by creating great content for the Cognos 10 blog, sharing the content on Twitter and linking both channels back to the Cognos 10 website.
According to Turner, a social media model should be:
- Guided by strategic and operational goals;
- Driven by an engaged and committed team;
- Fed by the best content;
- Enabled by the right technology; and
- Measured, scalable and relatable.
3. Find your audience and be findable
It is clear that social media is changing people’s purchasing decisions and the way businesses operate. According to a report from Forrester, 91 percent of tech buyers use social media and 69 percent use it for business purposes. Turner said that finding and engaging your audience is a combination of using easy tools and good old-fashioned legwork. You’ve got to put in the time to find out where your audience is and watch what people are saying before you engage them. You’ve then got to set up your sites where your audience is and use what you’ve learned about your audience to engage them.
Some tools that Turner suggests that can help you learn about your audience and engage them include:
4. Create killer content
According to a study conducted by Hubspot, Junta42 and King Fish Media, 85 percent of people surveyed said original content is critical to social media success. Therefore it is imperative that you create a content strategy for your business. Turner said it is a good idea to keep a close eye on the editorial calendars from the publications that your customers read and where you publish advertisements. Find trends and see where you can match blog posts to the publications’ stories.
5. Don’t underestimate quick wins
Every win counts in social media, even the small ones, said Turner. In social media, people want to interact with people and are delighted when a business representative hears them and responds to them in a timely manner. If someone is having an issue with a product or service, a quick and helpful response can be the key to maintaining longtime customer loyalty and contentment.
Turner said that starting out in social media is a lot like walking into a cocktail party; everyone seems to be friends already and you have to exert some effort and mingle to get accepted. However, once you start having conversations with the other guests, you begin to form your own community. Unlike a cocktail party, however, most companies need about two years of social media commitment before they really figure it out. Take your time, listen and learn before you leap, and have a solid strategy for content creation, management and measurement in place. These are the keys to your social media success.
Yesterday’s Zone5ive was a hot ticket. In fact, the near-capacity crowd Tweeted about it so much it trended on Twitter. The event’s success can be owed to the fact that co-presenters, our own Francis Moran and Kathryn Schwab of Cyan Solutions, demonstrated what they were talking about by producing a content-rich presentation that they – and attendees and event organizers from OCRI – promoted aggressively, predominantly through social media.
