By Alexandra Reid
Social media has become an integral part of the marketing mix for new companies. Startups are employing these valuable channels to promote themselves, receive market feedback, interact with key industry players, and offer relatively inexpensive customer support to beta testers and other early adopters of their technologies.
Yet despite these benefits, many startups aren’t allocating the resources necessary to support social media initiatives until after the product is released, their first customers are established, and they begin seeing revenue. As with all marketing activities, social media should be regarded as an investment that will generate profit. And just like launching a new product, social media requires a runway to set up the strategy and channels and develop the audience and content to succeed.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are the Guardian, Information Age, MarketingSherpa, Social Media Examiner and Fast Company.
UK’s technology, design and startup blogs ranked by influence
Eloqua has published its latest U.K. edition of Blog Tree, designed by the specialists at JESS3, where blogs covering topics including technology, design and startups are ranked according to their influence.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
I’m a huge advocate of social media and how it helps bridge new relationships and strengthen existing ones, but I think it’s bad practice to rely on it as a sole means of communicating with others.
I’m a community manager today, but my background is in journalism. One of the first lessons I learned from the veteran journalists who were my mentors was the importance of meeting my sources face-to-face. This is because the human face and body reveal huge amounts of information that can’t be received over the telephone or email (social media wasn’t such a hot topic back then). Some information could be subtle, such as false confidence, while other cues could be blatantly obvious, such as a facial tick, shifting eyes or a bouncing knee that could reveal discomfort or even dishonesty. Even the layout of an office, clothing, personal hygiene and other such visual signals could bring more valuable information to a story.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Humans have used images to tell stories for millennia, beginning with the rock art, tree carvings, and even tattoos of our ancient ancestors. Since the birth of the practice, marketers have used images as a powerful communications method for company branding and to influence the purchasing decisions of other businesses as well as mass populations of people. It should therefore come as no surprise that images have recently risen as a focal point in our most modern communications practices.
There’s no doubt that social media is becoming more visual. The rise of Pinterest, new developments at Vimeo, the domination of YouTube, the proliferation of new image sharing tools, and Facebook’s new Timeline developments and recent acquisition of Instagram demonstrate that social sites are both acknowledging and encouraging a more visual web.
As Social Media B2B explains, “Facebook already told us that photos and videos are the most important types of content because they encourage the most engagement.”
“In a general sense, (Facebook’s) acquisition (of Instagram) on the heels of the dramatic growth of Pinterest in the last few months is a massive reflection of just how fast the Social-Stream is becoming visual in nature, meaning evolving social engagement driven purely around visual media, not text — and just how valuable that will inevitably be to every major participant in the social media landscape,” Michael Downing, founder and CEO of social video service Tout, told ReadWriteWeb. “This is a huge endorsement of the shift to the visual web and visual conversation in a social media framework.”
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Introduced at Social Media Breakfast as the guy Klout calls an “authority on shoes,” Ottawa Tourism’s director of digital marketing, Nick Iannitti, is attempting to do what my fellow Ottawans might consider the impossible: change the perception that our beloved city is “safe and boring.”
As you may have guessed, he is employing the powers of digital marketing to influence potential tourists to come to the city. Mainly, he is aligning social media with a creative content marketing strategy to promote Ottawa as a destination and to encourage people to book vacations through the Ottawa Tourism website.
According to Iannitti, a city like Ottawa should be regarded as a very large brand with something to offer everybody. In Ottawa specifically, there are three broad categories of potential tourists:
Read More
