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18 Feb

Is Social Media Marketing Worth the Effort?

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Growth of Social Media is staggering but are the returns worth the effort?

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months.  We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alexa Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.

But It Does Takes Effort

Effective Social Media marketing does take effort.  Why because it involves engaging people, its not about SELL SELL SELL.  Its about engagement with interesting content, discussions and even etiquette.

Social Media is just that its social!

Content

People find interesting and informative content appealing.  Rarely do they find 100% sales literature appealing.  Rather they would rather read or view material that informs, explains or entertains.

Generally blogs provide the interesting content and web sites the more specific sales information.  However producing interesting and engaging content articles for your blog does take time and effort.  Allowing 3- 4 hours a week to write articles for the blog is reasonable planning guide.

The type of blog articles you write you should be informative, engaging or entertaining not in your face sales.  For example, if you are a Party Rental/  Hire Company, write articles about how to plan an event , eg a backyard wedding etc.  Or in this case we are writing about social media marketing, not selling our hire and rental business management software that has integrated social media marketing.

One of key point to remember to seed in your key words in to the article.  Blogs are also good for using less frequently used words associated with your business as well.

Let People Know About Your Blog Article

This is the social part of social media marketing.

Having written an engaging article you need to let people know about it.  This is where Twitter and Facebook really come in to play. However you need to invest time and effort in building up your Twitter and Facebook following.  More relevant followers means more people likely to read your post.

However communities take time to build, you need to invest time in listening and responding to what they are saying.  That is being a good community member.  This can take more than a couple of hours per week probably longer realistically if you are serious.


Effort Versus Return

So let us say you spend four to five hours per week on writing blog content and building your social media following then you need to have a return.

Interestingly Nielson cited that around 17% of time on the internet is now spent on social media.

Cost. The cost of your time is not just the salary on-cost it is also the opportunity cost.  That is what else could you have been doing.  Also a consideration is your Ad-words spend.  Social media may enable you to save this money or at least reduce your spend per month.

Return. The return is dependent on what you objective.  For most small to medium sized businesses the primary objective will most often be sales leads.  For us it worked, but for your business it may differ.

Our Returns.  We found that through this process our Blog (content focused) Unique Visitor rate increased from not much to a few hundred per day.  Our web site (product sales focused) increased proportionally leading to an 80% increase in sales leads through the web site.

Key Lessons Learnt

We learnt some critical lessons through our trial, which were:

  • Have a Plan;
  • Be Disciplined and above and beyond all else; and
  • Be Sincere.

We were lucky in that we approached the trial with genuine sincerity in our engagements with our social media community.  We went in with the view of genuinely learning from others in our social media community and we have – it has been brilliant.

For us, yes there is a real effort needed but the returns are greater than just an excellent growth in sales leads – we have gained far more from what we have learnt from others.

If you have any similar experiences or even different views please take the time to add your comments – they are most welcome!

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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18 Feb

Why Communicating With Customers Is Now Harder Yet Easier

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Communicating with customers/ prospects is now both easier and yet more difficult!

Easier because there are more channels available to communicate with customers / prospects such as Social Media.

Yet more difficult because customers or prospects have more choices from which to receive communications and more selective in who they invite to send information.

Note: In this article the term customer is used to cover both existing customers and prospects.

Why Is It More Difficult!

Communicating with customers even five years ago was fairly straight forward.   You could communicate directly through email, mail or even the telephone.  Or you could advertise in the newspaper, yellow pages or if you could afford it Television or Radio.

But all of these are now less effective than five years ago

You may well have your customers address, email or phone number

 but are you actually reaching them?

Traditional Mail

This is not new we have all known this for years. Companies are increasingly using electronic means to communicate and invoice and pay bills.  For example according to the Washington Post, the US Postal Service has ..

That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

And nearly half of this is junk mail!

the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered 153.8 billion pieces of mail, of which 43 percent, or 66.4 billion pieces, were junk mail.

Decline of Email

Email is beginning to decline in popularity, as more communication options become available.

In 2003, people spent 46% of their time online using sites which fall into the “communications” category – that is, sites whose core capabilities are email and instant messaging. By 2009, that usage dropped to 27% or a 41% decline in overall use.

May be spam has contributed to the decline in people’s focus on email as a primary source of communication.

In Microsoft’s latest biannual report on the state of computer security, the company says that in the second half of 2008, a full 97.3 percent of email traffic was unwanted spam (or malicious email like phishing attacks and outright viruses).

Tele-Sales Now Seen As Least Effective

Business to Business tele-marketing or sales is also in decline for a number of reasons, not the least of which are changes in the legislation’s around the world governing tele-marketing practises.  Many now view out bound tele-marketing as the least effective option.

90% view Telemarketing as at least as effective as their other marketing mediums.

Decline of Yellow Pages/ NewsPapers/ Television

Even these – the stalwarts of advertising for decades are in decline, see previous post Advertising media types

So Where Are Customers Going

Well it appears they are becoming more interested in Social Media.  However social media whilst opening up new channels also poses some interesting problems.

It is Discretionary

Yes you can communicate with customers now by using Twitter or Facebook etc.  However it is at the customers discretion as to whether they allow you to communicate with them.  Either by adding as a Friend on Facebook or Following You on Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are arguably direct communication social media type but there are more indirect channels.

Common Interest

Many years ago I read the Dale Carnegie Classic – “How to Win Friends and Influence People” .  In that book, I remember reading the story of how he (or someone) had tried to make an appointment with a prospect for years – but failed.  He then found that they both had a common interest in something.  From this he was able to develop a friendship which led to sales.

This can be the same with Social Media!

For example through say Social Book marking sites (eg Digg, Stumble on) you may find that you have common interests in similar articles.  Developing relationships this way can lead to either direct sales or them even referring you on to their community or contacts.    It also provides a means to commence a discussion leading potentially to being invited to join their discretionary social media sites.

Social Media provides opportunities to engage prospects and customers indirectly, by finding things of common interest.

It Works!

For example, our software is developed for hire and rental companies.  One of our major points of difference is integration with the Web and Social Media.  We therefore are genuinely interested in both subjects.  We write about it (blog posts), we read about it  and we comment about it.  Through this process we have found similar like minded companies and individuals and built really good communities on Facebook (>350 friends), Twitter (>3000 followers) and also on Digg and Stumble On.  It does deliver results for us:

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months.  We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alex Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.  See full post – “Is Social Media Marketing Worth The Effort”

Summary

So yes on one hand their are more ways to communicate with your customers yet at the same time it is more difficult.  We are entering a period where increasingly customers are gaining control over who, what, when and how they are communicated with.  This will pose a both challenges and opportunities to marketing people for in the future.

 

Interested in more articles on Social Media and Marketing?

Then follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Networked Blogs or Stumble On

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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12 Feb

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week.  We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I found myself highlighting Google‘s lamo attempt to control the internet and picking out a HUGE problem with Apple‘s new operating system which deletes all user data.  Yeah, you read that right – and people whinge about Windows.  Gosh.

I’ve blogged before about how I think Google Wave is/will be stupid, worthless and pointless.  But don’t just take my word for it, other people are saying it too – as evidenced by this article.  Don’t know what Google Wave is?  Well, who cares.  If you do, it’s supposed to be an email/twitter/instant messaging alternative – replacement, whatever.  C’mon Google, you employ 20,000 of the smartest people on earth and not one of you can figure out that most people won’t want to ditch email because they can barely breathe without having access to it. #FAIL

Well, I know most of you aren’t geeks and won’t read the article, so I’ll paraphrase here to outline why I thought this article was interesting – basically, Google has a direct optical fibre connection to the core movers and shakers that make the internet connect to everybody (in fact, I read recently that Google accounts for 6% of all internet traffic in the word at the moment, an astounding statistic for a company that didn’t exist 10 years ago), which means that Google don’t need to pay for internet traffic.  So, all of those YouTube videos are just beaming out of the place with the computer infrastructure built into the rest of Google’s fortress of computer power, essentially making what most people would think to be an extremely expensive operation in pushing out online video actually cost them basically nothing to run – all those ad impressions are pure profit.  This is an amazing contrast to an organisation like Facebook, which spends $1 million a month of infrastructure to make their service super snappy and fast for users.  What the article goes on to detail is how Google hold so much power already, that instead of internet providers charging places like Google to have direct access to each other so that company’s internet users their their site quicker, Google are so powerful that they can charge internet companies to have better direct access to them to provide their services faster to their users.  In the next 3 years this will be a huge debate in the US as their government is trying to regulate this stuff and don’t really know how to approach it properly.  Public outcry ensures.  It’ll be an interesting development.

I’m sure if I stood in a newsagent taking pictures of each page of a magazine so I could read it later without having to buy the magazine in the first place I’d be chased down the street by the shop owner and probably have the cops called on me.  Google send people to libraries to scan books digially, build a whole online book store full of inventory and they call it a “business“.  This is criminal.  That’s all I have to say.

  • WOW Mac Users should read this – Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data http://bit.ly/10PdGD

So, being the good samaritan that I am, I’ll give you Mac users this tip – don’t allow anonymous logins on your computer.  You’ll have your login that you use and just keep using that – don’t switch to another user and use the anonymous feature, as what happens is that you’ll go to log back into your computer as you and everything will be gone.  Yeah, it’s pretty awful and embarassing problem.  I tweeted this last week and I’m not sure if Apple have patched this problem yet but keep your eyes peeled on the Apple Software Update feature – last I read Apple were looking to put out a 10.6.1 update that addresses this and other problems.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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01 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 15 Nov

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy Windows apps, plus some interesting statistics about social media in the enterprise:

If you haven’t heard of Windows SkyDrive, it’s basically a free online storage solution provided by Microsoft which gives you 25gb to store whatever you want on the internet so that you can access from anyway.  It’s not really pushed at the moment which is why not many people know about it, but that will certainly change once Office 2010 is released, as it is heavily focused on extending the Office experience beyond the desktop allowing people to create and save MS Office documents online using online browsing versions and store them in their SkyDrive using the Office Live plugin.  Personally, I’ve found it really handy and I use it alot.  What this application does (which was NOT created by Microsoft, by the way) is install your SkyDrive as another hard drive on your computer in the Explorer shell, so that you can simply copy and paste to it like any other hard drive – the online difference of course is that you are storing your stuff on Microsoft’s servers.  This is really great for backing up all of your critical information so that if your machine breaks down or is stolen, you can simply replace it and remap your SkyDrive to the machine using this application and voila – you have all your information back.  Highly recommended.

  • Very interesting – Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise http://bit.ly/TBJt1

There is another article of similar theme that I tweeted as well this week, which you can read here – http://bit.ly/1P8llM – which also touches on how social networking usage is exploding in the business and enterprise workplaces.  The reason why?  It is a far more effective way of engaging your audience and getting your message across.  I am willing to bet my left kidney that Google will shell out somewhere in the vacinity of $2 billion to buy out Twitter and position it as it’s newest advertising medium, considering that many businesses are telling the same story as we are – Google Adwords is a WASTE OF MONEY.  Our company stopped using it earlier in the year and we now exclusively advertise our products and services through Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) and the result has been a 700% increase in sales leads.  True story.  We are so happy with the results that we will never use Google Adwords ever again – which by the way supplies Google with 97% of their $16 billion a year in revenue.  You do the math – Google will have to radically adjust their business model or risk becoming irrelevant and having their revenue dry up big time.

  • Good article – Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough [Opinion] http://bit.ly/19flzZ

I’ve blogged about Microsoft Security Essentials before – if you haven’t yet heard of this program, it’s Microsoft’s version of a free anti-virus program – and since it’s release I have been surprised about the amount of articles likes these that are getting published which are complementary to Microsoft for this being a great release.  What I would add to the fact that it is a good enough security program is the fact that it DOESN”T ANNOY YOU.  I’ve been running it myself ever since it was released and not once ever has the program prompted me to interact with it in any way.  At first I was a little worried that perhaps the virus definitions weren’t up to date so on the odd occasion I opened it up to check – I was wrong, the program is updating itself almost daily and it isn’t doing anything annoying on the screen to indicate that it’s working in the background.  In my opinion, that is the ultimate security program, as I often forget that it is there.  I have been going through the process of uninstalling AVG and other virus programs on the computers that I come across and have been installing this instead, it truly is a nice, solid release and I’d recommend it to anybody.  If you’d like to try it yourself, you can download it for free at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials.

Photoshopping has pretty much become a verb now, on par with Googling a search of Tweeting a message and yet Photoshop is an extremely expensive piece of software that only business professionals can afford.  This application – Paint.NET – which has been around for a while, is a FREE program that gives you all the basics of image editing and some advanced options too.  I’ve been recommending this to people who are uploading graphics to their website and want to do some basic image manipulation themselves and this program will do it all for them for the nice price of nothing. I’d recommend this to anybody – it’s a Windows only release, but let’s face it, the majority of Mac users probably have Windows installed as well, or will need to install it soon.  Grab this and enjoy (and check out the article for more tips on how to use the program).

It surprises a fair few people that I talk to when I tell them that I’m a dedicated Internet Explorer user, but truth be told, Firefox is a great browser but still has a ways to go. Do you ever wonder why Google invested a whole pile of money into building their own browser even though they pony up the majority of the funds that Mozilla uses to operate whilst building free products like Firefox? It’s because sometimes in situations like these where the browser is such an important tool, it’s beneficial that it is being designed and built by people who spend all day working in computer security for a wide range of software products, not just one.  This article goes on to detail how Firefox is the most vulnerable browser to hack attempts and general exploits, even above Internet Explorer.  Something else that most people don’t know about Firefox is that it is a memory hog.  I’ve often looked at people’s computers who have Firefox open and 3 or four tabs open and Firefox is using around 180 – 200mb of RAM from the machine just to do that.  It’s pretty ridiculous.  My general advice is to stick with the browser that comes with the computer – IE on Windows or Safari on a Mac, as they are both acutely fine tuned for their respective environments.  What about Google Chrome you might say?  Well, you can always use that browser if you don’t mind the fact that it is butt ugly.

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About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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28 Jan

Look To Small Companies For Social Media Innovation

Necessity is the mother of innovation – so the adage says!

The tough times create the business circumstances that foster necessity. Businesses are forced to be both more creative and at the same time more brutal in their decision making. Innovative ideas whether:

  • market solutions,
  • business models or
  • technology will be created.

Whilst many of the ideas in this post are applicable across all business sectors, the focus of this article is on the Equipment Hire and Rental market.

Social Media as Basis of Innovation Ideas

The range of ideas that may be implemented can not be predicted. However it can be confidently predicted social media will form the basis of many innovations, around areas such as:

  • Revenue Improvement: Marketing areas such as lead generation, customer service, customer retention;
  • Cost Reduction: In marketing budgets by reducing expenditure on traditional marketing methods
  • Mitigation of Risk: Such as in areas like Product Damages and Safety through use of YouTube, see post.

At the end of this post is a series of examples of how to use each of the major Social marketing tools.

Where to Look for the Innovative Ideas?

Where will the innovation emerge from, large corporations or small rental or hire business?

Let’s look to what has happened over the last thirty years as an indicator of what may happen. Consider this, that since 1980, Corporations have completely lost their monopoly on new ideas. This change in innovation sources ended the era of IP monopolization.  We are no longer in the era when “feudal lords” (i.e., a small handful of large “old economy” companies) controlled all the (intellectual) property and those who were without property had no rights. [1]

In 1980, Corporations accounted for 80% of all innovation (research and development outcome), they now account for under 20%. The beneficiaries have been small to medium sized companies who now account for 80% of innovations.

A key trend emerging in the knowledge economy is the change in the sources innovation. Prior to the 1980’s, large corporations dominated US research and development, with over 80% being undertaken by companies with more than 5000 employees. However since 1980, this has completely inverted, with small companies accounting for almost all the growth in R&D. [2]

Hire Rental Industry Innovation

The discussion above may not sound applicable to the Rental and Hire Industry but it is. For example in the 1980’s only the large Corporations could afford the innovation R & D expense of developing computing based management systems. Such rental software or hire software management systems are now powerful and affordable to businesses of all sizes.

Importantly though even more powerful tools such as Social Media are available (in may cases freely) to any business.

Innovation in the use of these tools is not constrained by not having financial resources but more by the extent of the will and imagination of companies.

It is in the area of will that the true constraint may appear. Major Brands have demonstrated in some instances a reluctance to engage in social media for fear of losing control of their brand. This is understandable as the brand is an asset that could well appear on the balance sheet. Hence taking avoiding perceived risks with the brand is understandable. Numerous articles in this subject.

Smaller hire and rental businesses whether though the pressure of necessity or less attachment to a brand are therefore more likely to undertake innovative social marketing ideas.

So if you are looking for new innovative ideas in the equipment hire and rental industry look to the Small business sector rather than corporations – the results may surprise you.   Below is a list of how equipment hire and rental  can use of each of the main social marketing tools.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies.  Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration.

How to Use Social Media Tools

Announcements
Marketing Problem

[intlink id="246" type="post"]Hire Rental Advertising Considerations[/intlink]
[intlink id="572" type="post"]Why Traditional Marketing Fails[/intlink]
[intlink id="875" type="post"]Yellow Pages Versus SEO[/intlink]

Agt-Home

Creating a Digital Marketing Platform

[intlink id="254" type="post"]Creating a Digital Marketing Foundation[/intlink]
[intlink id="294" type="post"]Hire Rental Web Lead Statistics[/intlink]

TwitterMarketing via Twitter

[intlink id="592" type="post"]How Rental Hire Company can use Twitter[/intlink]
[intlink id="607" type="post"]Business Reason to Use Twitter[/intlink]

FacebookMarketing via Facebook

[intlink id="990" type="post"]Using Facebook for Business[/intlink]
[intlink id="781" type="post"]They worried about Social Media in the 1930′s[/intlink]

YoutubeMarketing via YouTube

[intlink id="507" type="post"]How Rental and Hire Companies can use YouTube[/intlink]
[intlink id="481" type="post"]Big List on How to Use Social Media[/intlink]

WordpressMarketing via WordPress

[intlink id="641" type="post"]Why Blogs are Effective for Small Business[/intlink]
[intlink id="762" type="post"]Why Small Businesses Should blog[/intlink]

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26 Dec

The Risk Facing Social Media

Social Media marketing faces a serious risk to its adoption by business.

Many already question whether it is a fad? And if these risks are not addressed then it could well be perceived as a fad?

The hype that presently surrounds Social Media marketing has many of the hallmarks of the late 1990′s and its hype regarding integrated business systems.

The Chasm

Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle1

Social Media Marketing has its basis in technology arguably web 2.0 tools. Therefore it is considered that some aspects of Geoffrey Moore’s, Crossing the Chasm (1991) could be applied to Social Media Marketing.  (note image source wikipedia)

Early Adopter Stage

In life cycle terms Social Media Marketing for business is very much in its early adopter stage.

Early adopters, like us, are the enthusiasts who see the business potential. To businesses like us, we see the potential of Social Media marketing as a way to achieve our business goals. We are driven by dreams and aspirations for improving our business marketing using Social Media marketing without the need for definitive proof that it will work before we start.

However this is the stage at which results must begin to match dreams.

visionaries are easy to sell but very hard to please… because they are buying a dream…

This is where the real risk for Social Media lies!

It must be seen to deliver the results expected. And it is this expectation that it at the very heart of the risk facing Social Media marketing’s future.

Hype Setting Unrealistic Expectations

Social Media Marketing has certainly been hyped up in some many quarters as the new marketing approach for the new age. Whether deliberate or not, expectations are being set that Social Media marketing will deliver above average returns on marketing effort.

If visionaries can only achieve average results or arguably even slightly above average results, their perception may be that their Social Media marketing experiment has failed. Based on the concept that satisfaction is achieved when perception exceeds expectations. For example if you have really high expectations but perceive only above average results then you will be dissatisfied.

Metric’s Needed to Moderate Expectations

The second problem is the absence of benchmarks or metrics to moderate or help define a reasonable set of expectations. Moderation of expectations may be needed by Social Media, given the hype especially by those who advocating the wonderful benefits of “going viral”.

However there is an understandable paucity of metrics to gauge the success of social media marketing due to its infancy. Some research is being to emerge to help guide and even moderate expectation thinking. However such research is still limited, effectively meaning that a real risk exists of visionaries having unrealistic expectations of success hence being disappointed when those expectations are not met.

Risk of Focusing on Applications (Tools) Not Strategy

The next risk element facing Social Media marketing is the focus on tools (applications), ie Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Linked in etc rather than a coherent strategy. Twitter and Facebook’s dominance in the mainstream media may lead to some visionaries building business dreams on the basis of just using one or two of these applications. Such an approach to those of us who are beginning to understand Social Media marketing is fatally flawed.

Social Media marketing requires a coherent strategy with a defined purpose, such as increasing web traffic, increasing sales leads, improving brand awareness or customer retention. Flowing from the purpose objectives can be set. Knowing both the purpose and objectives means that the appropriate applications and resources can be determined. Whilst the absence of metrics (as discussed above) may limit the hardness of objectives this should not be used as an excuse not to create a strategy.

Pressure is On Social Media Marketing

Finally the pressure is mounting on Social Media marketing and with it the risk of perceived failure in the broader business community. In addition to the risks discussed above is the pressure coming from the volume of companies who are planning to undertake Social Media marketing. The Center for Media Research found that…

After surveying more than 1,000 people with media buying or planning responsibilities, the center found that “having a presence on social networks” is one of the top priorities for media plans in 2010.

As Sean Carlton (former Dean of Philadelphia University’s School of Design + Media) from Clickz.com puts it many of these companies are creating a presence with out a strategy.

Bad Publicity will Create a Bigger Chasm

It will take time for Social Media marketing advocates to develop case studies proving the benefits, plus defining the metrics as well as providing the infra-structure of education, consultants, resources etc to teach the “how to’s”.

The clock is ticking though as the high volume of “newbies” entering the social media marketing space creates a real risk of bad publicity. Newbies who fail will be quick to tell the world, “oh we tried that and it didn’t work.” Bad news always travels faster and wider than good news, its human nature.

To cross the chasm, ie to start to become part of the main stream marketing, Social Media marketing needs third party referencing. The early majority, that segment on the other side of the chasm, look to others in their industry for proof that something works:

Pragamatists tend to be ‘vertically’ oriented, meaning that they communicate more with others like themselves within their own industry than do technology

If some in the industry have been early adopters who have failed to be successful then word will spread. This will have the impact of slowing the adoption of Social Media marketing in that industry. Effectively deepening or widening the chasm depending upon your perspective.

Social Media Marketing is at a Cross Roads

Social Media Marketing has a future and it will in time become a standard component of marketing strategy. However it does face risks to its short term future from over hyped expectations and the focus on tools not strategy.

Greater emphasis needs to be placed on developing strategic frameworks/ guides and as well as metrics, case studies and other reference material to help support the successful use of Social Media marketing.

If you believe in Social Media, and we do, then we need to focus less on hype and more on the tools to help support its growth!

About Us

Making Life Ezy provide business management solutions with integrated web and social media solutions to the Hire/ Rental Industry.  For more information email us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au or visit our web site www.makinglifeezy.com.au

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24 Dec

How to defend Brand Value in a Social Media World

Social Media Process v. 1.0

Image by Damien Basile via Flickr

There has been a run of articles recently citing survey results etc of Corporations that have banned the use of Social Media.

More than half of employers say they completely prohibit social media use by workers, according to a new survey of about 1,400 large U.S. companies.

Like most articles the question is posed as to why. Certainly on face value the reasons such as a loss of work productivity are cited and supported. But is there are another reason?

Brand’s Can be an Asset

Many Corporations have valued their brands and placed this brand on the balance sheet as an Asset.  Under the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) this may be mandatory for Public Companies.

Why Accountants Want To Control a Brand?

Intangible Asset Value

Why Accountants want control over the brand is pretty apparent when you look at the figures below.

… intangible assets such as brands generally account for the majority of a company’s market value: 70% for Disney, 76% for Nike, 85% for Heinz and 98% for Microsoft. (2005 values)

A brand is categorised as an intangible asset, and in the western world now intangible asset values can quite often be far larger than the tangible asset values of a company.

Future Income

If a brand is an asset, then by definition of an asset it is something from which future revenues or benefits will flow.  Such benefits could be from revenues created from the brand or the value someone would pay to get the brand.  Generally both are related to a calculation based on future cash flows.

Control

So if you were to have a major asset on your balance sheet that in some cases is your biggest asset, wouldn’t you want to control it?

But Who Really Controls A Brands Value?

The brands value may in some cases be the biggest asset of the company.  The company may even think that it controls it – but do they?  Who really controls a brand?

Before answering that – think about what is a brand really?

A brand is more than logo’s, trademarks etc.  These are tangible representations of something more important. That is what people (customers, suppliers, staff and investors) think it is.   People’s belief’s of the promise that a brand will deliver effectively define a brand.

There belief’s are largely driven by what they think the brand promises.  Whether they believe that brand promise to be true though is driven by their perceptions of their experience when engaged with the brand in some way.  This is where a brand can truly become an intangible asset.   If that sounds vague then here are some explanatory examples:

A customer has created a set of expectations in their own mind of what a your brand will deliver to them.  These expectations are purely based on what they have implied from your advertising or even what others have told them.  Let’s say they have an expectation that your brand will deliver them a great service, but when they get it is only average- will they be satisfied?

An employee joins your company because they perceive it as a great brand to work for etc.  But when they get there, their perceptions don’t met their expectations – will they be satisfied?

You could cite similar examples for investors who have expectations of returns or suppliers on what it is like to trade with your brand etc.

The short answer for each one is that they will not be satisfied and if they have a global soap box to make their views known, then in fact they begin to control the brand.   Marketers have always claimed that a brand is in fact controlled by customers, but customers have never really had the power to truly effect a brand.

Social Media is a Global Soap Box

Pre – global media if people were disgruntled with your brand, well they could tell a few friends via telephone or email etc.  But the distribution of their dis-satisfaction was fairly limited and with the power of TV, Radio and Print advertising brands pretty much had the power to effectively suppress the dissatisfaction.  This was even the case if they decided to put something on the web, the SEO budget power etc of the big brands could drive the post in to page 300 of a search, so to speak.

But this is not the case with Social Media.  For example someone with 10,000 twitter followers can repeatedly tweet their dis-satisfaction quickly and to a global audience.  Such dis-satisfaction may be about your brand’s service delivery, brand as a place to work, brand as an investment etc.  Whilst the later two may impact your ability to recruit or attract investors, the biggest concern is with damage to revenues.

You can not predict the impact of when or how destructive will be on the brands revenues.

This poses a real problem to risk management of a brand.  Brand valuations are based forecast revenues with allowances for risk.  But how big is that risk with Social Media is effectively un-quantifiable.  This uncertainty then flows back in to brand value placed on the balance sheet and how much confidence investors and others can have in that figure.

Managing the Risk – Could Be Counter Intuitive

There is some evidence that companies may approach the management of such social media risk by limiting the use of Social Media use with in the company.  But this could be the wrong way to approach the risk.

Here is the logic behind this thought.

If you control your social media presence through just your brand having just a company twitter account or  face book account etc you risk becoming an impersonal entity.  Why because you will be a single marketing controlled presence in a sea of individuals unconstrained in expressing their thoughts.

If however you allow your staff to have Social Media accounts both brand and personal (they will have these anyway) then you have multiple points of presence.  Not all of your staff are going to be dis-satisfied many in fact could be very strong advocates.  But it is deeper than this.

Your staff will create relationships in their social communities and with it some element of trust.  Through your staff you are no longer an impersonal entity but a living brand of people. So if bad social media press hits, then through your staff and their communities you have the potential power to defend your brand.

Why- well let’s go back to the very basics – it is not what you say about your self that people really believe but what others say.

So if your brand is under attack from bad publicity and all your have to defend yourself is your “controlled” social media presence – ie what you say about yourself – well you will struggle to win.

But if you have allowed your staff through work and personal accounts to build a community then their comments will count with their communities.  Their communities will trust your staff’s opinion and through that trust they well become allies in defending your brand.

It is inevitable for any brand that someone somewhere will be disappointed and will let the social media world know about it.  Your best defense is to have as many social world allies (friends) to help defend you, and that may mean allowing your staff to be engaged.

So your best risk management strategy for your brand may be to let your staff be social

About Us

Making Life Ezy are the developers of Business Management Software with integrated web, digital market and social media for the hire and rental industry.

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21 Dec

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week.  We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy apps.  There were a few things written about that blew my mind and I’m sure will blow your mind too, as detailed below:

  • Wow, very cool and handy app – Dropresize Monitors Folders, Automatically Resizes Photos [Downloads] http://tinyurl.com/ylzkz73

I’m a big fan of apps that supply a simple convenience and are simple to use, as detailed in previous blog posts.  This application is a brillant idea for handling photos online – digital cameras are so deep in resolution now that they are regularly creating pictures that are 2 – 4mb is size, which is great and all, but can present a problem when you go to do a mass upload of digital photos to places like Facebook or even into our very own HireEzy app for uploading pictures of Hire Items to your online store.  Once you install this application, you can nominate a folder in your computer (Windows only) as your photo upload folder and then all you do is copy and paste whichever photos you are going to work with into that folder and the application auto resizes all the photos you paste in there and voila! They are resized to a web-quality standard and ready for uploading.  This will speed up the uploading of your photos significantly to online services and you won’t need to worry about photo quality – places like Facebook will only resize your photos to a similar quality on their end anyway so you may as well save yourself the pains of sitting through the unnecessary uploading time.

I’ve blogged and tweeted (I’m a trendy online socialite) previously about Augmented Reality (AR) and whilst admittedly this video would mainly appeal to nerds, I tweeted it just to really reinforce to regular users what can be possible with this new technology.  Don’t know what Augmented Reality is?  The concept is looking into a camera and seeing non-reality elements overlayed ontop of the real things that the camera sees.  Currently, AR apps are doing things like showing the name of a building on your screen when you look at it with your camera, but these first versions are cheating by using GPS positioning to know where you are – this software demo actually processed WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT, recognises it and shows you the appropriate content.  Some examples of AR in realtime are using your phone to look at a menu in French and having your app overlay the French words with English words so that you can read it as you are looking at it, in addition to things like looking at the Statue of Liberty with your app showing you the times that day that give you the best shot of it without a shadow cast on it’s face, etc as apposed to how it looks at that moment.  Truely amazing stuff, it blows my mind.  We all need faster internet connections to make this stuff happen but hey, it’ll happen eventually.

  • Wicked! – VistaSwitcher is an Absolutely Awesome Alt-Tab Replacement [Screenshot Tour] http://bit.ly/HpCWY

Don’t be fooled by the name, it works on Windows 7 as well and it is awesome.  Currently, when you ALT-TAB through open windows you only see an icon and the name of the app open, or if you’ve got the Aero Glass feature of Windows turned on you see a tiny little screenshot of the open window that you can tab through – this app gives you a fullscreen menu showing the list of open apps down the right hand side whilst giving you a HUGE screenshot of the open app as it currently appears.  Very handy and highly recommended.

This is really the new way to work now – people are afraid of updating their computers because it’s hard to learn where all the new things are, or programs that work in an older operating system don’t work in a new one, or even worse they are people switching to Mac who have a whole pile of programs that only work in Windows.  Virtualisation allows you to run an operating system within an operating system – for example, I currently use Windows 7 as my main operating system but I also virtualise Windows XP and switch between them (I also have a Linux version called Ubuntu which isn’t relevant here, but this proves the power of what I can do) – this allows me to have both Internet Explorer 7 (in XP) and Internet Explorer 8 (in Win7) for testing web apps across common browsers whilst also testing our own software in how it behaves in each environment.  The most common use of virtualisation nowadays is running Windows from inside of Mac OSX so that people can jump into Windows if they need to whilst using a Mac and not miss out on being able to do whatever they want.  This article details a bunch of FREE virtualisation applications that allow you to do this – I myself use a paid version of VMWare for what I do but these do a comparable job – and I figured that people would particularly find this interesting if upgrading to Windows 7 and want to use Windows XP and are (unlucky) like me who can’t use Microsoft‘s built in Windows XP Mode feature in Windows 7 because they don’t have the right kind of CPU to support it (which sucks).

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04 Dec

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 25 Oct

Welcome to the Tumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week. We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I actually didn’t find much that surpised me – I mean, there was Apply trying to bag out Windows on the week of the Win7 launch, but that was hardly surprising at all.  There was some news of more Australian Government sensorship ideas, as detailed below, and a great article about how Microsoft actually one upped Google with an announcement they made for their Bing search engine.  Check it out.

This article does a good job of picking out the hypocrisy in Apple’s never-ending bashing of Windows – the fact that Windows 7 is a solid product and works really well.  It’s disappointing that Apple can’t market their products on it’s own merits – they have a fantastic operating system, sexy looking computers that are rock solid and a very VERY devoted fanbase that grows leaps and bounds by the day.  What this article picks up on is the fact that if Apple really did have good products, they wouldn’t have to resort to bashing the competition if their own stuff truly were worthy of customer attention and I totally agree – especially when their product manager is saying stuff in the press like “At the end of the day, it’s still Windows.” So what? A product with problems has been fixed up and that’s a good thing.  It’s the same deal as Mac OS – I’ve mentioned in this space before that the older versions of Mac OS were horribly backward and couldn’t even multi task of all things (which the iPhone still can’t do either).  So should we not use Mac OSX because the older versions were terrible?  Of course not.  OSX is a brilliant operating system and so is Windows 7.  Apple got a free ride of Windows defectors over the past three years with frustrated PC users and they deserved to have their market share increase from about 3% to about 9-10% – now all bets are off and it’s an even fight, the two companies need to bring their A-game now and compete on features.  It’ll be exciting for the end users.

This is a really bold move by the Aussie Government but I have to say I actaully like the idea.  It’s something that needs to happen considering that the iPhone/iPod Touch is a gaming platform and the Australian Government has their own classifications for console and computer games.  There is an uproar in Australia that there is no 18+ classification for gaming which causes excessively violent games to be refused classification (and therefore sale) in Australia and I happen to like this idea because it keeps all the brutal American stuff out of our country (and the subsequent axe-murderers and school gunman they produce).  Apple have built an over-arching approval process for applications which lacks transparency and there are a lot of developers that have been writing about how they think it’s unfair – at the end of the day, it’s up to Governments to police content, not companies, so handing off this process to the government in Australia is a lot fairer – Apple won’t like losing their total control over their eco-system for iTunes, but.. well.. tough.

  • True, makes good points – Well, What Do You Know: Google Is Actually Nervous About Microsoft Bing http://bit.ly/b8KMp

Competition benefits consumers and finally Google has a legit competitor – so much so that they actually got showed up by Microsoft when they announced their content partnership with Twitter and the first beta of Bing’s Twitter search app which you can find here.  As a knee-jerk response from Google a few hours later produced news that they were going to do the same thing (sort of) and that their toold would be available in a few months.  Not to be outdone, Microsoft announce later that day that they are also integrating Facebook into their search engine.  Google had nothing to say to that – Microsoft owns a small chunk of Facebook and would never allow Google to get access to it (and neither would Facebook themselves).  This article makes good points in how Google’s “me too” response to Microsoft’s news of innovation was real proof that there is definately chinks in their armour and a reminder that you have to always compete to stay the best.  just ask MySpace all about that.

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