5 Business Reasons for Social Media

1. Listening & Research to your customers to find out their wants, wishes and pain points. We live in a Web 2.0 world, if you re not a part of it you re missing out on a lot of information.
2. Communicating with your customers and prospects, not just about your products and services.
3. SEO: Social media is more than just communications and connections, it is a powerful business tool.
4. News & Information: Consumer habits have changed, people rely on their social networks and other Web 2.0 sources for news and information.
5. It is in line with the business objectives.

Leaderfest is a  Regional Young Professional event on April 20th hosted by Pulse, the Young Professionals Network of the Fox Cities Chamber. Below is a video of one of the sessions as well as the presentation itself… Enjoy and comments are always welcome!

Here are five elements your organization should be including in your marketing and PR strategy in 2011:

1.       Integrate your traditional public relations with the social media channels that you have developed.  Making your communications seamless across multiple channels will give your organization better efficiency and help insure a consistent “theme” is shared with your audience.

2.       Increase options and methods to facilitate conversations with your target audience.  A “contact us” fillable form isn’t enough these days.  Look for other ways to engage your audience.  Twitter, Linkedin, chat and other tools can help you reach new levels of contact and responsiveness to your audience.

3.       Review your content – people want participation, not propaganda.  Make sure that you offer the audience information that they can use and respond to – this should  motivate action (hopefully in your direction!).

4.       “Video Killed the Radio Radio Star” and it will do some damage to traditional communication channels –actually, it already has!  Back in 1979 when The Buggles released that single, video was new.  Radio is still alive today but radio stars are no more – they have embraced multiple channels to share their talent and as communicators we have to do the same.  Video, from professional to low budget podcasting will have its place in an organizations strategy.  Where does video fit for you?

5.       Metrics, metrics, metrics.  As integration of the channels continues, more opportunity for measuring technology enabled communication will help demonstrate return on investment for marketing and PR activities.  Make sure your organization can measure the impact of your communications and marketing programs.

These are just a few key thoughts, one thing is for certain, change is constant so hang on for the ride or get behind the wheel!

We just finished our “Fall into Folders” campaign and reflecting on the hits and misses is part of every campaign I do. I want to take a few steps back and talk about the “4 P’s” of campaign success and how they can make any campaign a victory.

The first P of campaign success is Precision. Targeting your marketing efforts and tailoring your database to the proper audience is key. There’s little reason to send out a direct mail campaign to a nursing home if you are targeting people who enjoy using playground equipment. A bit extreme, but you get the idea.

The second P is Presentation. The design and message in your postcard and subsequent landing pages is very important. Remember you only have a short moment in time to capture the attention of your audience, less then 3 seconds to be exact. The use of personalized images is one great way to capture attention and distinguish yourself from your competition.

The third P is PURL. I’m talking about personalized URL’s here. PURL’s are a great way to add teeth to your message. Turn a cold lead into an instant warm lead. Your call to action and offer was engaging enough to get them to visit the landing page and complete the survey. Now put your sales hat on, make that phone call and seal the deal. Without a PURL, you will never know who is interested and who is not.

The final P and most important key to campaign success is Performance. When you run a multi-channel, multi-touch campaign, the worst thing you can do it not track results. We live in a numbers oriented society and results count. Things like landing page hit rate, email open rates and how many people finished the survey provide vital feedback to a successful campaign. In my mind, running a campaign without the proper metrics in place is a sin and can be almost as bad as not doing the campaign at all. Having the proper return on marketing investment numbers will get you the support you need to run successful campaigns in the future.

Here are some great facts from 2010…

• Facebook, Blogspot followed by Myspace are the top sites visited by under 18s.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content.
• Facebook has over 500 million users.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest country.
• An average Facebook user spends about 55 minutes a day on the site.
• YouTube receives over 2 billion viewers each day.
• 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube by users every minute.
• There are over 181 million blogs.
• 80% of Twitter users use Twitter on mobile devices.
• There have been over 50 million tweets in 2010.
• Over the last first year of Foursquare, it has more than half a million users, 1.4 million venues, and 15.5 million check-ins.

There are so many more facts and stats to fit every taste. So well written with supporitng foot notes too. Read the entire article here.

Social Media Revolution

It was just over-the-top awesome!!!

Great Kids!

Great Questions!

I got these 2 amazing tweets from @HiSchoolLife

Does it get any better then that? I love speaking!!! Seeing the light go on in the eyes of these students was magic.

Here is a copy of my presentation…for those who are interested.

What a great day!

Scott Monty, Ford from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

Please leave some comments if you agree or disagree and what tools do you use to keep from falling into this communications trap.

My take on being “top of mind” is sending thank you cards. Personalized, hand written thank you cards are so under used in my opinion. What an impact it sends when you go to your mail box and get a personal thank you card or note. Who uses snail mail anymore? Thats the point, why get your thank you’s lost in the clutter of email, twitter DM or facebook message…make an impact with a hand written thank you!

I put together a PDF file of all the tweets that took place during the PRSA event. Transcript for #prsanew