In celebration of National Small Business Week… For entrepreneurs, business owners, investors, and consultants, one of the most exciting prospects of social media, lies in the ability to dramatically amplify your visibility and value proposition among existing and potential stakeholders. Social Media finally places small, local and emerging businesses in the spotlight in ways that up until this point, were largely unattainable. New Media is rapidly shifting the landscape of how people find and share information and much of it…
The Business of B2B Social Media
Social Media is often misconstrued as a medium for business-to-consumer or B2C engagement and discounted as a viable communications network for those companies focused on business-to-business transactions. However, B2B, as in any other field impacted by online activity, is faced with a prime opportunity to not only cultivate communities in social networks and other social channels, but also amplify awareness, increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles, and perhaps most importantly, learn and adapt to market dynamics in real-time. Ignorance is…
21 Tips for Using Twitter and Facebook for Business
Following is an abbreviated excerpt from Engage, a new book that helps businesses build, cultivate, and measure success in social media. Last year, Forbes magazine assembled a visual list for its Top 21 Twitter Tips to showcase business examples on how to use Twitter for marketing, service, sales, and ideation. The original compilation served as inspiration for a new list, one that helps businesses of all shapes, sizes, and focus embrace not only Twitter, but all social networks of relevance….
Engage: A Video Introduction
Engage helps businesses and brands build, cultivate, and measure success in the new web and it is now available online and hopefully in a book store near you. Please consider reading the book and if you find it helpful, please also help me share it with those who are looking to learn about social media and how it can help them in their work. This book and all that’s in it, was written with passion and dedication over the last…
Q&A: Social Media Continues to Rewrite the New Rules of Advertising and Marketing
To celebrate the release of Engage!, I was recently asked to share my thoughts on how social media impacts the advertising landscape for the current issue of Winning the Web, a popular magazine related to Web marketing. While the discussion opens with a review of the state and future of online advertising, the discussion also looks at the overall tectonic shift in new media and the profound opportunities that are unfolding. With Ad:Tech San Francisco on the horizon, the timing…
Q&A: Personal vs. Professional Branding in Social Media
Dan Schwabel is not only a personal branding expert, he’s someone I’ve come to know and respect over the years…and definitely someone I consider a friend. We recently sat down to discuss Engage and the resulting interaction culminated in a wonderful discussion that explored the state of professional and personal branding in the era of new media. How do you define “Engage” and do you believe that people and business that fail to engage will cease to exist in the…
Redefining Viral Marketing
In September 2008 at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, I shared something that many, to this day, believe to the contrary, “There is no such thing as viral marketing.” The declaration was empathetic in its direction to those marketers who have been on the receiving end of directives instructing them to create and unleash viral content. In parallel, the statement was aimed at those decision makers who assign such projects. Content, no matter how brilliant, creative, abstract, or controversial,…
Engage is Now Available at a Bookstore Near You
Following a special and unforgettable debut at SXSW Interactive, I’m excited and thankful to announce that Engage! is available at bookstores near you. When you invest so much into something that you believe will change the way people think, you can’t wait to tell the world. This book is written for you… It helps champions, decision makers, and executives understand the impact and potential of new media and how, when, where to integrate it into mix. It also helps you…
Time Spent on Social Networks up 82% Around the World
Nielsen recently released a new report that officially documents what many of us already know, just never substantiated through data. According to a study published at the end of January 2010, Nielsen observed the online social activity of consumers around the world and discovered an 82% increase in time spent on social networking sites in December 2009. On average, users spent more than five and a half hours on popular networks such as Facebook and Twitter in December 2009. In…
ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media
What follows is the entire version of my recent post on Mashable, “The Maturation of Social Media ROI“ Over the years, Social Media experts attempted to redefine ROI for a new era of influence. While some introduced alternative philosophies for measuring the nuances tied to social media, others wondered aloud whether ROI simply wasn’t necessary as the tools and methodologies for analyzing yields didn’t yet exist. And furthermore, by focusing on justification and metrics, we were distracted from the primary…
