The time spent at SXSW (just call it South By), can be summed up in one important talk I attended called "Power Posing!". The premise of the talk was that our body language shapes who we are and deeply affects our chance of success in pitches, client interactions and life in general. By standing in a power pose for a few minutes (3-5) just before you enter an important meeting, or the start of your day, your levels of confidence will go up significantly and your power will come through to others around you. She also noted that looking at your mobile phone is intrinsically a "low-power" pose and you actually decrease your power by looking at your phone all hunched up over your little black rectangle. So I'm asking everyone to stand up for 3 mins today and before every important meeting and "Strike a Pose" - a Power Pose that is!
31 Flavors of Mayonnaise on THE FIVE
Hi Everyone! I wanted to share my latest post on everyone favorite condiment - mayonnaise! If you haven't heard their is a "Mini-Niche" revolution happening out there and this post on THE FIVE breaks it all down for you.
Money making bloggers have always known that people search for super specific things. If they tailor their blog content to answer the specific need of the searcher, they can ensure that their post will be among the top five search results. This hooks the searcher in and then targeted ads drive them further down the funnel, providing Google with a click and the advertiser with a potential customer or sale. They call these super-focused sites “Mini-Niche” and they are everywhere online. The offline equivalent of this would be walking down the street and on the way you ask someone - “Excuse me? - Where is the nearest grocery store, I need to buy some mayonnaise?” and they smile and say “You don’t need to go to the grocery store, because there is a mayonnaise store right there and they have every mayonnaise flavor you could dream of!” Wow! Who knew that mayonnaise came in different flavors? and that there were stores that sold just mayonnaise. For most of you the thought of 31 flavors Baskin Robbins Ice Cream store for mayonnaise may be scary, but for others this would be a dream come true. The truth is that this mayonnaise store is real and is soon opening on Vanderbilt Ave in Brooklyn. Yes, I know that Brooklyn is a “Mini-Niche” lovers paradise, in fact the sign coming over the bridge says “ Welcome to Brooklyn, Name it... We Got It”, but that’s not my point...or is it?
Read the rest of the post on THE FIVE
*Warning - Pinterest is highly addictive and should be taken seriously*
Pinterest is heating up and it’s addicting! The visual bookmarking site or virtual pinboard allows people to “pin”, share and organize digital images (theirs and/or others) in a compelling and interesting way. Think of it as Google Images organized and personalized for the social era. For marketers this may be the next “useful” shiny object to dive into. -Why should you care?- We are all a little bored with the standard way to view an image on Facebook and frankly they can’t organize images very well. Pinterest allows you to build a beautiful, simple and organized visual library that is extremely search friendly. This doesn't mean stop what you’re doing on your existing social channels, but to reconsider how you organize your image based content.
Some of the best uses for Pinterest include: - Know what’s hot! - Stay connected to the latest trends and styles in a myriad of categories - Elevate your brand by connecting all of the visual dots. Your brand imagery is critical to how people perceive your company. Unlike Google Images that provides little or no control, Pinterest allows your to organize the images in a way that is meaningful to you and your brand. - SEO - everyone is raving about how Pinterest is driving qualified traffic to their sites. Etsy claims it’s the number 1 driver of traffic for them. Wow!-While many of the brands that are on Pinterest are home decor, recipes, DIY, fashion, style and fitness related -- the expansion of the site is upon us and you can find almost any category within the “pin-boards.”
According to mashable some of the brands that have already “pinned” a stake in the ground and are doing it well are:-Gilt Home Whole FoodsModClothMartha Stewart Better Homes and GardensReal SimpleBergdorf GoodmanTravel ChannelClub Monaco Rhapsody MusicMashable-Why are they doing it well?According to pinterest they are pinning from various sources across the web and they are engaging with others by repinning (or RTing, liking) from others on the site and as we all know this is key to building relationships and expanding engagement. They also create multiple topic boards to allows people with various interests to connect to them. Mashable has put together a beginners guide for those of you that want to try it!
What are your thoughts on Pinterest? Let us know.
What will the new Facebook News Feed changes mean for Brand Pages?
You may have heard that Facebook recently updated their "News Feed" and to no surprise there has been a backlash from their users. Much of this backlash has been around the removal of the option to choose between "Most Important" and "Most Recent" News and the new creation of one consolidated News Feed that automatically aggregates both most recent posts and most relevant. The most relevant posts are now called "Top Stories" and "Most Recent." Facebook has also added a new feature called "Ticker" and this is a real-time feed that sits on the far right hand side of your screen. The big question for marketers is what does this mean for brand pages?Despite some recent posts that state that the changes will not benefit brands, the more I dig into the changes, the more it looks like the new format could be very beneficial for brands. Here's how:1. Social actions you take on a brand page, "like" a post, comment, etc. pop up in real-time in your friends Ticker. Your friend has the option to roll over the Ticker and expand the conversation seamlessly. The fact that a lot of the social actions that may not be the most important news for everyone (status updates, likes, friending and comments) are now real-time in the Ticker offer instant visibility, where before they were often hidden in the cluttered old feed. It gives most social actions an equal opportunity to be seen. Albeit the opportunity is shorter because the ticker moves quickly, but the new dashboard approach taken by Facebook offers people a "Twitter-like” interface while maintaining the ability to have weighted more relevant conversations bubble up to the surface similar to a Google+. 1a. Since many of the social actions are now in the Ticker, I’m seeing more posts by brand pages in the updated News Feed design then in the previous. Because many of the social actions have been removed from the News feed and into the Ticker highlights the brand page posts more in my feed than in the old feed system.[j1] The new cleaner "News Feed" provides significant exposure to brand page posts and this clears the way for more opportunity to engage. It seems like most of the posts in my "Most Recent" feed are brand page updates.2. How do your brand page posts become "Top Stories?" What happens is that when a post by a friend or a brand page becomes "hot" and people are engaged then it moves up to the top. If you check Facebook a couple of times a day then your "Top Stories" go away and it is replaced by the "Most Recent." If you are like me and check Facebook more that once or twice a day, it quickly switches to "Most Recent" news and "Top Stories" fades away. The goal for brands pages is to create enough engagement and update frequently to ensure that you build a great relationship with your fans and that will get you in their "Top Stories." But don't fret if you miss this opportunity, because you can also reach them by posting consistently, but make sure that the content is exciting and relevant as you don't want them to hide your posts. An ultimate goal would be to get your fans to add you to their "Top Stories." This can be done in the little arrow at the upper right corner of each Top Stories" post. Fans have the option of adding you to their "Top Stories." This is what I call the Pandora "Thumbs up" - the more you add things you like to your top news the more content they will share from those sources. It might be as simple as to ask your fans to do this or to make sure you are providing them with the most relevant content that they don't want to miss so they do it on their own.Overall the new changes will take some time to fully digest and evaluate for brand pages, but for now I think that these exciting new developments will only help your chances to build deeper relationships with your fans.
How GroupMe Can Help Your Business?
This year’s SXSW created another must-have bright shiny object in the form of GroupMe and millions of people are grouping together and texting about it as you read this. I can hear your inner voice screaming - Another group to join? Another social channel to manage? Another community to create content for? I already use Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Groupon... How can another GROUP help me or my business?
Here's how.
Many apps add things to your fragmented digital life - more content to create, more games to play, more people to follow - GroupMe tends to simplify things by creating a useful layer on top of the way we interact already. GroupMe lets you group text/chat with a group of people on any phone. It allows people to maintain relationships in clusters and stay privately connected to friends, colleagues, family, travel groups, teammates, businesses, parent teacher associations, conference and event attendees and now brands.
Today GroupMe launched “Featured Groups” and gave us a glimpse into how they will work with brands. Brands can connect to private “Fan Clubs” and offer exclusive benefits to these intimate groups. Their initial brand partners include MTV "Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew.", Oxygen “Bad Girls Club”, Bon Jovi, and the Bonnaroo and Coachella music festivals. Brands will be able to engage the private GroupMe groups by sending messages, answering fans’ questions, sharing photos or posting special promotions, among other possible activities. Sounds a lot like a Facebook page right? They say that the you will not become part of some huge group about Bonnaroo, but it will only include the people that you or your friends invite to the group. The “brand” can join your conversation and keep you all informed as needed. Imagine you are with your friends at a concert and Jon Bon Jovi himself stops by to say “hi” to just your group. For example: MTV promises that a few lucky groups will receive a "visit" each week from one of the crew members at its show "Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew."
In a world of millions of fans and followers GroupMe is a great way to personalize and reward your strongest advocates. Create a group for your blogger ambassadors, create a group for your exclusive media launch partners - provide intimate behind the scenes content and connection for a select group of VIP’s, create a group for clients and business contacts, the sky is the limit and public Facebook Pages are not always an option.
What do you think? Useful? Have you seen any other brands using this service well?
Quora and The Power of Questions
My son just started asking the question “Why?”. If you read my about section you would know that I think that this is the best possible question that he (or anyone) could ask. Questions are the key to our survival and growth and it keeps us all informed and moving forward. Sir Francis Bacon famously stated that “Knowledge is power” and Google and Wikipedia have given us answers to many of life’s greatest questions and seemingly more power and control over our environment and the world.
Built on the back of Yahoo! Answers, the retired Google Answers, Mahalo, LinkedIn Answers and Facebook Questions - Quora is the latest social version of Q&A that has the industry buzzing. The site is “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”. I signed up for Quora when it launched about a year ago to see what all the hype was about and to answer the question “what exactly is Quora and why should I care? Since then I have watched it grow and seen its usefulness increase exponentially. After all a site is only as good as it is useful.
How to Use Quora as a Marketing Tool?
A. The first step for using Quora for Marketing is to establish yourself as an expert. This is easier said than done, but you or your clients must be an expert at something? So make sure you answer questions that are in your comfort zone and you truly are credible. (Quora offers a unique ability to create separate profiles, so you can be Brooklyn expert on one and Photo expert on another) This will help better position you as a thought leader. As of now you must be a person and no brand pages are allowed, but you can be Suzy from brand X.
B. If you are interested in building relationships and generating leads once you start answering questions you can see who reads your answers and then you can reach out to them to see if there is a way to work together.
C. Quora is a market research goldmine. As it expands to all categories there is a wealth of information on your competitors and your industry that could be used in new business pitches, proposals, positioning, whatever the scenario, start here and ask questions if you can’t find what you are looking for.
7 Interesting Quora Links
1. How are physicians using social media? 8 Answers: http://qr.ae/veGX 2. Seven Reasons Why Quora Will Be Bigger Than Foursquare http://bit.ly/eLEyPa 3. Why You Should and Should Not Use Quora: http://dlvr.it/D6Qgm 4. Why Quora will thrive long after the buzz wears off http://bit.ly/hdYzvu 5 ways news orgs - and reporters - can use Quora http://bit.ly/g1oz8Z 6. How to integrate your Amplify blog with Quora http://ow.ly/1aOUwD 7. Why Quora is more than just a fad: http://bit.ly/giPxeA
What are you using Quora for?
Marketing Game Mechanics
I used to be a “gamer”, but I thought that I should spend my time focused on my career and personal life and put the joystick down. It was a tough decision, I just didn’t have the time to play. But, now I have a reason to play again! Not sure that my wife will be happy, but with the success of game-based marketing strategies, marketers are taking their cues from the gaming world. “Life is a game” has reached a tipping point (some would say it has already jumped the shark) and with the proliferation of smart phones, we are playing whether we asked for it or not. We are “leveling up”, being rewarded, earning points, receiving badges, competing for seniority and becoming the master of our domain all at the hands of game mechanics. Now don't get me wrong, we have been "gaming" for centuries and some of the core mechanics of promotions, sales and marketing have always included game mechanics, but in this digital world they are playing an increasingly important role.
Sites like Bunchball and SCVNGR are driving customer participation strategies through gaming mechanics and participation is what builds lasting relationships, brand affinity, and brand loyalty. When you layer on an achievement layer that rewards people for engaging with your brand, you are giving people a fun, but powerful way to keep them interested, all while driving business value for your brand. According to SCVNGR, a mobile gaming company that brings gaming to the real-world, there are at least fifty game dynamics available. They have even published a deck of cards that they give to each employee for memorization. According to others like Adrian Chan from Gravity7, SCVNGR’s list is flawed and doesn't help us truly understand what is a work here. No matter what you think about gaming mechanics, they are here to stay and it is up to us as marketers to get a handle on them. Here are few from SCVNGR's deck: * Achievements - Status - Virtual items* Blissful Productivity - Making basic tasks fun and rewarding
* Communal Discovery - Working together as a virtual team like the MIT DARPA balloon challenge
* Appointment dynamic - People must return at a specific time and perform an action to get a reward, like in Farmville
* Countdown - The clock is ticking only 1 day left!
* Pride - I have all ten badges!
* Viral Game Mechanics - Farmvill makes you more successful by inviting your friends
* Free Lunch - Group efforts bring greater rewards - like Groupon
* Fun once, Fun always - a simple action like a check-in that brings a little joy into your heart each time you do it
* Cascading Information Theory - bite size release of information keep people coming back to move forward Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR says:
“ By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.” How can games change the world? What do you think about the gaming layer and the mechanics behind it?