The thing which a marketer likes to adopt is challenge. Marketers have been treating the challenges effectively for years. Still there are various challenges standing in the way of marketers. Those challenges are the major concerns for the marketers to handle in 2010. Challenges that will most likely perturb marketers in 2010 are classified below:
1. Sustainability: After doing all the hard work in the past, marketers would be very desperate in order to make their customers stay with them. They would be planning strategies how to make their customers happy and make them stay for long as clients.
2. How to generate large revenues? Marketers would be focusing high on out of the box thinking to generate large revenues with minimum investment. They would be thinking for a greater ROI with minimum expenses and it would keep them awake at nights.
3. Would it be possible to keep the traffic up at the social media? This challenge would be on top list of the marketers to handle. Marketers would be thinking hard how to make their social media network robust so that more users interact with our social media marketing.
4. Platform to generate output: Marketers would have their eyes pointed at sales. They would be in the hunt for ground breaking ideas rather than cost effective ideas to increase their sales in order to generate a profitable output.
5. Keep up with the change: With the evolution of new marketing models, marketers’ think tank would be planning how to keep their pace up to the market standard so that they can lead the market.
6. Offering U.S.P against the best offer: Marketers would be thinking how to offer U.S.P against the best offer made by the competitor in order to make prospect/customer/client buy marketers product other than the competitor’s product.
7. What should be the plan of action against competitor? Whether the competitor attacks the marketer directly or indirectly or make a pessimistic comment against marketer, marketer would have something in back up to answer the competitor. Therefore, marketers would be thinking real to make some plan of actions against competitor’s attack.
8. Brand Promotion: Marketers would genuinely think how to run their marketing campaigns effectively to promote their brand. They would be in a deep search to make their brand value stand out among their target audience.
9. Planning marketing budgets: Planning marketing budget would be a critical challenge for the marketer as making the wrong decision against your marketing budget can ruin whole marketing business; therefore marketers would be thinking twice whether investing marketing budget to a certain business is beneficial or not.
10. Maintaining the customer’s loyalty: Marketers would be planning to maintain their customer’s loyalty. They would be searching for ideas how to make their loyal customer happy in order to build a robust relation with them.
Conclusion: One thing for sure challenges are meant to be faced and how effortlessly the marketers can handle those challenges no one can.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Social Media – A Road to Ultimate Success
One question i.e. definitely going to push one’s mind who wants to develop social media network is: How my social media will be able to interact global users effectively? Obviously its human nature whenever a question arises, he/she starts seeking the answer. Marketing experts have researched on the remarkable success of Social Media and determined that a planned strategy make a social media successful. Strategic planning to run social media should be as follow:
1. First step to success: You must decide your goal before commencing your network on social media. You should have your target audience in your mind to deliver the best value to your social media; therefore you must have a plan of action to accomplish what you desire through social media marketing.
2. Why social media? After identifying the audience, you must be clear why would users interact with your social media? Would my social media be able to make a strong impact among the audience? Therefore, you must watch your competitors businesses carefully; it will let you develop ideas on how to make your social media marketing successful.
3. Give and Take: Don’t promote your business or service only because social media marketing is not just for you, it’s to deliver fun to all; therefore regardless of your business, you must also give technical support, advice or even free stuffs to your social media users and let them share their views on your social media through blogs, forums or other social media tools.
4. Brand Promotion: Rather than being social, you should market specific items through your social media to make sales in order promote your brand effectively. To achieve brand promotion, you must build your connections with partner websites through banners to make prospects reach your social media network. The more ROI (return on investment) you receive, the more your social media is successful.
5. How to make users feel your presence: You should take a step forward to let your social media generate respect among your business partners, potential customers, customers or friends; therefore you must decide whom will represent your social media and how well he/she will represent your business/service to stand out creative in the market.
6. Participation: Your social media network should provide a platform for users to interact with each other and share their views online.
7. Openness: Your social media network should be open for all users. Resources to make your social media open are polls, contests or message sharing online.
8. Conversation: Social media network should provide a communication source to let the users interact online. A tool used for this purpose commonly is a “shout box” for a live chat.
9. Community: One thing that a social media must have is a community. Community is formed by building good relation with the others. More the users are attached towards your site; more are the chances for your social media community to prosper.
10. Connectedness: Your social media should also have useful videos, articles or online blogs to develop connectivity.
11. Sharing: Once you have established your social media presence, you should connect with social media users either through face book, twitter and LinkedIn and participate in discussion forums to know how they feel about social media marketing. It’s a good idea to attend conferences on social media to generate some ideas for your social media network.
12. Updating the social network You should keep on updating your social media to progress along with your competitors. You can post an interesting fact, an article or a blog to keep users stay towards your social network.
13. Where does social media fit? Social media fits into the marketing channels such that what you want to communicate about your services with the users and how well you use those channels to communicate effectively with the users.
14. Success or Failure: If your social media is good enough to develop strong customer relationship and able to generate large revenues for your social media; it means your social media network is a success. Positive comments and reviews about your social media ensure success while improper plan of action to run your social media will definitely result in a failure.
15. Spend more on social media: It’s a wiser thinking to spend more dollars to promote your social media network rather spending money on other advertisements. It gives you a slight assurance regarding the stability of your network.
Conclusion: Following the preceding steps in a proper sequence will gradually lead your social media to achieve success.
1. First step to success: You must decide your goal before commencing your network on social media. You should have your target audience in your mind to deliver the best value to your social media; therefore you must have a plan of action to accomplish what you desire through social media marketing.
2. Why social media? After identifying the audience, you must be clear why would users interact with your social media? Would my social media be able to make a strong impact among the audience? Therefore, you must watch your competitors businesses carefully; it will let you develop ideas on how to make your social media marketing successful.
3. Give and Take: Don’t promote your business or service only because social media marketing is not just for you, it’s to deliver fun to all; therefore regardless of your business, you must also give technical support, advice or even free stuffs to your social media users and let them share their views on your social media through blogs, forums or other social media tools.
4. Brand Promotion: Rather than being social, you should market specific items through your social media to make sales in order promote your brand effectively. To achieve brand promotion, you must build your connections with partner websites through banners to make prospects reach your social media network. The more ROI (return on investment) you receive, the more your social media is successful.
5. How to make users feel your presence: You should take a step forward to let your social media generate respect among your business partners, potential customers, customers or friends; therefore you must decide whom will represent your social media and how well he/she will represent your business/service to stand out creative in the market.
6. Participation: Your social media network should provide a platform for users to interact with each other and share their views online.
7. Openness: Your social media network should be open for all users. Resources to make your social media open are polls, contests or message sharing online.
8. Conversation: Social media network should provide a communication source to let the users interact online. A tool used for this purpose commonly is a “shout box” for a live chat.
9. Community: One thing that a social media must have is a community. Community is formed by building good relation with the others. More the users are attached towards your site; more are the chances for your social media community to prosper.
10. Connectedness: Your social media should also have useful videos, articles or online blogs to develop connectivity.
11. Sharing: Once you have established your social media presence, you should connect with social media users either through face book, twitter and LinkedIn and participate in discussion forums to know how they feel about social media marketing. It’s a good idea to attend conferences on social media to generate some ideas for your social media network.
12. Updating the social network You should keep on updating your social media to progress along with your competitors. You can post an interesting fact, an article or a blog to keep users stay towards your social network.
13. Where does social media fit? Social media fits into the marketing channels such that what you want to communicate about your services with the users and how well you use those channels to communicate effectively with the users.
14. Success or Failure: If your social media is good enough to develop strong customer relationship and able to generate large revenues for your social media; it means your social media network is a success. Positive comments and reviews about your social media ensure success while improper plan of action to run your social media will definitely result in a failure.
15. Spend more on social media: It’s a wiser thinking to spend more dollars to promote your social media network rather spending money on other advertisements. It gives you a slight assurance regarding the stability of your network.
Conclusion: Following the preceding steps in a proper sequence will gradually lead your social media to achieve success.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The Emergence of Media in Different Decades
In 60’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play
In 70’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite
In 80’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc
In 90’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc, DVD, QuickTime, Internet, Email, Webcam, Tivo, PDA, Smartphone
In 2000
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc, DVD, QuickTime, Internet, Email, Webcam, Tivo, PDA, Smartphone, Satellite Radio, HDTV, Blue Ray, iTunes, Podcasting, Blog, RSS, Flickr, BitTorrent, YouTube, Wikipedia, Joost
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play
In 70’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite
In 80’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc
In 90’s
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc, DVD, QuickTime, Internet, Email, Webcam, Tivo, PDA, Smartphone
In 2000
Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc, DVD, QuickTime, Internet, Email, Webcam, Tivo, PDA, Smartphone, Satellite Radio, HDTV, Blue Ray, iTunes, Podcasting, Blog, RSS, Flickr, BitTorrent, YouTube, Wikipedia, Joost
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Article Review: 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content
While reading through the social media today forum, I found this article with pretty ordinary title. But when I start reading the article, I found it is challenging the ongoing school of thoughts about blogs and their content.
This article is providing “7 tips for writing engaging content”, but it is actually focusing on what to avoid while writing content for a blog. In the first tip the author is advising to not clutter your articles/content with lot of sharing buttons, widgets and so on. It will only distract the attention of the reader and make it difficult to focus on the content.
Secondly, he talks about the banner blindness that how side rail distract the visitor attention from the content.
Thirdly, he advices to avoid putting your big smiling picture on the blog.
In the fourth advice, he emphasizes to avoid slang words and bad language.
Fifth advice is about the comments on the posts. Author says, not to pull unnecessary comments from the social media. Let the relevant people participate in a neutral manner instead.
Second last advice is about moderation of comments and importance of their replies.
Finally, he advices to avoid unnecessary posts for just filling up the space. Write only when there is something really important, and spread it through RSS and social media.
Read the full article at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/162838
This article is providing “7 tips for writing engaging content”, but it is actually focusing on what to avoid while writing content for a blog. In the first tip the author is advising to not clutter your articles/content with lot of sharing buttons, widgets and so on. It will only distract the attention of the reader and make it difficult to focus on the content.
Secondly, he talks about the banner blindness that how side rail distract the visitor attention from the content.
Thirdly, he advices to avoid putting your big smiling picture on the blog.
In the fourth advice, he emphasizes to avoid slang words and bad language.
Fifth advice is about the comments on the posts. Author says, not to pull unnecessary comments from the social media. Let the relevant people participate in a neutral manner instead.
Second last advice is about moderation of comments and importance of their replies.
Finally, he advices to avoid unnecessary posts for just filling up the space. Write only when there is something really important, and spread it through RSS and social media.
Read the full article at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/162838
Monday, December 21, 2009
Now, SEO is Social Media
Gone are the days when any back-link to your website ranks you higher in search engines. Now, competition is immense, therefore contemporary search engine algorithms give power to those links only, which come from authority resources. Directory submission, article submission and so on are at one place but social media is going to be the only venue through which you can get authority links. We will see how future of Search Engine Optimization is linked with Social Media.
There used to be a lot other ways to get back-links easily and get higher rankings, but now these back-links don’t have enough juice to take you up on search engine rankings. For instance, directory submission was once a powerful tool to get back links, but if I can submit my website in 500 directories, my competitor can submit in 1000 and the chain goes on. So, who will get the higher position in search engine?
By looking at this matter, algorithms have been changed and now search engines look for quality and authority links only. And the best place to get these authority links is social media.
The question arises here how to get authority links from social media. For Instance, you have a website to sell cell phone accessories.
Identify Needs - You first have to identify needs of your target market. Find what they have been looking for. Listen to their conversation on different portals like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo answers, blogs, and so on.
Create Killer Content - After need identification of your target audience, create killer content in shape of articles, ebooks, podcasts, vodcasts etc. and make it available on your business website or blog for the people around the social networks.
Spread The Content - Now, it’s time to spread the content over social media networks. Submit your content to social networking websites like slideshare, stumble upon, Youtube etc.
If your content is really impressive and has ability to educate, people over social networks will start to read and discuss about it. They will publish it to their websites and blogs for their audience which links back to your website and that eventually takes your website up in the search engine rankings.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Review of the Articles Predicting Social Media Trends for 2010
2010 is not very far away. Debate over web is already going on that how social media will be in the coming year. Many trends watchers and trend makers have published research articles to predict the future aspects of social media by keeping the trends of past years in mind. Therefore, I have decided to review all the authority articles to see what conclusion we can extract about social media in the next year.
One authority article which has been published on Harvard Business Publishing is titled “Six Social Media Trends of 2010” and written by David Armano, who is a part of Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design service. As Harvard is famous for business reviews, same essence of business philosophy can be found in the article.
In the opening of the article the writer directly predicts the future trend for 2010:
“So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that's my guess.”
One other very important prediction is done about social media is that; most of the companies will have social media policy for the coming year. Let’s see how writer see this aspect:
“If the company you work for doesn't already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what's considered competition, it's likely that you'll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.”
Some more very important predictions have been done like mobile becomes a social media lifeline or sharing no longer means email and so on.
Other article on Bizreport.com titled “Social media on marketers' menu for 2010” by Helen Leggat describes:
“It looks like social media is on the menu for most marketers next year. A survey of almost 2,000 MediaPost subscribers found that over half plan to have "a presence on social networks" as part of their marketing mix in 2010.”
Writer further list down the social media venues according to popularity for 2010:
• Email, with 56.8% realistically planning to use it
• Social networks (56.3%)
• Keyword search (49.7%)
• Radio (42.2%)
• Magazines (42.1%)
• Online display (40.5%)
• Event sponsorship (36.9%)
• Rich media display (35.5%)
• Direct mail (34.7%)
• Regional TV (32.8%)
• Regional newspapers (31.7%)
• Out-of-home (31.2%)
• Email sponsorship (29.5%)
• Online video (26.7%)
• Mobile SMS text (26.1%)
• National TV (18.2%)
• National newspapers (14.8%)
A very famous blog of social media influencers, ReadWriteWeb.com, published a guest post titled “10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010”written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com. She has written her predictions in a very long and comprehensive manner and nearly covered all the matters related to social media in 2010. She opens her lines by giving the current figures:
“Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.”
Among the 10 ways, one way she explained in the sub heading “Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology”, is a matter which I have already been thinking before. Let’s see how she discussed this prediction:
“With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such as closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while re purposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.”
Social Media Today, a famous online social media community published an article “Five Social Media Predictions for 2010” by Joel Postman (originally published on socializedpr.com). I recommend this article worth reading as it has some rock solid predictions. In his one paragraph he predicts that:
“We’re nearing the end of the hegemony of Google Search. This is not to say Google is in immediate trouble, or some other search engine will take its place, but traditional search is becoming irrelevant, and other kinds of search will begin to challenge Google. Even Google, a Web 1.0 company — or Web 1.5 company at best — recognizes this, and launched its Social Search experiment. Technorati, an early leader in social (media) search, could have owned the space, and maybe they did for a while, but not anymore.”
Conclusion
All the articles which have been reviewed and which have not been reviewed but published on the internet already, more or less predict the same future of social media. Everybody is predicting the substantial growth of social media as well as marketing over it. Marketers will more tilt towards social media as compared to other venues of online and traditional marketing. Hence, the conclusion is that, social media will thrive drastically and create more charm for people around the world.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Article Review: 10 Tips to Get Re-tweeted On Twitter
Recently, a post published on Social Media Today (originally published on http://citysand.wordpress.com/) provides a comprehensive case study about tweets and retweets. The writer took the facts and figures from Dan Zarrella’s, and written a comprehensive article to figure out why people retweets. A very informative post for the people who are addict of Twitter as well as for those who use Twitter for marketing.
Facts and figures are graphically represented in the original post but you can take the following facts as a brief summary of the full script.
• 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets.
• The use of tinyurl.com has been decreased, and the use of bit.ly has been increased for URLs shortening.
• “you” is the word which is the most retweetable.
• “game” is the word which is the least retweetable.
• “Colon” is the most retweetable punctuation mark.
• “Semicolon” is the least retweetable punctuation mark.
• 5PM is the peak time for retweets.
• 9AM is the nadir time for retweets.
• Friday is the best day for retweets.
• Sunday is the worst day for retweets.
Go to the link to read full article, Click Here
Lots of more informative articles regarding Social Media will be coming on Social Media Extremist so stay tuned....
Facts and figures are graphically represented in the original post but you can take the following facts as a brief summary of the full script.
• 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets.
• The use of tinyurl.com has been decreased, and the use of bit.ly has been increased for URLs shortening.
• “you” is the word which is the most retweetable.
• “game” is the word which is the least retweetable.
• “Colon” is the most retweetable punctuation mark.
• “Semicolon” is the least retweetable punctuation mark.
• 5PM is the peak time for retweets.
• 9AM is the nadir time for retweets.
• Friday is the best day for retweets.
• Sunday is the worst day for retweets.
Go to the link to read full article, Click Here
Lots of more informative articles regarding Social Media will be coming on Social Media Extremist so stay tuned....
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