community - Social Email Marketing

The Importance of Your Business Mentality

It is important for each department in a business to understand where they stand in regards to overall business goals. Without having a clear grasp of what their objectives are accomplishing, do their missions and goals truly serve a purpose?

Each department should be able to define their individual goals, which generally fall within the parameters of the overall business goals at each specific company. Obviously varying departments are going to have unique goals that other aspects of the organization don’t have and vice-versa.

Social media marketing is a matter of passion: an amazing story (and a 70-year young community manager)

Regular visitors of this blog probably remember that a few weeks ago we organized a social marketing meetup. One of the people, willing to help out and introduced to me by young Thomas Van Orshaegen, was Alain Indria, owner of a “natural food” shop, Lombardia, in Antwerp that got international headlines when one day a journalist from the Wall Street Journal put his restaurant on the top five places to visit in Antwerp, Belgium. Alain was at that time at the Shanghai World Expo, passionately demonstrating his new creation, the GingerLove tea. Among his customers, Alain has a lot of famous people and he took care of the catering when stars such as Moby and others came to Belgium. His passion and enthusiasm struck me. But so did the way he used social media. Strategy? No, sir. Alain’s social media approach and his whole businesses thrive on three things: passion, an incredible sales drive and an excellent interaction with his community. But that’s not all. The amazing stuff still has to come! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Case studies Tagged With: Alain Indria, Antwerp, blogger, community, Facebook, GingerLove box, GingerLove tea, good cross-channel marketer, interaction, J-P De Clerck, Lombardia, Marta Majewska, natural food shop, Shanghai World Expo, social marketing meetup, social media, Social Media Day Meetup, Thomas Van Orshaegen

Communication and marketing relationships: the power and danger of words and marketing speak

Using marketing terms to describe people, their needs and the way they communicate, makes us, marketers, reduce the reality of communication into a linguistical cloud that troubles our views on people and the way they connect.

Marketers are not the only ones using their own dictionary to capture reality in a very specific speak, of course.

MDs have patients or clients, governments have citizens, marketers have target groups, recipients, fans, prospects, leads, consumers etc.

Language is powerful but it can also be destructive and reduce complex realities to simple words that enable us to see clear in the chaos but at the same time make us blind to the reality.

Why don't we just talk about people and dialogues instead of customers, prospects, leads and media?

LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Pages, spam and self-promotion

The great thing with LinkedIn Groups and Facebook Pages is that they are started by people you can connect with, and they allow exchanging ideas, asking questions and so on, especially LinkedIn Groups.

I’m a member of several LinkedIn Groups and of course in many of these groups, there are people who “spam”.

Let’s define spam here as adding links to your own company, services or whatever without any value for the discussion but only for SEO or self-promotion purposes.

Social media marketing: how many friends does your business have?

When I started this blog back in December, I thought no one would read it because I was not a native English speaker, and I guessed that what I have been writing about for ages in my own country wouldn’t appeal to an international “audience”.

The interaction with people via this blog, the “followers” (I really hate that word) and good old Google Analytics, tell me I was wrong.

When I started the Social Marketing Forum, I was doubting again. Who needed another web site, group blog or Ning community about social media marketing, right?

But I was wrong again. If you have over 600 members in 3 months and over 900 fans on your Facebook page in 2 weeks you must be doing something that appeals I guess.

Email marketing: some less conventional ways to build and grow an email list

There is a common saying among email marketers: “the money is in the list.” I liked to add: the list is composed of real people, not email addresses.

When it comes to building a list, most marketers think well within the box. They create websites or blogs, fill them with content, and slap an opt-in box to draw in visitors.

This method certainly is not the be-all and end-all of marketing as some believe. There are non-conventional ways to build an email list and with social media, there are more than ever before.

Creating social media fan pages and communities: tips to do it better

It’s one thing to have a social media profile, and another altogether to empower your business or personal branding efforts with an entirely independent social media fan page or community.

From small businesses to major corporations, thousands of worldwide business presences have captured the attention of social media platforms on a user-level, but few have made the move to becoming total fan-based brands.

Whether you want to simply conglomerate your social media presences or provide a new platform for fans and customers to interact, the tips in this post on fan page and community building will help you find social media marketing success.

Being featured on TwitterCounter.com: is it worthwhile?

There aren’t many social media tools and services I haven’t tested yet. Social media listening tools, social media analytics applications, Twitter marketing tools, social bookmarking apps, you name it.

I’m going to start to share my findings. What works and what doesn’t. What are the benefits and what sucks?

There are plenty of free tools among them and lots of apps you have to pay for. There are tools that everyone knows and platforms you probably haven’t heard of yet.

Whether it’s Nielsen BlogPulse, Seesmic, HootSuite, Spredfast, Converseon, WhosTalkin?, OnlyWire, FriendFeeder, twtpoll, dozens of Twitter apps, whatever, they will all pass the test (next on my list are email marketing platforms, yep, I’m ambitious).

Since a few hours, I’m testing the ‘featured user’ function of TwitterCounter, a service developed by Dutch serial entrepreneur Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

The role of email marketing in the social media day and age (part 1 of 2)

Email marketing is a form of marketing. Marketing is a global and holistic strategy with one final goal: generate revenues. There are many ways of achieving this goal, from direct marketing to branding.

Email marketing is a part of a global marketing strategy. Social media marketing too. Customers are increasingly online. They decide when, where and how they want to connect. And why: to gain information, buy, complain, talk, comment, interact, etc.

Marketing should strive to get a global view on the customer by tracking all online and offline interactions. The goal is to create customer satisfaction.

Why are social media marketing experts so obsessed with the letter “C”?

Social media marketing is not new. But now that the number of social media users is growing, a new generation of so-called experts is reinventing the wheel and coming up with great theories about a phenomenon that exists since many years.

What was once called word of mouth is now, well, many other things. The reason why there are so many “experts” is simple: companies are finally starting to wake up and often don’t have a clue, so they hire “experts”.

It has always been like that, especially in times where companies don’t take risks any more and prefer to let others solve their challenges, it’s about fear and responsibility. Yes, I admit, I don’t like people that brand themselves as experts very much. The same goes for companies that need experts and consultants for every little decision they have to make. “I like to move it, move it”. What ever happened to thinking and deciding yourself?

And right now I hate that “C” obsession that’s going on.

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Communication and marketing relationships: the power and danger of words and marketing speak

LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Pages, spam and self-promotion

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