How to Integrate Branding and Social Media

Social media has been used as a platform to reach customers and get information about them. But, it’s also being used to enhance brand strategies for greater brand equity.

What is Branding?

“Branding” is a term that gets thrown around a lot in business marketing circles. But what exactly does it mean? Think of your favorite beverage. What brand is it? What comes to mind when you think of that brand? Chances are it’s much more than just the brand’s name. You probably associate enjoyment with drinking that brand of beverage, and most likely you also associate high quality and trustworthiness with it – you trust your favorite beverage brand to be consistently satisfying.

If your beverage supports a particular cause, you might even associate social responsibility with the brand, which in turn heightens your satisfaction with purchasing and consuming that beverage. So, at the simple mention of a brand name, you instantly conjure feelings of enjoyment, quality, trustworthiness and satisfaction. That’s a pretty impressive feat – and that’s branding.

Build Your Platform

The most common elements of a social media platform are a blog, a Facebook page, YouTube and a Twitter account. Each of these elements needs to be a reflection of your brand and must work together to move potential customers to your website where they can then purchase your goods or services. It’s important to develop a brand narrative that social citizens can follow throughout your social media platform that will in turn help develop brand passion.

An effective way to do this is to make sure your content is both relevant and engaging. The more creative and entertaining your content is, the more excited your audience will be, and the more likely it is that they will not only spend time with your platform, but they’ll spread the word, too. Some of the most successful recent marketing strategies include tying the online and offline worlds together as well as linking social media with traditional media.

Track Down Your Audience

Once your platform is built, the next step is to find your audience. Consider who your target audience is and then find out where in the web they hang out and go there. Google is a great tool for this. By using keywords to search for similar products and services to your own, you can land in the same places your potential audience does.

Take the time to follow conversation threads to find out what that audience is thinking about a given product, what matters, what excites them and even what doesn’t. Use this valuable information to help refine your platform and your approach.

Nurture Relationships

Once you find your audience, connect with them by joining the conversation. Offer your insight and expertise, but be careful to avoid self-promotion. Attempts to simply get people to go to your site will appear pushy and insincere. Genuine dialogue will help build a relationship of mutual respect that will lead to potential customers seeking out your goods and services.

While searching for and engaging with your audience, take note of the influencers and make it a point to develop a relationship with them. Influencers are the bloggers who are in a position to spread the word and recommend your brand. Introduce yourself and become a part of their online community and be sure your interactions add value to the conversation.

Your Brand, Your Experience

How have you integrated branding and social media? What have your experiences been? We’d love to hear about them. If you have questions about making social media work for your brand, please leave them in the comments section below. We look forward to helping your business and brand make the most of social media platforms.

                      

Going Viral: Why and How to Use YouTube as Part of Your Social Media Campaign/Strategy

When you hear someone talking about social media, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Most likely, it’s FaceBook or Twitter. But, what comes to mind when someone mentions YouTube? If you’re thinking home videos of kittens and toddlers, think again. YouTube is a social media force to be reckoned with and here’s why.

According to YouTube’s own statistics, almost 17 million people have connected their YouTube account to at least one social service, such as Twitter or FaceBook. Additionally, 100 million people take a social action – such as likes, shares, or comments – on YouTube every week. To illustrate the opportunity that awaits you, YouTube also has more than 2 billion views per day.

So, what’s the best way for your business to incorporate YouTube into your social media strategy and take advantage of those statistics?

Get Started Now

Because of YouTube’s social features and social activity update feeds, you can begin to build a YouTube presence even before you produce any video content of your own. There is also the ability to comment on and rate videos, add videos to your YouTube Profile as favorites (also known as “favoriting”), share videos on FaceBook and Twitter – or almost anywhere online, and generate playlists of relevant videos.

Track Your Progress

Once you have your own videos, not only can you get feedback through user comments and ratings, but you can also get invaluable marketing data about your videos – for free. YouTube offers information on viewer demographics, popularity, and a digest of user interaction, consisting of statistics on comments, ratings, and “favoriting.” This type of information is an extremely useful tool for developing relevant, more effective content.

Create Traffic

Views of your videos on your business’s YouTube profile or, channel, can easily send traffic to your main website. This is a great way for potential customers to opt-in from YouTube to your business’s website. Twitter and FaceBook also work well in conjunction with YouTube to help drive traffic to your website. Consider that an auto-shared tweet on the average results in six new YouTube.com sessions and that YouTube sees more than 500 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link.

Create Relevant Content

If you have a budget that allows for professionally produced videos, great! If not, you can still produce content with minimal cost and relatively little effort. Videos can be uploaded from your webcam or mobile phone, and they can be enhanced with features on YouTube, such as adding captions and subtitles, annotations (text, links, and hotspots), or replacement audio.

Your YouTube

 Have you used YouTube as a part of your social media campaign? What were the results? If you have any experiences you’d like to share, please comment below. Please send you comments to (info@flylinesearchmarketing.com). We also invite you to visit our website at (http://www.flylinesearchmarketing.com/) or call us at 1-866-258-5511.

                      

Google+ Not Quite Ready for Small Businesses…Here’s What You Can Do While Waiting

As many anxiously anticipate what Google+ can do for social networking and what it will mean for the rest of the social networking crowd (Facebook and Twitter, are you watching?), numerous individuals are already signing up with businesses close on their heels. However, a recent article in the Los Angeles Times suggests that Google is not quite ready for businesses to sign on to this service.

In fact, by all accounts, it sounds as though businesses will get their own special service later this year as the brains behind Google are working fast and furiously to build out something unique and separate from the personal social networking. Not a bad idea as the current social networking channels often make it a challenge to figure out how to keep the personal from the professional on social networking pages. While Facebook allows users to set up business fan pages, these are still linked to personal profiles, making it difficult to present a separation for the small business owner who likes to create a social networking presence. Here’s hoping Google+ is Google’s real success story unlike its past attempts at social networking.

Other Professional Social Media Channels

In the meantime, small businesses still have a lot of ground to cover in the social networking arena from which to share their messages and interact with their target audiences and customer bases. In fact, there are dozens and dozens of sites to consider. Here are some of the big names and what you can do with them:

• LinkedIn: Known as a great professional networking site, more businesses now understand the need to create business profiles for their executives and staff to build business-to-business relationships, attract great talent, and generate new growth opportunities.
• YouTube: While this site is known for some hilarious and often controversial postings, more businesses are recognizing it as a way to put a multimedia spin on their business offering as they reach out to their audience. For example, a client now uses it to help their small business clients interact with other business experts for such services as CEO coaching, business coaching, one-to-one coaching, and advisory boards.
• 43 Things: This site offers businesses a way to share goals, objectives, and plans for your business with colleagues, peers, customers, and even investors. It is helping businesses network for a wider audience, fund new ideas, and generate publicity.

Your Social Networking Roadmap

How are you currently using social media and social networking? Do you need help in generating a plan? Leave your questions below and we would be happy to suggest ways in which you can take advantage of these and future social networking channels for greater business and brand exposure for your intended audience.




             

Using Social Media Carefully: Keeping Companies and Brands on Good Terms

Social media becomes a sensitive subject when people use it in a negative way to post offensive material or make disparaging comments. Even worse is when these negative posts become connected to the company they work for or are about the firm they represent.

Bad News

Not many people are likely to forget the two Domino’s Pizza workers who made a mockery of their employer or those from Taco Bell who posted pictures of rats in the restaurant. Other companies fear that their intellectual property and proprietary information may end up on Facebook or YouTube.

From people exhibiting a lifestyle that contrasts with the values and ideals of their employers to those who tweet about things that show their organization in a racist light like the recent Albuquerque police officer, social media must be used carefully and a way that leaves the company in a good light. Despite the Albuquerque police officer being punished for his offensive Tweets, he carried on and is now involved in an investigation, involving pistol whipping. Taken together, social media may not be working in the favor of the local police department.

Good News

But, for seemingly every example of one bad apple in the social media barrel, there are examples that illustrate the benefits of bringing employees and social media together. A Dutch study noted that innovation improved with employees that were given access to and full use of social media tools.

Numerous employees around the world have used their personal social networking sites to praise their employers or help with viral marketing initiatives, noting that social media, when used correctly, can also help and organization and make employees feel involved in creating positive change.

Smart News

What an organization may need to think about is a social media policy that provides a framework from which to show their employees how they think social media should be used when they are representing themselves as part of a company or brand. Companies must tread carefully in terms of balancing employees’ rights to free speech with concern over intellectual property rights and potential defamation of the company’s reputation.

New legal studies are asking companies to tread lightly with employees who might use their personal Facebook and Twitter pages to complain about their jobs. Employees have to vent and as long as nothing inflammatory or defaming is said, it is important to let them have their space.  However, important areas to address immediately are posting that have racially charged rants, company secrets, or other types of inside information.

Your News

What has been your experience with social media and your employees? Do you have a strategy that works? Let us know by adding your comment below.




                 

Developing a Social Media Policy That Fits Your Needs, Culture, and Strategy

Recently, the Albuquerque Fire Department (AFD) announced that they are preparing to unveil a new social media policy. According to the article, the fire department said it will restrict vulgar posts pictures that could be tied back to the department even if it is posted on a social networking site that an employee uses for their own personal use.

Source: www.flickr.com/
photos/naromoyu/
270689100/

As the articled quoted AFD Deputy Chief Tige Watson, “Anything you taken in the scope of your employment with the Albuquerque Fired Department will be considered our property.” This illustrates the growing recognition that the Internet and social media often greatly influences the reputation and brand of a company – in good ways and in very bad ways. Therefore, whether large or small, it may good to create a formal social media policy for your company.

Social Media Policy Must Have’s

While most must have’s in a social media policy seem like common sense, this does not mean that every employee would be capable of using good judgment, especially with social media tools that they use on their personal time. For example, many people have been fired for posting they were at the beach when, in actual fact, they should have not shared that information because they just called in sick to work.

Hence, the must have’s must help employees get a better understanding of the overall guidelines and parameters of how they should be using social media if they are connected to an employer regardless of whether they are using social media for work purposes or not:

• Provide clear examples of how to use social media in a positive way and what constitutes punishment or firing in terms of doing something that could damage the company’s reputation. 
• Explain what type of information and content is off limits in terms of confidentiality.
• List laws and an easy to understand explanation of what is considered to be content that could involve defamation, discrimination, harassment, and copyright infringement.
• Link all social media policy to the policies already in the employee handbook so employees make connections between the two in terms of their roles, responsibility, and performance. 

Guide Tips for Social Media Policy Development

Compare some of the great information found online about this hot topic, including numerous articles and guides that are readily available. This will help you gather a number of ideas to help customize your own social media policy. Here are some basic tips:

• Write an overall social media policy guide for employees that covers the basics on online etiquette and connection to the company. Tie all information to the company’s culture and current policies on public interaction.
• Add on specific social media policies for specific social networking or media channels as they are necessary. There is no point in including a particular channel if it is not used or your firm is too small to need multiple policies.
• Consider what other companies have done by using the Social Media Governance website to benchmark the best practices of other company social media policies.

How have you used social media policy to shape how your employees use social media and social networking channels? What have you found successful or challenging? If you need help in developing a Social Media Marketing program for your firm, I hope you will consider allowing Flyline Search Marketing to serve your firm. Please share your thoughts below.

              

Ready, Aim, Pitch! How to Sell the Idea of Internet Marketing to Your Bosses

If you’re the type of person who recognizes the incredible benefit that online marketing can have for a company and you work for a small Albuquerque business that doesn’t have an online presence, you may be in a very good position to make the kind of suggestion that could prove very profitable for the business. And, in doing so, you could make yourself an invaluable asset.

The first question, as always, is how to breach the issue with your company higher-ups. The reality is if they haven’t already recognized the growth potential inherent in having an online presence on their own, they’ll probably require some convincing. Here are a few tips on how you can sell launching an internet marketing plan to your boss (or bosses).

Show them what other companies in the same industry are doing. If that’s not enough to make them realize they’re being left behind in the dust, you may have to go for the jugular by finding examples of competitor companies that have made headway in conquering cyberspace. Break down the strides they’ve made. This may be painful news to deliver, but it’s also a necessary tact that should work. If it doesn’t, you may have to go for the sales pitch.

Don’t just bring up the idea. Pitch it good and hard. Go all out by putting together an official presentation that contains facts, figures, and projections. Ask for an appointment with your higher-ups or the company CEO so that you can present your idea directly to the people who call the shots.

It’s not good enough to just casually bring up the notion of launching an internet marketing campaign in the course of a staff meeting. First of all, you run the risk of being rejected before you’ve had a chance to really make your argument. Besides, projects like these don’t get green-lit without someone putting together a plan and presenting all of the pros and cons as well as budgetary and profit projections.

Offer to form an “exploratory committee” consisting of just yourself. This offer should only be made if the people in charge are reticent to give you a definitive answer. It’s far preferable to receive approval to test the waters rather than being rejected outright with a firm “no.” 

Taking this approach will require you to put in a lot more work than you were probably thinking you’d have to – but, by doing so, you’ll only serve to raise your own stock with the company.

For more information on what you’ll need to get your online marketing campaign off the ground, contact Flyline Search Marketing, a group of local experts who can deliver the nitty-gritty on what your company will need to succeed in cyberspace.

                  

Enabling Citizens to Fight Crime with Social Media

 

The city of Albuquerque is in the news again, and, once again, it is the efforts that police are taking to use social media as a tool in fighting crime that is attracting a lot of buzz. There’s so much buzz, in fact, that other states like California, Georgia, Minnesota, and Washington are following in hot pursuit. So, what’s all of this hubbub about?

In what could be seen as one of the most inventive and positive uses of social media ever, the Albuquerque Police Department has launched an effort to keep citizens and businesses updated on the status of ongoing crime investigations. Standing in stark contrast to the typical way that police departments operate – by maintaining a policy of not sharing certain information with the public about current investigations – Albuquerque hopes that its efforts will go a long way in making up for unfortunate cutbacks to the city’s police force. 

Some of the proposed uses of an integration of law enforcement with social media includes:

• Raising awareness about theft rings by informing businesses and individuals of what to look for to ensure they don’t fall victim.

• Gathering tips to help solve open cases, such as receiving anonymous tips.   

• Obtaining critical information about the location of fugitives. Police are well aware that, sometimes, people feel much more comfortable providing information through private social media instead of picking up the phone or visiting the police in person.

This latest development stands as testament to the impact that social media is having on our society, and only hints at the possibilities that could be developed further down the road. In its reach, social media has had an impact on society that hasn’t really been seen (or heard) since the invention of radio. 

 

Once you stop to consider the implications, you might just decide your next stop is a social media presence for your business. Contact Albuquerque Internet Marketing for more information on how you can tap into and take advantage of this vital pipeline.