How Cisco Uses Social Media to Connect With Customers
In this video I interview LaSandra Brill, the social media marketing manager at Cisco. She talks about the cool stuff Cisco is doing with social media.
LaSandra shares insights into how Cisco reached 90 times the audience at one-sixth the cost on a recent social media product launch and how they did this compared to a similar launch using traditional marketing. You’ll also hear about other ways Cisco uses social media to deepen relationships and connect with customers.
Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.
4 Tips for Converting Social Media Leads
Are you finding your social media efforts aren’t generating enough leads? Do the ones that come through “die on the vine”? This article will tell you why and what to do about it.
To fix the lead problem, you need to be able to easily identify where your “system” is breaking. There’s only one place to look for holes in your lead generation efforts: your sales funnel.
I faced this exact challenge and found that it wasn’t my strategies that weren’t delivering—it was the sales process that social media leads were being put through. Once I identified that, I worked on building a better sales process for social media leads.
8 Hot Social Media Tips From Eight Industry Experts
Are you looking for some creative ideas to enhance your social media activities? If so, look no further.
To help you lay down tracks for social media success, here’s a solid list of strategies from eight top social media experts. Take a look, ask yourself what tips you can use and start reaping the rewards of real success.
#1: Offer live events on Facebook
“To provide additional value and fresh ways for your fans to interact with you, periodically conduct live chat sessions or live webinars or teleseminars. My co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day, Chris Treadaway, and I recently conducted what we called a ‘flash chat’ in order to crowdsource content for version two of our book,” explained Mari Smith.
26 Ways to Use Social Media for Lead Generation
Is your business looking for leads?
As enticing as the saying is, “If you build it, they will come,” we all know that just because we build a social media presence, people don’t magically start knocking down our door.
Instead, we need to encourage people to come to our social pages and once they’re there, we have to create enough value for them to hang around. And through these repeated exchanges, casual users can become regular visitors as well as valuable leads.
In previous posts, I’ve written A-Z guides to help create the absolute best presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. Now let’s turn our attention to harnessing the power of those efforts for lead generation.
9 Ways to Transform Your Website Into a Social Media Hub
Should your website be social? Are you looking to turn that static website into an interesting social media–enabled destination?
Keep reading to discover how.
Should Your Site Be Social-Enabled?
There’s no doubt that social media is a powerful marketing and communication tool for businesses and non-profits that have embraced it.
Yet, for most of us, our websites are still where the rubber meets the road. It’s where you turn visitors into leads and prospects into customers. It’s where you build your lists and sell your goods.
The Art of Enchantment: How Guy Kawasaki Will Change Your Business
I recently interviewed Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com and the author of the bestselling book, The Art of the Start. His latest masterpiece is called Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.
In this interview we talk about what makes for great content, how he came up with the title of his latest book, what Enchantment means for business, why businesses need to embrace nobodies and how he promoted his book. (Be sure to listen to the MP3 of this interview below.)
Mike: Most of our readers are marketers and business owners. Can you explain what Alltop does for them and why they might find it useful?
Guy: One of the functions of marketers, PR people and social media people is they need to keep on top of things.
The vision of Alltop was that we should aggregate RSS feeds for people by topic and create essentially an online magazine rack so that you could go to one place and say, “Okay, these are all the social media blogs and websites aggregated in one place.” It’s the five most recent stories from each source, and we give you a preview of the first paragraph of each story so you can see if you really want to click through.
How to Create Your Own Social Networking Community
If you have a medium- to large-sized online network, you might have noticed some of your contacts have been developing their own communities in the form of private groups, forums or social networks that are a mixture of free or paid memberships.
The Pros of Creating Your Own Community
So with all of the existing communities out there, what’s the benefit of creating your own?
Driving Traffic to Your Site – Let’s say that you start a forum on your own domain. If you’re successful in creating a popular community, you’ll be driving a lot of traffic to your website. The traffic, in turn, will lead to the next benefit.
Study Reveals Top 6 Social Media Goals for 2011
In 2010, many businesses laid their social media foundations. In 2011, many wonder what social media marketers will tackle as their top priorities.
Altimeter Group‘s recent research reveals that integration, staffing, advertising and measurement are all key areas of focus for social media strategists in 2011.
Jeremiah Owyang, industry analyst and Altimeter Group partner who focuses on customer strategy, recently delivered the keynote Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration. He offered some extremely valuable survey results, insights and advice for businesses looking to expand their social media plans in 2011.
How Social Media Drew 27,000 More People to the Races
In Southern California, the Del Mar Racetrack is the place to see and be seen. And now it’s the place to check into, tweet about and post via Facebook.
This Southern California institution, in business for 71 years, draws thousands every summer for horse racing, its cool bars and restaurants and a busy slate of concerts and festivals.
But like many entertainment industry venues, Del Mar attendance has dipped in recent years due to the ailing economy. But in 2010, the track added a new star to its marketing lineup – social media.
With virtually no other marketing changes, social media boosted attendance this past season by 4.2 percent.
“That’s an increase of 27,000 bodies,” said Craig Dado, senior vice president of marketing at Del Mar Racetrack. “In this economy, I’ve got to be honest, it was a little bit surprising.”
Is Your Business Ready for the Now Revolution?
I recently interviewed Jay Baer, co-author of the brand-new book The Now Revolution and founder of the popular blog ConvinceandConvert.com.
In this interview, we talk about social media marketing, Jay’s experience writing the book and about where this crazy, fast-moving industry is headed.
Mike: Jay, what’s the single most important thing that marketers or business owners need to know to be successful right now?
Jay: It’s a terrific question. One of the things that we talked about a lot in the book is the fact that you have to act quickly as an organization. The example that we use to kick off the book is if you’re at a hotel and you’re having a bad hotel experience—it’s dirty or gross or whatever—historically, you might go down to the front desk, or call the 1-800 number or write a letter.
