One Day on the Internet
Sometimes you have to see the information graphically to really grok the substance of what you’re viewing. With that said, here’s a look at One Day on the Internet, thanks to MBAOnline.com.
Created by: MBAOnline.com
What’s your Social Media Reputation?
Managing your social media reputation may be something that you’ve never even thought of. Or it may be something you obsess over! Either way, there are a few things you can do to control, or attempt to control, your social media reputation.
First, you must spend time just getting out there. Establish your online reputation by appearing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media outlets. People will look for you on Google (for the most part – over 90% of searches), so besides your company website, they should also find you on Twitter, Facebook and perhaps on YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Searchers won’t find those results if you aren’t there, and not only have established a presence, but are actively working those platforms.
Second, if the conversation about your products or brand turns sour, you’ll need to jump on the situation immediately. The famous United Break Guitars incident shows how lack of response can cause the chatter to blow up beyond having ANY control. But by monitoring your channels, when something does pop up, you are prepared to respond quickly. That quick response will help you acknowledge any complaints and address the situation so that your followers understand what’s going on.
Third, keep your ears to the ground! There are myriad tools out there that help you monitor what’s going on in regard to your products, company and competition. The best are Google Alerts and Social Mention. There are also several premium products on the market that allows you to drill down into social media platforms to follow those conversations.
Bottom line? You have the power to take proper action and control your social media reputation. And if you value your bottom line, you MUST be proactive in monitoring and responding when the conversation turns negative.
Top Eleven Reasons to Use Social Media at Your Next Tradeshow Appearance
So the guy in accounting loves hanging out on Facebook, checking status updates and posting photos. Your sales manager loves Twitter. And the installer-guy checks in on Foursquare all day long.
But you’re still trying to make the decision on whether or not your company should get involved in all of those platforms for your next tradeshow appearance.
Not to fear! Here’s an incomplete list of reasons why you should seriously consider using social media to engage with potential clients and visitors at your next tradeshow appearance.
- Most, if not all, of your potential booth visitors are already using social media.
- The entry level to using social media is cheap, if not free.
- Most, if not all, of your employees are familiar with, if not adept at, social media.
- Tradeshow are a visual medium. It’s easy to share visual images of the show and your booth through photographs and video.
- Twitter is a great tool for capturing attention and broadcasting to attendees through the use of hashtags. Hashtags are the magical currency that moves people from place to place and alerts visitors, thanks to the near-instantaneous spread of information.
- Tradeshows are social. Social media is social. People love to connect, either in groups or one-on-one.
- Social media actually makes in-person events more attractive, not less, as was thought years ago when it first came on the scene.
- Tracking metrics via social media can be extremely useful to your long-term marketing efforts. By uncovering information about your visitors, you can use that info to determine where they hangout online, what gets their attention, and what they respond to, so at future shows you’ll have more insight into their actions.
- Social media allows you to build buzz before the show.
- Social media allows you to stay connected during the show.
- Social media allows you to continue to drive online traffic and keep attendees and followers informed and interested long after the show doors have closed.
No doubt you can come up with more for this list. Suffice it to say that social media gives you tools, insight and leverage that you didn’t have before. And you can be assured that whether you use the tools or not, your competition is definitely using them!
In fact, feel free to download our free Social Media Tradeshow Marketing Checklist if you’re just getting started. It’s a freebie with no strings attached and no opt-in required: PDF download – right-click to save to your hard drive.
Ten ways to use Social Media to Drive Traffic, Get More Leads and Close More Sales at Tradeshows
Here’s a ‘cheat sheet’ for a webinar I’m going to give in about a month.
I’ll show you the ten ways I feel are key pieces to creating more buzz and driving traffic to your booth. Some of them are fairly easy and quick, others take time, energy and some investment, whether of money or people. Some are hard to learn to do properly and take time, others can be understood if not mastered in short order.
All of these pieces are worth taking a very good look at, and whether you choose to engage in blogging, or using Twitter or spending your time on Facebook or YouTube depends on your particular skill or knowledge level and your company’s situation in regards to personal and position in the marketplace and what you’re willing and able to commit to. But understand, it IS a commitment, and it is not to be taken lightly.
- Blogging
- Photo sharing (Flickr and Facebook)
- Video Sharing (YouTube and Facebook)
- Contests and cleverness
- Famous or notable people in your booth?
- Pinterest?
- Have a Social Media Point Person
- Train your staff, not only in Social Media, but also in handling the traffic.
- Preparation makes it all work
I’ll take all of these various elements and spend 3-5 minutes on each. Stay tuned for more. In fact, if you’d like to be on the notification list for the sign-up, just make sure you’re subscribed to the Tradeshow Marketing Newsletter – the form is in the upper right side of the page.
Podcast: Derek Mehraban Interview
This podcast interview is a follow up of a previous interview we did with Derek Mehraban back in September, 2010. Back then, Derek had some great ideas on how to use social media to build buzz at a tradeshow through the use of a virtual tradeshow website. Lots of good info there – you should check it out if you haven’t heard it yet.
This year, Derek’s company, Ingenex Digital Marketing, went back to Lightfair in Las Vegas and worked again with OSRAM Opto Semiconductors – with some very interesting results. Listen to the podcast here while you check the links (which all open up a new window to allow you to continue to listen with no interruption).
[display_podcast]
RELATED LINKS
Ingenex Digital Marketing – Social Media Agency
OSRAM Opto Semiconductors at Lightfair 2012
During the show (you’ll hear in the podcast), Ingenex Digital worked with Lisa the Contortionist – and set her up with some social media outposts to help spread the word before, during and after the show:
15 Ways to Stand Out in the Social Media Crowd
It seems everyone tweets. Everyone has a Facebook page. If they’re not on YouTube with their own channel, it’s coming soon. Your competition is popping up on Pinterest and Google+. So how do you stand out from the crowd, especially if you want to stand out at a tradeshow, event or conference?
Let’s count the ways (an incomplete list!):
- Create good content. Whether it’s a short tweet or a longer blog post, or a photo of your new tradeshow booth, find ways to deliver something GOOD to your followers.
- Be responsive. If you get a comment be sure to respond.
- Don’t belittle your competition.
- Do things differently. You may do the same thing or provide a similar product as your competition. Can you find a way to do it differently to stand out?
- Do different things. Don’t do the same thing everyone else is doing. Search for ways to do different things.
- Take risks. Risks are just that: risks. But if you don’t risk, you don’t get the reward. Take a risk now and then. Small, medium, large risks…they’re all worthwhile at some point.
- Work hard. You don’t necessarily have to outwork your competition, but you do have to work hard. Good hard work is important and it shows, especially when compared to others that may not be working as hard.
- Have good manners. Politeness counts for a lot!
- Think for yourself. Take input from your colleagues and assess what the market is saying – but at the end of the day, think for yourself and make decisions based on what YOU think, not what others think. After all, it’s your life and your business.
- Don’t follow the crowd. Following the crowd makes you one of the crowd. Not a good idea, since the idea is to stand out from the crowd.
- Do what you’ll say you’ll do. It’s amazing how such a little thing like keeping promises is important to standing out in the crowd. You’d be surprised – or maybe not – by how many people don’t keep their word.
- Show some initiative. Don’t wait for the boss to ask you to do something. Don’t wait for your partner to give you an idea to pursue. Come up with your own ideas and follow them. Initiative helps you stand out from the crowd.
- Be attentive. When people are in your booth, or responding to your online postings with comments and questions, act as if they’re the most important thing in the world at that moment. The attention you give to them will be remembered.
- Make people feel good. By spreading a little happiness, you’ll be remembered. Find something about your followers or visitors that you can compliment.
- Be consistent. Yeah, really. That’s important, too!
Tradeshow Marketing Podcast: Interview with Jim Ferolo of Float Learning
Interview with Jim Ferolo, Creative Director of Float Mobile Learning. We talked a bit about what Float Mobile does – and then narrowed the discussion to an iPad app they recently released called Rabble Browser, which is aimed at helping an audience interact with a speaker at an event – and vice versa.
10 Reasons to Share Content from Your Tradeshow Appearance
It seems like I’ve been doing a lot of list-making lately. Here’s another one!
- Branding: the content you share defines your company. Think before you tweet!
- Networking: share content that highlights or involves people from other companies. Take photos of booth visitors, tag them in the photos and watch them share with their followers.
- Interactivity: by sharing content and responding to comments and questions, you’ve begun to see interactivity, which leads to…
- Engagement: a step above simple interactivity (which may be almost meaningless), engagement is more personal and responsive.
Organic spread
(your content could go viral): a good piece of content gets legs, no matter who it comes from. Can you create, either purposefully or accidentally, a piece of content that spreads throughout the social media system? If it happens, pay close attention to the type of content it is, and see if you can determine why it spread. Then try to recreate something that does the same.- Social proof: if your followers like your material and share it, now you’re exposed to potential new people who may not have previously known you existed. But because they saw it from one of their trusted sources, now you’ve suddenly a trusted source.
- Humanize your company: by becoming human to your market, you become more attractive to them, generally speaking.
- Caring: by sharing you’re showing that you care about others.
- Reciprocation: if you share something that focuses another person, company or product (it may complement something you’re doing so it makes sense to highlight it), those people will feel compelled to do the same for you vie reciprocation.
- Sharing drives traffic to your booth. And your blog. And your Facebook page, Twitter page, YouTube channel, etc.
photo credit: serenitbee
Goal Setting for Tradeshow Social Media Marketing
Do you have a set of clearly defined, easily measurable goals for each of your tradeshows regarding your social media marketing efforts?
If not, here’s where to start.
First set down your show objectives.
What metric are you most interested n moving during your tradeshows when it relates to social media? Yes, you want to move the sales needle, but as you add on social media components, you are putting more people into the potential sales funnel.
There are myriad tools available for tracking your social media interaction, but your measurements should be driven more by what you want to learn.
Need to know how many visitors you had this year compared with last?
Want to find out if people respond to a series of tweets inviting them to your booth to get a great deal, meet a famous person or win a contest?
Need to know how many people see those photographs you posted on your Facebook page from the show, to gauge interest in your products or services?
Once you determine what you want to learn, start focusing on the various ways social media lets you do that in the realm of event marketing.
Some of the metrics you might be interested in:
- Facebook page ‘likes’ – perhaps not as good as adding someone to an email marketing list, but by having them as a Facebook friend they are giving you permission to engage with them.
- Booth traffic. If you have a rough count of booth visitors from last year’s show, you can compare to what you get this year. If not, start counting anyway – it’s a good metric to have.
- Direct response visitors, which will come from contests or other come-ons sent out via Twitter or Facebook.
- Getting more followers on Twitter. If you have show-goers following you on Twitter, chances are they’ll come to next year’s show as well, which means it’ll be easier to find and track them to your booth.
- QR Code responses. If you invite people to download documents or sign up for a newsletter, track the number of people that have used the code. Compare the percentage that actually followed through on your offer.
- Blog post views
- Photo views
- Video views and possible click-throughs from your YouTube channel to a specific landing page.
- Want to take a survey in the booth? Here’s a great opportunity to do a little market research. Just make sure to ask respondents how they interact with you online (or if they do at all). Offer a small reward for taking the survey. Capture contact information – at least a name and email so you can follow up. Put them on a newsletter if you publish one.
- Length of Facebook thread, to show you how much a particular topic or post resonates with your audience (of course, it might be the responses that they’re responding to, not your original post!).
- Impressions and other opportunities-to-see you.
And of course the sales information that you should be tracking from show to show:
- Number of leads
- Number of registrations for demos (or other)
- Number of appointments made
- Number of proposals delivered
- Number of sales
- Amount of sales
- Average amount of each sale
- Comparison of different shows and year-to-year same show results
Yes, there are a lot of moving parts and your particular goals will of course be unique to your company and product or service. The more you are able to track social media metrics and compare those numbers with the more traditional sales tracking metrics and see how they work together (or not), the more informed you’ll be and the better positioned you’ll be to adjust your direction or jump in a new direction when the signs point that way.
Ernest Hemingway Would Have Loved Twitter
Do you find that trying to learn social media is confusing, confounding and generally flummoxes you? Do you wish for a time when you didn’t have to worry about whether you needed to buy a book a Kindle, or download a PDF or just get the hardback version?
Don’t feel lonely or left out. There are thousands – probably millions – in the same boat as you.
Look at it this way. History has left some of our most famous folks in the same boat. Benjamin Franklin never sent out a tweet. Alexander Hamilton never checked in to his favorite watering hole with Foursquare. Franklin D Roosevelt never used a credit card. Jonas Salk never used a Pentium II computer.
So if they never had to deal with a Facebook update status, why should you, right? If Ansel Adams never had to post his latest shots to Flickr, why should you?
Actually, I think a lot of those historical figures would have felt right at home. Imagine John Lennon hanging out on Twitter. Think of what Ben Franklin would have done with his Facebook page. Picture Pablo Picasso showing off his latest artworks using Instagram.
The thing is…it’s all been done before. Everything got shared before. It just was done using different sharing methods. Social media gives you a new method to do the same old stuff, on a much wider scale.
One senior citizen executive was heard to say once, “I’m too old to learn social media.” Actually, no, you’re not too old. You’re too lazy. There are senior citizens doing social media every day and loving it. Just like there are young people who don’t give a hang about it. If you don’t want to do it, admit it. Just don’t say that you’re too old, or too busy, or too distracted, or too whatever.
Ernest Hemingway would have loved Twitter, after he got through making jokes about it. The 140-character limit would have fit his writing approach perfectly. Of course, most of his tweets would probably have been crap, as he put it:
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Ernest Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
But hey, he did come up with some masterpieces along the way. As we all will.