this is a social media road map i found

I keep getting asked by fellow business professionals on linked-in discussions the following questions regarding social media and social networking for business.

1. How are you successfully using Twitter, microblogs, blogging, etc. in your corporate environment?

Justin’s Answer- personal branding, product/ service branding, customer service, industry news, trends, event promotion, competitor analysis, building BUSINESS relationships, etc.

2. How do you convince those that don’t “get it”?

Justin’s Answer- I tell them go get educated and come back to me in a year when your ready to build an on-line marketing strategy around your products or services and have it done right. Once companies wake up and start realizing 1-2% returns on direct mail and telemarketing is NOT working. Why do you keep doing things that don’t work? Stop throwing good money after bad ideas and work with an innovative marketing company. Maybe they should get educated on one of our many webinars about social networking, twitter training, or linked-in training for business. I don’t have the time or patience sometimes to deal with business people that “don’t get it”. Time is money!

3. How do you measure successful ROI?
We measure ROI for our customers with our own proprietary methods and software systems we have developed and it works great! We have paying customers, they see results, and we show them monthly reports. We have to measure the success of our clients online campaigns and report to them monthly or they wouldn’t be spending thousands of dollars per month with us!

4. I’m interested in hearing successes, failures, and strategies.

We have MANY success stores (see my blog http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com/blog/ or customer testimonial videos.

Failures; just know you will make some mistakes, get over it- just jump it try it, learn, and learn from your mistakes most importantly of course. You will learn, test, and refine the strategy. Try to have a plan at least. The alternative is to do nothing and fail. Need Strategies- see my blog or book some one on one consulting time with me and lets formulate an online marketing strategy together.

We even have an internet consulting team I can dedicate to your next on-line marketing campaign. Don’t have time to do all this social networking stuff yourself? No problem- we’ll do it for you. Give us a shot and we GUARANTEE we can increase traffic to your website IF you partner with us, sign up, and take our recommendations. It’s worked for these clients (see videos to the right) so maybe your business is ready to jump on board.

Is your business ready? What is your understanding of social media and social networking for business? Take the social networking IQ test here: business evaluation

Cheers
JustinRFrench twitterholic
Tweets by JustinRFrench

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Executives Must READ-

Research, Education, Attitude, and Drive

These are the only ways to survive in today’s market place.

The Internet is NOT going away so get educated! Education is the #1 failure of internet marketing strategies so don’t let your corporation fall short. Take a competitive edge and gain first mover advantage. There are some very knowledgeable internet consultants out here in San Diego so grab a hold of one of us and start formulating a plan. Remember, business professionals don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan!

I assure you, there is no easy answer and no get rich quick scheme to internet marketing for business purposes. Myspace and Facebook are not just for personal use anymore! There is a BUSINESS use and us on Linked-In are well ahead of the curve. It just takes the right strategy and approach, and then my favorite- execution.

Its not if but when. Its not why but how. Its hard work believe me, and developing relationships just like in the off-line approach is where we as marketing professionals need to help educate the local business community.

But the firms must but be willing to “invest” in their online marketing strategy. its not an expense. I look forward to assisting you any way i can-

I would appreciate any executives or professionals you may know who are ready to turn their company around with a proven internet marketing strategy. We work strictly through close referral (off line and online of course)

Cheers,

Justin

“We consult and educate our executive level clients how to form a strategy on using social media and social networking sites like twitter and linked in to build business relationships and brand awareness in the digital online market place, which in turn increases traffic to company websites and increases sales.”

Please help me spread my message! I do Webinars, Internet Consulting for Business, Twitter training, Linked-In training, Social Networking Packages for businesses, and also Speaking engagements in educational facilities and corporations on this growing trend.

Justin French President
Social Networking San Diego
“We use social networking to grow your business”

Summary on Obama news conference, and 3 Tips for Small Business Owner Success in the digital age

Special Thanks to my followers and friends on Linked-In for you support! Yes we can!

1. Find out more about how internet marketing can help your business (this is the current trend)
2. Upgrade your Business Development Department- Develop a 21st century Business Development Strategy
3. Find a good CRM software to help keep track of leads

“business owners and CEO’s don’t plan to fail, they fail to have a plan”- twitterholic justinrfrench

Need help on any of this? Call Keith- 760-500-6043 and schedule an in depth internet marketing assessment for your business

JustinRFrench, CCNA

CEO & Chief Internet Marketing Strategist-

Social Networking San Diego

http://www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/itconsultantsandiego

Twitter http://twitter.com/justinrfrench

Twitter as a Marketing Media

Marketing through twitter! Does that sound odd or is that obvious? Many people are still uncertain about the use of twitter and other social networking podium for marketing products. The truth is that these networking sites work as a great channel for marketing in more ways than one. Marketing is about presenting your product to the mass in a way that gets you the attention of the consumer. Converting this attention into a value to your business is obviously the objective. Twitter is certainly the answer to a marketer’s prayers.

We at InRev are constantly trying to challenge tools and technologies to estimate their worthiness. We have already been testing the social networking tool through our web application InRev Twitin to evaluate the usefulness of Twitter as a business accelerator. Following are some interesting finding from the InRev team.

Below is the world map, categorized with respect to the time zone. Why Time Zone? Because, in marketing, timing is a crucial factor to determine its effectiveness. In today’s global market, we need to reach out to the wide range of the audience and understanding the timing difference is the key.

We have collected data from twitter and prepared a report which will reveal some very important and interesting facts.

Distribution of Population and their Tweets

The first step is to understand the population of the twitter users. The following graph shows the distribution of population with respect to Time Zones. Graph1 shows that the majority of twitter users lie on GMT-5, GMT-6, and GMT-8 Time Zones. These time zones cover: Pacific Time (US & Canada), Tijuana, Arizona, Chihuahua, Mazatlan, Mountain Time (US & Canada), Central America, Central Time (US & Canada), Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, Saskatchewan, Bogota, Eastern Time (US & Canada), Indiana (East), Lima, and Quito. Furthermore, the distribution of tweets shows that the location with higher population has more tweets, which is obvious.

Graph 1 : Distribution of Population

Graph 2: Distribution of Tweet Count

The result from the above graph can be used to change your marketing strategies to increase your number of followers in twitter and to stay more visible in the online social media. This is very clear that most of the twitter user is from the western region and that their population is very large among the total population. This timing knowledge is very important here because this will give you the right time to tweet your products.

Category of People in the Twitter

Now we know that most of the twitter users are from the GMT – 5 Time Zone. Let us see what kind of people are twitting from that zone. The following tag cloud has been created by taking the description written by the people in their twitter profile.

Tag Cloud 1: Description of People at GMT – 5 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

The result clearly shows that most of the people are related to Social, Media, Web, Geek, Blogger and Marketing. Therefore, it’s evident that twitter is more popular among the marketers and media personals. This information is very important, as it shows you the profile of your audience and will certainly help to better market your product. To explore further, let’s see if this is the trend in other time zone.

Tag Cloud 2: Description of People at GMT – 6 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

Tag Cloud 3: Description of People at GMT – 8 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

Tag Cloud 4: Description of People at GMT + 1 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

The above tag clouds 2, 3 and 4 show some similarities with the GMT- 5‘s profile structure. Though, the marketing profile seems high, in terms of percentile distribution, it is only about 1.77%.

The scenario changes as we move towards east. The percentage profile of marketers changes to 0.89%. We already have a less share of population in the east and among them only few percentage of marketers. This could be due to the conservative nature of the eastern culture. We can see that the higher percentage of people in East is from blogging and student background.

Tag Cloud 5: Description of People at GMT + 8 (generated using http://www.wordle.net/)

Summary

All the above data analysis was carried out by taking a random population of 31691 of the current tweeter users. The cloud tag analysis was carried out with the help of tool at http://www.wordle.net/. The analysis does not present any precise statistical analysis or conversions. The goal of the analysis was to show the demographic distribution of the people on twitter and its implication on efficient marketing.

The analysis tells us that niche marketing is possible through twitter, if marketers are willingly to study the population of twitter more closely and understand them better.

Any Media or Marketing Analyst needs to segment the population to have better ROI on time they spend on Twitter; a generic line might not work.

Article by InRev, written by Deep Sherchan

About InRev

InRev Systems Bangalore Pvt. Ltd** *transforms business by making all possible information available at all times. InRev combines domain knowledge, trusted reporting structure and innovative applications to help companies advance their business decisions. It serves across all stages of Business Intelligence and Decision Management right from Data Extraction and Integration to Strategy Consulting using the intelligent insights of the business. More information can be found at http://www.in-rev.com.

Internet marketers know several strategies by heart to sell their goods in the simplest and the easiest way possible. Internet marketing can be hard work and after a few years you will get the hang of it. But for the beginners, here are a few simple strategies that you can use to move your goods as fast as possible.

Link building- Yes, links can make or break a site! Search engines crawl the internet day and night to find links to and from your site. Make a lot of links from your site to other related content sites, submit your content to free article websites and ask your blogger friends to give you links to your site. The large the number of relevant links the higher you come on the search results.. Search engine spiders also check the relevance of links so if you can link to authority and high ranking sites, it would make your content seem that much more valid.

Keyword rich- Find out exactly what keyword is relevant on your site and use that to make your site so much more presentable to the search engines. For the best marketing on internet tips, you can check with several webmaster tools present free on the internet which will help you find the best keywords for your site optimize it.

Site directories- There are several site directories present on the internet where you can submit your blog or website so that it can be catalogued. This provides search engines with one more link that they can use to index your site.

Email marketing in the internet- If you already have a database of customers who are interested in your product, then sending them regular updates is just one great way of ensuring visibility of your product. Don’t over do it; no one likes a whole box full of emails about your products. That’s called spam!

Marketing on internet Forums- Marketing on internet forum can get you eager visitors that you have invited personally. You can talk about your product, what it does and establish yourself as an expert in the field of interest that you are selling. Every time you sign off you can leave links to your site and the product you are promoting. The best part of this kind of marketing is that you do it yourself. And you can join as many forums as you want to promote your product.

Internet for marketing? Does it work? And how do you make sure that your products and your website get the best customers who have the money to buy?

Marketing articles are the best way to sell your product on the internet. That means you may have a website or a blog of your own but unless you are totally familiar with SEO and link building; your maiden venture into internet for marketing is going to fail miserably. SEO means Search Engine Optimization and it is one of the core rules to draw customers and relevant traffic to your website. One of the simplest explanations of SEO is that if you want to sell handbags, you better make sure that your website content is filled with the correct number of words all talking about handbags! Search engines like Google and Yahoo trawl the internet daily searching for new content and then indexing the content in their archives according to the most number of words (keywords) in the content. If you have more than 10% of words in the content about handbags, then you would have a higher chance of getting indexed in the search for handbags. The higher amount of words and relevant links about handbags the higher you go on the search results pages of Google. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as I’ve said it but you get the gist. A few more tips you can try out to optimize your content are-

• Put your keywords high up. That’s very important. The higher your keywords come in the content and the title, the more traffic and page rating on Google you get! Keep your title within 200 characters and with a description of about 20 words.
• Stick to a 10% density of keywords. Any more and the search engines automatically list your site as spam or worthless content.
• Place relevant links to authority sites and get them to link to your website for internet marketing. Ask other blogger friends to link to your site and post about your product and you can post about them in reverse.

Viral marketing isn’t about viruses which can give you a disease but the process is just as contagious. Smart companies now use marketing on the internet as the fist choice to tell the world about their products. Viral marketing is the premier method of marketing on the internet which is cheap and effective too.

Take for example, the launch of The Harry Potter Amusement park in Orlando. Normally, companies would promote the well-recognized brand name Harry Potter to fans all over the world in the form of advertising, billboards, flyers, prime time ads etc, etc, etc to coax fans to visit the amusement park. But Cindy Gordon, vice president of new media and marketing partnerships at Universal Orlando Resorts didn’t do anything like that! She just told seven prominent Harry Potter fans who then proceeded to tell seven more via the internet. The whole process spread exponentially all over the globe with bloggers and fans of the teen wizard picking up tid-bits of information and passing them on to more friends and fans! Gordon got a whole lot of free marketing on the internet simply because she realized that a popular object of desire will market itself, so long as you present it attractively!

Marketing on the internet can get you the same interest for your brand and your product. As long as you have something that people want and use, you will acquire a customer base with a word-of-mouth publicity or viral marketing. Like a disease, viral marketing spreads rapidly from person to person. It also helps if you offer significant discounts and free stuff with your products.

Viral marketing through books?
One of the most powerful forms of marketing is free e-books. E-books are basically reworked forms of the more well-known white papers. E-books are really a great option for anyone who wants free marketing on the internet. Browsers realize that valuable content which is ordinarily sold for a fee is no going for free in the form of an e-book. If you have the time and patience, write an e-book yourself or get a writer to connect your product to something which is a hot area of interest in the media at present. Of course, it also helps if you promote your e-book like crazy on blogs, free article resource bases, and as links on author resource boxes.

Viral marketing works: just make your offer interesting and attach something free to it!

Well, isn’t that the truth! It’s a fact that its not what you know but who you know that can get you a job. That old adage works in the real world and very soon going to be applicable on the internet too. Think big with sites like LINKEDIN and FACEBOOK being the new ways that employers become familiar with you and possibly hire you instantly.

But do these social networking sites actually work as self-marketing on the internet?
The internet is the only medium where you do not actually immediately meet and greet a potential employer for your job. No more toting around of large resumes, references, and other documents to impress potential employees. Sites like TWITTER, FRIENDFEED, and ORKUT have made marketing on internet as easy as pie!

Let’s find out how it works…
Take my own personal experience. Without even getting up from my warm leather computer chair, I’ve gotten several clients for my online services. I’ve also got a few good references for future jobs all through my online social networking by using internet marketing my niche services. I’ve made a few good friends and several good contacts all by social networking. The process is very simple. Just log on to the social networking sites like TWITTER to upload your resumes and private contact details. You’ll find one of the best networks on LINKEDIN. That site is best for finding potential employers and personal marketing on internet. You can use the site to promote your own services for free while connecting to several social groups and potential employees. Internet and marketing is also the best way to be eco-conscious and green; just imagine the paper and trees you are saving for the planet to breathe by skipping the use of paper!

Another way to make your impression on the internet is by online marketing on the internet and by building your own website. Once your website is up, you can then link up and use the social media sites to link up, promote your site and drive traffic there. More and more customers also use the LINKEDIN network to find reliable sites that offer professional and reliable services. That was just the reason that my website and profile became so successful.

No matter what industry pundits say; I say that social networking marketing on the internet is here to stay!

Marketing on the internet is the new buzz word. But not everyone knows exactly how it works, do they? Think about it! Did you ever wonder why results for a search on Google come out like that? Who decided which sites came first and how? Do you have to pay anyone for your site to be the first choice on any topic? If you are selling handbags, how do you ensure that your site is the best and the first in all Google rankings whenever searches for handbags?

Marketing on the internet is simple but understanding the basics can take a lot of time. A few simple tricks commonly used in internet and marketing are:

1. Advertise, advertise and advertise– advertising copy can get you the best sales possible. The internet is a blind medium where you have to encourage customers to come to your site without actually seeing your products! Your advertising copy and content should speak to each customer as much as possible. Content at your site should fool the customer into reading more and buying. It’s as simple as that!
2. Free stuff counts– It really doesn’t matter what you’re selling. As long as your offer something free with the product you will get customers. It can be a free e-book, free templates, free graphics etc…You get the idea! No matter what you are offering if the “FREE” tag is associated with the sale; you get customers.
3. Target your sales– It happens that customers who come to your site may not have the money or actually need your product; they’ve just come there by accident. And that does mean traffic but doesn’t translate to sales. Target your audience by streamlining your product and the sales copy on your site for internet marketing. That means if you are selling brown handbags; the copy at your website should repeat that mantra again and again. You will attract the customers who want to buy brown handbags.
4. Offer discounts– Simply put, discounts count. You might be offering a great product, but unless you offer the magic word “DISCOUNT,” customers are not going to be lured. Combine products with sales discounts, and you should get a lot of sales.
5. And lastly- Don’t exaggerate! Sales copy is sometimes really exaggerated, customers notice that. Try to keep your sales copy to the point; exaggerated and screaming content makes customers feel that the site is a scam or a virus hive.