2. Our country is built on small and mid-sized businesses and because of the Internet, companies are now able to compete on-line with large fortune 500 companies with an even smaller budget. It’s all about having the right strategy. It levels the playing field and enables a communication channel that would have never been possible in traditional marketing or media. We have now seen that a small business with a great product or service and the right strategy can achieve huge economies of scale on-line. Look at what has happened with twitter. Our current business model leverages twitter to be used as a business tool for our clients to achieve some of these business objectives: PR, customer service, branding, marketing, and of course developing lasting business relationships. Twitter has enabled corporations to get back to the foundations of doing business in a digital age which is much needed right now. Being more transparent, not always selling things, and building an on-line community culture around community. Remember- people want to do business with people. Think of this new way of doing business on line as social marketing. If someone from company A does something good for me, say help me out or point me in the right direction, or does a good job on a project, I am going to tell 10 of my friends and just like word of mouth referrals, the same happens now online in a virtual setting.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post!

Social Marketing is a new buzz word going around. Social marketing basically means word of mouth marketing using online tools such as social media, social networking, and other online PR tactics. You know how powerful word of mouth can be, just imagine what it can do for your products and services! Social Networking San Diego has been able to achieve great success for our clients, and the way business is conducted today is very different from the 20th century. Consider our 21st century marketing methods which you can see here:

1. Even though businesses are going through some tough times due to economic conditions, this does not make it ok for management and executives to do nothing. Good leadership in all companies is needed to find innovative ways to be resilient during these times and figure out ways to cut costs where necessary (not employees) streamline operations, upgrade technology, and invest in an online marketing strategy. Why? Because online marketing strategies can mean a more cost effective advertising and marketing approach than traditional marketing efforts and can even reach a more targeted market in a shorter amount of time. Having your company set up on twitter, linked-in, or face book is one thing, but how are you using these tools? This is where you need an online marketing strategist to develop the right creative campaign that can then track results, measure progress, and show good ROI. The economies of scale are much greater with an on-line marketing approach as opposed to off-line. Consider this: an inbound marketing campaign, or inbound marketing system in which we help formulate and execute around your business model. We do the back-end work for our clients on social media and social networking and train them on how to leverage these tools for business development purposes and how to build business relationships online. We function as the out-sourced virtual marketing department and partner with our clients for long term contracts for long term business strategy success.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post!

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”

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.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a strategist. I like to think about things, come up with a plan, work within my clients’ budgets and create marketing strategies that not only make sense, but which will … um, well … actually work for them. Go figure. Ready, aim, fire. Don’t spend money, time, effort or energy until it makes sense as part of an integrated marketing plan. Totally makes sense, doesn’t it? You’d be amazed at how many people forge ahead without a plan, looking for the least expensive “solution,” without any first-hand knowledge about what they’re attempting to undertake and without any understanding at how much potential damage they could do to their brand and brand image as a result of poor execution.

Well, after sitting in one too many meetings, listening to small business owners talk about social media – trying to get their heads around email marketing, mobile marketing and, heaven forbid, something like Facebook or Twitter, it’s my head that’s beginning to spin. And these same business owners just don’t seem to get it. Their eyes glaze over and they shake their heads and say “I know I need to do an e-newsletter, or write a blog, or investigate Facebook, but I just don’t have time. But I have a website!” Well I say “Woo Hoo for you!” Having a website does not mean that you’re on top of your game when it comes to promoting your business. In fact, having a website without doing anything to advertise, promote or draw traffic to it is about as useless as having a billboard in the middle of a corn field. Social media, email marketing, mobile marketing …. all of those things are tools that marketers use to promote brands, products and actually drive sales. Imagine that – doing something that would actually sell your product.

Well, in tough economic times, the gloves come off and it’s time to talk tough love. Don’t cry hard times because your sales are down. Of course they’re down. And the time to do something about it, to allocate some marketing dollars and some savvy tactics and stop the bleeding is now.

Social marketing is and should be a part of any serious business’s marketing and communications plan – especially today. But, the interesting thing is, that so often people (read that “business owners”) think that it’s just the perfect project to sink little Jenni on – you know, the one who just graduated from Community College last year and who just loooooves surfing the ‘net. Or, maybe Johnnie, who’s in college and has a Facebook page – that’d be something he could do for us and we could pay him $200 and save a bunch of money.

People – you don’t get it!

Social marketing is serious stuff and is well on it’s way to replacing the traditional kinds of media that we’ve known and loved. Display ads are going the way of the dinosaur. Who reads magazines and newspapers when you can get instant news and any kind of content you would ever want online – through more sources than I can possibly articulate.

Traditional media, while still an important part of brand management and strategy, is no longer the only game in town.

People are online. They are talking, sharing, opining, recommending, blasting, learning, blogging, ReTweeting and moving at the speed of sound.

The question isn’t “should I embrace this social media stuff and use it as part of my marketing strategy” … the question should be “how quickly can I find the right people to help me integrate this so that I can start taking advantage of the brand awareness – (and sales) that I can generate as a result.”

And the answer is that they are out there. People like my friends, Justin French at Social Networking San Diego (all things social media) www.socialnetworkingsandiego.com and Jason Werner at Opus Media (all things email marketing) www.opusbywire.com are knee deep in what’s going in their respective worlds. And there are a myriad of others – those guys just happen to be great friends of mine, and people that I would trust with my own brand.

Bottom line – DO get involved in social media. DON’T try to do it yourself (especially if you don’t know what you’re doing – and most people don’t). DO hire someone to help you not only do it correctly so that it produces real results, but make sure that it’s integrated with and compliments the other elements of your marketing efforts. And, most importantly, DO it now! And, if you don’t have the resources or know where to look ask me – I’ll be glad to help and/or refer you.

Shelly DeMotte Kramer is a marketing strategist specializing in planning, branding, product launches, creating buzz and awareness through non-traditional methods and is, clearly, a social media enthusiast. shelly@kramerandcompany.com

…