Social Media Measurement
And if you enjoyed the last post about Why Social Media?, you’ll probably enjoy flicking through my friend Mauricio’s presentation on measuring the impact of social media campaigns. It’s probably more tailored to those of you working in agencies, but for business owners and marketers there are some good ideas for what you could ask your agencies to think about.
Mauricio, my hat off to you, I thought this presentation was superb with some good original thinking.
Tag:social mediaWhy You Should Care About Social Media
If you have ever wondered about the value of using the social media to market your products, you might just want to watch the video below. It contains some pretty compelling stats which might convince you to start playing in this space now, and I mean right now.
Consider:
–> “There are over 200,000,000 blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily”
–> “Face book has so many users, if it were a country, it would be the worlds 4th largest! ”
–> ”The fastest growing segment on facebook is 55-65 year old females
–> “Ashton Kutcher and Elen de Generes have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama”
–> “80% of twitter usage is on mobile devices, people update anywhere, anytime! Imagine what that means for bad customer service”
For lots more reasons why to get involved in social media, click play right now!
YouTube DirectSocial Media Revolution
Hot Tips for Good Meetups
I received an email recently that I thought could be interesting for anyone running event marketing programmes. It was from a friend of mine Navin Arora, founder of Pheonix GMN, a company responsible for the IndiansinLondon.net social network, along with the recently launched UKbloggers.net and countless other excellent networks.
Navin has worked on the Meetup platform to organise and promote events here in London, as have I with the London Bloggers Meetup community. He took it upon himself to share some insights into how he has tried to promote and produce excellent Meetups, many of which could also be applied to general events.
Anyway, I asked Navin if he would be happy for me to share his email, so here you go. Thanks Nav…
——————————————–
Hello Guys,
I have spent some time on meetup blogs and found out some top tips to make meetups even more attractive in current economic climate.
1) Urge your members to spread the word about your meetup to all their friends. Meetups are a great way to meet like-minded people in a natural and informal environment and attending most meetups are free or costs next to nothing.
2) Try to organise seminars and events with some speaker on some interesting subject. E.g. someone who has done English teaching holiday in Spain, someone who can share some tips about water sports, someone who can share some tips about job hunting and CV making.
3) Do try to tie-up with other meetup organisers in your region to have joint meetups to increase the attendance, which helps in obtaining bigger discounts from various venues. Always try to get group discounts from venues like Cinemas, Theatres, restaurants, bowling alleys etc.
4) Do mention in your newsletter, updates on some other interesting events of other meetups happening around you. This should be mutual and will provide boost to all the meetup groups in return because when your members go and join other events, they will eventually talk about your meetup too and that will bring in more audience and popularity to your meetups.
5) You can also start a “Service Directory” on your “About Us” page, where all members can post what they do and can do for other members. Someone who has already done this says “We ALWAYS look there first, for home repairs, dog sitting, any service work, landscaping etc! We take care of our own FIRST…and have thus created our own MICRO-COMMUNITY.”
6) You can create a dedicated forum thread/topic for job seekers where members can help each other by posting job tips and other insider information about jobs. In current economic climate, this has proved to be a very useful forum thread for many members.
7) You can create a dedicated discussion board forum for your members to post their wares for sale (i.e. free classifieds for selling things, roommates, etc.)
You can create a dedicated discussion board forum for Pooling-Resources like Cars, books, dvds, video games etc
9) You can create a dedicated discussion board forum for finding travel-partners for those Europe or around-the-world trips. Its always fun to go for travel around the world with like-minded people.
10) Use the meetup fee (or a part of it) to do a raffle for your members and award one of the first 10 door-crashers something nice to motivate others to attend and turn up on time.
Please share with me and other Organisers, any ideas of a joint meetup by mailing to the emailing list of this group.
That’s all for now.
Cheers
-Navin
——————————————–
It would be great to hear some tips from others who organise successful Meetups..!
Tag:EventsHow to Avoid Advertising Disasters
I’ve been working with small businesses for long enough to know that most standard advertising is fairly ineffective for generating sales pipeline. Sadly I have learnt this the hard way, by wasting money on adverts that have generated a negative return on investment - the negative element being the loss of cash and moral! So why then do I occasionally get caught out by advertising sales reps?
A question I had to ask myself recently when I booked a quarter page ad in a publication in London that turned out to be a bit of a toad. The reason I would hazard a guess is twofold:
1. the skill of the sales rep in presenting a compelling opportunity, and
2. the client’s real need for new leads in these difficult economic conditions made me think twice
Of course when I learnt my advice on this one was a little wayward, I did the only decent thing and offered to cover the cost of the advert should the promised sales leads not appear. Watch this space to see if I have to get my cheque book out.
The other result is that I’ve decided to compile a checklist of questions I must ask and fully understand before I place an order. With the aim of helping everyone to get a better return on their advertising investment, I thought I’d share this here.
- Is the publication readership the same as my target audience / decision maker? (note it is important to really understand your target audience first!)
- Do I clearly understand the target audience description provided by the publication?
- Have I heard of the publication or is it launching?
- What is the format of the publication - A4, A5, glossy, newspaper, portrait, landscape, colour or black and white etc?
- Exactly what size will the advert be?
- Can I secure a guaranteed right hand page? (important as an advert placed on a right hand page generally outperforms those on the left hand page)
- Are any of my competitors advertising?
- What is the publication date?
- What is the publication’s reach - not just the circulation, but total reach?
- Will they offer any guarantees - cost per enquiry for example? (unlikely but worth asking)
- Can the publisher help to put together the creative?
- Have any of my competitors / peers advertised in the publication and if so what results did they achieve? (also, could I have their contact details so I can talk to them and find out about their experiences?)
- What is the total price?
These questions will help me to better understand whether the opportunity will present a return on investment i.e. a value of sales greater than the cost of the advertising. Ultimately, there are lots of other factors which will impact the success of the advert which are not the responsibility of the publication.
In particular, the quality of the text and images used in the advert and the strength of the call to action. For some guidelines on good advert copywriting, check out this post by freelance advertising copywriter John Kuraoka.
I’d very much like to hear the experiences of other small business advertisers as to how you measure and interpret whether an opportunity will present good value?
Tag:Advertising-
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