Are We Addicted to the Internet?

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature ofInternet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing. Here’s an infographic I came across on flowtown.com.

Mobile social media marketing is an effective way to draw people in

This is because mobile computing is a trend that is only going to get larger as the days go on. People are buying more and more mobile smart phones, and less and less desktop computers. This means that in order to have the most effective social media marketing approach possible, it’s important to keep the mobile audience in mind.  In order to properly cater to mobile audiences, it’s important to keep a few things in mind-

Keep It Short

It’s hard to read long speeches on a tiny smart phone screen. By keeping your messages succinct and the point, you’ll ensure that your mobile social media marketing will hit home as effectively as possible. It’s a sad truth that mobile audiences are even more prone to attention deficit issues than other audiences. This is because as a mobile audience, they are very likely doing other things out in the real world beyond just surfing the net. They are using their phone as a distraction, so distract them! Short messages that draw interest are the way to do it.

Media Is Your Friend

Reading long messages on a mobile device isn’t the preferred method, but media can work. Pictures especially, A distracting picture can go a long way to getting a marketing idea across. Links to videos can do this as well, especially short videos with music. Keeping up a constant stream of content with media on social sites like Twitter and Facebook can go a long way to helping you reach your mobile social media marketing goals.

The Rule is Cool

It’s important to stay on topic, but nothing will kill a campaign for mobile social media marketing faster than going on about how important it is to buy a product directly. If you make it interesting, and related to something else as well, so as to stay “cool,” then your campaign is much more likely to do well. Cool movies, music, pictures, or clever tweets or Facebook posts will ensure that your message goes as far as possible. This will also make sure that you have a better chance for your efforts to “go viral,” and reach a huge audience.

It’s important to keep a few things in mind when marketing on Twitter

In modern times, social media marketing is so important, you could almost say that it’s the key to success in online businesses. And when it comes to marketing on the Internet, one of the most important social networking sites you can use is Twitter.

Part of the reason for this is because Facebook has recently made their site less palatable to marketers through various fees, while Twitter is still completely free, and has the ability to potentially reach a very large number of people.When marketing on Twitter, it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

Tweet Often

It’s a sad fact in social media marketing that if you don’t put out content constantly, you’ll lose people. The Internet is so full of information, so full of conversations and various things happening, that short attention spans abound. If you don’t keep content coming at your followers constantly, you’ll lose people in a hurry. Tweeting on your topic at all is an effective strategy. It doesn’t have to be directly related to your business. Anything in the general area that could be in any way related to your topic could be very helpful in maintaining and expanding your reach.

Follow People in Your Topic

One good way to grow your reach on Twitter is to follow people who are doing something similar to what you’re doing. If you’re in the restaurant business, for example, you could follow others doing the same thing, like Pizza stores, or anything else related. This will put you in contact with potential customers who are interested in the topic related to your business. If you can comment on the tweets that come down the line from popular personalities online, use mentions, use retweets with mentions, and so on, you’ll increase your visibility among that client base. You could very easily get some of your own followers that way.

Keep Attention

When it comes to social media marketing you should do whatever you got to do to keep people’s attention. In the world of social media marketing, attention spans flag fast. So gimmicks like contests, “best of” voting, and anything else interactive is an effective way to make sure people stay on board for long enough to grow your base. Growing any base takes time, and it is necessary to keep at it.

The best time to share content on Social Media networks

Social Media Marketing is about sustaining lasting relationships and by creating new ones. By not providing value and by promoting yourself is a big mistake.  Social media is all about entering into conversations and participation.  We all see companies that enters into social networking, blogging, Facebook and Twitter that spends their energy and time marketing themselves.  This will definitely make sure that people run the other direction. Here’s an infographic from Visual.ly about the best time to share content on social media networks.

Are you annoying your friends and followers on social media?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is almost the same as like having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop.  It is also like getting that unexpected phone call from an old friend and just talking to each other.  It is conversational and laid back.  There are hundreds of companies jumping in on the social media band wagon that really just don’t get it and they are usually trying to hard. I came across this article below on Memeburn.com.

Social media rearchitects itself very quickly… our ability to change behaviours is not nearly as fast. This timing dichotomy results in seemingly appropriate behaviours that come off as thoughtless or self-serving. New tools and capabilities in social media have created new norms, some good, and others that unfortunately encourage repugnant behaviour.

In the past I’ve complained about 29 communication behaviours (see “16 annoying communications that must end in 2011” and “13 annoying communications that must end in 2012”). After some reflection on a few of these annoying communications and others soon to be mentioned, I realize the reason many of these communications irritate me so much is because the sender thinks they’re doing the right thing.

Like being thrust into a blinding swarm after our team wins a national championship, we lose our better judgement as to what’s right and wrong. Just because we see others doing it en masse we benignly think it’s okay to engage in abhorrent activity. What proceeds is a challenge to these mob-OKed assumptions.

Friend collecting

There was a time we used to just guess as to who was the most popular person in the room. Today, we look at your very public follower, friend, or subscriber count and we know. If one person’s number is higher than another’s, then that person is more popular, right?

We like to fool ourselves into believing this is not true, but we can’t stop ourselves from staring at those numbers, comparing ourselves to others, and adding more online friends.

While most of us connect with people we’ve met in the real world or online, there are others who truly collect friends, extending invites to complete strangers on Facebook and LinkedIn with absolutely no explanation as to why they want to connect. Both social networks allow you to send private messages to explain why you want to connect. Yet these “friend collectors” avoid taking advantage of that function. What’s worse is the number of these strangers that refuse to reply to private messages after you’ve accepted their friend request.

Refusing private communications proves that the “friending” is purely a selfish action with the intended purpose of increasing public friend counts with no intention of creating a true social connection.

Asking people to like your content-free Facebook page

Similar to friend collecting is the process of setting up a Facebook fan page and then immediately spamming all your friends to like your page which happens to be void of content. Luckily, this has decreased substantially as it used to be a seemingly automatic request to all of one’s friends upon the creation of every single fan page.

Liking a piece of content or fan page is a transactional agreement. It’s an endorsement that comes after I have approved of what you have shown me. Requesting someone to like your fan page without showing them content is the equivalent of asking for something for nothing.

It’s similar to friend collecting because when you build a fan page your desire to create followers is tantamount. Your fan page has nothing, but you’ve got tons of friends. You’re so desperate and so dependent on your existing friend base that you think they’ll say “yes” to liking your page just because you’ve already established Facebook friendship. If you were the only one doing it, then maybe that would be true. Problem is we’re constantly inundated with these self-serving “please help me get my fan page count up” requests.

Yes, it’s a small request. But without content, it’s a lopsided transaction. And because it keeps happening, it becomes blatantly self-serving and obnoxious.

Requiring app installation to consume a message

Ever get a message like this:

“John Doe just sent you a birthday greeting. Install the Happy Birthday App to view the content.”

This is similar to like requests on contentless Facebook pages in that it’s a lopsided transaction. The selfishness in this case lies primarily in the hands of the app developer who sees this as a “viral” technique to increase their install base. In social media speak, the message would read as such:

“Pay me first by giving me access to your personal computer and social network and I’ll show you this message you will probably not like. You can still uninstall the app afterwards if you’d like, but given that most of you don’t know how to do that, chances are you won’t. We’re counting on your ignorance and apathy so we’ll be able to show our investors the number of people who have installed our app. We need another round of funding.”

Auto-DMs on Twitter

Nothing screams “Pay attention to me!” more than automated direct messages (DMs) after you’ve followed someone on Twitter. I think the reason they annoy me so much is how they’re written to appear so personal (e.g., “Thank you so much for following me…”) when they’re obviously not any type of personal communications. I wish Twitter would simply turn this feature off.

The reason it’s so obnoxious is because it’s usually not complimented with an auto-follow. Lack of a return follow means the DM recipient can’t send a direct message back. That’s anything, but a personal engagement.

“Happy Birthdays” on Facebook

Isn’t it great that Facebook reminds us when our friend has a birthday? This alert is a great reminder to send a note about how much you appreciate your friendship. Or you could send a gift. Or maybe record a “Happy Birthday” video greeting. Facebook has provided some amazing personal information about your audience, yet we go out of our way and blow a well-timed opportunity to make a meaningful connection with our friends by just typing “Happy Birthday” and nothing else.

Only typing “Happy Birthday” is truly the least you could do outside of doing nothing at all. What a colossal waste of bandwidth.

Before Facebook, when people said, “Happy Birthday,” your response would be “Thank you. You remembered.” But we can’t say that anymore because we didn’t remember, Facebook did. With this information we chose not to build a meaningful connection, but rather become participants of a massive ongoing spam campaign.

Sharing without consumption

Thanks to the proliferation of like and retweet buttons, we all have the ability to share any piece of content without looking past the headline. While no one readily admits this, we all share content via our social networks without taking the time to actually consume it. It’s often a kind thing to do for a friend who wants to spread the word about an event or a piece of content. It’s not okay to just retweet and share content to build your industry voice.

Blind sharing does provide benefits to the sharer as tweeting out content that other people retweet will raise their Klout and Kred scores. Employers are now using these social rating systems as hiring barometers especially for organizations such as PR firms.

While ostensibly one should believe that blind sharing, even without consumption, would benefit the content creator. When it’s done en masse, then it only benefits the sharers and not the content creators as there are incidents where a piece of content has more shares than views. For stories highlighting evidence of this phenomenon, please read “Here’s what’s wrong with social media: sharing without consumption” and “Why sharing online content may be too easy” on Mashable.

Photo overdose of your kids and your wedding

I have an endless number of photos of my son. My wife and I look at them constantly, and our respective parents can’t get enough of them either.

While I can happily look at a million photos of my child, I can only stomach looking at about three photos of your kid. Understanding that other parents probably feel the same way, I keep a limit to the number of photos I share of my son with my entire social network.

Not all parents are aware of this photo absorption discrepancy between themselves and the rest of the world. Your kid may be cute to you, but you’re the parent and that’s how you’re supposed to feel. The rest of us are not supposed to feel that way.

Same holds true for weddings and honeymoons. The pictures you provide should acknowledge the event, and that’s it. Anything beyond that becomes a tiresome effort that overwhelms your audience.

Posting bad photos

For those unaware of what a bad photo looks like, here are some hints:

• It’s out of focus.
• It’s overexposed.
• It’s underexposed.
• There’s no subject in the photo.
• It’s poorly composed.

While your camera may have this amazing function that allows you to automatically upload every photo you took to Facebook, it also has another great function called “delete.” Not using the always available trash button projects the image of an insensitive clod who wrongly believes everyone will love all his photos he took because the event he was at was just so damn cool. Knock it off and edit your photos.

Follow Fridays

I don’t know why this still goes on. Has anyone ever actually been compelled to follow someone after someone else’s #FF? I would guess not because almost all of them are devoid of context. Those who #FollowFriday still have fooled themselves into believing they’re being selfless, but that’s not the case. You’re alerting those #FFed in hopes they’ll pay more attention to you.

Automatically cross-posting contentless information across social networks

This is the process by which our actions, as measured by various social networks and often without moment-by-moment acknowledgement, are passively shared with multiple social networks. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg happily supports this kind of automated and frictionless sharing as the rise of the social web.

Foursquare check-ins, achievements in social games, and songs we’re currently listening to on social radio stations such as Spotify and MOG can be cross-posted on Facebook and Twitter. While Facebook has smartly turned down the volume on these passive auto-posts, this has not been the case on Twitter which has no power to turn down the volume on anything.

To auto-share your every action across multiple social networks where people haven’t opted in is obscenely egotistical and doesn’t take into account the additional noise being created in the social sphere. Stop it. If someone cared where you checked in they would be following you on Foursquare. No need to let everyone on Facebook and Twitter know as well.

The social media life-cycle

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is almost the same as like having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop.  It is also like getting that unexpected phone call from an old friend and just talking to each other.  It is conversational and laid back.  There are hundreds of companies jumping in on the social media band wagon that really just don’t get it and they are usually trying to hard. Take a look at this infographic from Mediabistro.com.

Guide to successful brand establishment on Pinterest

Pinterest provides incredible marketing opportunities that are unavailable in other social networks. Making the most of it will help you establish your brand successfully in the online realm and increase your popularity.

The specific nature of Pinterest marketing demands the creation of a unique approach. To build your brand on Pinterest, you will have to adhere to several basic rules.

Think Visual

Although this sounds like a rather logical tip when you are trying to build your brand on Pinterest, many marketing experts forget to do it. Most social media marketing campaigns focus on text and this is where the biggest difference stems.

Pinterest is all about visuals. To establish your brand and your reputation through Pinterest marketing, you need high quality, professional photographs of your products. Investing in a beautiful portfolio will always pay off because many Pinterest members will be tempted into giving you a try, once they see the visuals.

Build Your Network

Just like in the case of other social networks, you will have to build your Pinterest network, in order to enjoy popularity. This is the first goal you should try to achieve when you start to build your brand on Pinterest. Building a network of followers will take some time and it will depend entirely on the consistency of your efforts and the attractiveness of the visuals that you are pinning.

Get involved on Pinterest. Comment, add people to your network and interact with them. The more you demonstrate your desire to be an active member of the community, the more your group of followers will grow.

Know Your Audience

Pinterest is particularly suitable for the establishment of certain brands. Knowing who is using the social network and why will help you draft your promotional strategy.

According to official information, more than 90 percent of the individuals using Pinterest are women. The number of men using the social network has also started growing but ladies are by far more active on the network. Base your Pinterest marketing strategy on this information.

Additionally, it is good to know that 2.2 million Pinterest users are active on a daily basis. This is a large group of potential customers and establishing your brand on the social network will certainly be worth the effort.

Define Your Competition and Monitor Its Activity

To build your brand on Pinterest, you will have to come up with a creative approach but you will also have to focus on your competition. Do some competition analysis to see which companies are on the social network and how they are using Pinterest marketing to increase their popularity. You are lucky if the number of competitors who have discovered Pinterest is limited. This will automatically turn you into a pioneer and increase your brand’s popularity.

Study the campaigns carefully. What visuals are competitors focusing on? How are they interacting with other Pinterest members? You can learn from their successes and failures. They will help you increase brand awareness without committing some of the biggest mistakes that other companies have made.

Pinterest requires some work but it is a great marketing channel. You can easily translate Pinterest popularity into higher sales and better brand awareness. Be goal oriented and think about visuals to make it happen.

The History of Content Marketing [Infographic]

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales. Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Did you know that you can allow the visitors of your website or blog to share your content with others? Have a look at this infographic from blog.junta42.com.