Social media « Talk, Inc - Find Your Voice

Put Social Networks to Work for Your Business

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

You’ve signed up for LinkedIn, created a profile on Facebook, and joined Twitter. Now what?

Social networking is touted as the next big thing to help you grow your business. The act of networking and word-of-mouth marketing is not new. What’s new is the venue – the online social network. A social network is an online community where people meet others with common interests. Ideally, their common interest is your brand or your industry, so you want to be in front of them online.

To use a social network to your advantage you must do the following:

Find the network(s) where your audiences are spending their time.
Create a profile
Participate – get engaged with other users by writing comments, sending messages, posting blogs, etc.
Incorporate social networks into your existing marketing activities

The good news/bad news about finding the right networks is that there are a lot to choose from. Social networking is much more than Facebook and Twitter. Here are a few categories to consider:

Traditional Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace
Social Media Submission Sites — Digg
Social Bookmarking – StumbleUpon, Delicious
Microblogging – Twitter
Photo and Video Sharing – Flickr, YouTube
Review and rating sites – Amazon, Epionions, TripAdvisor, Yelp
Blogs

Every business that has customers online should consider a social network campaign to grow your business. The cost to entry is nominal, but it requires time and strategy. Don’t just jump in because you think everyone else is out there.

To learn how to use social networks to grow your business, join us on Thursday, July 23 for a free, one-hour webinar entitled Social Networking 101. Click here to register.

Tags: Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Marketing, Social media, Social Networks
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments

5 ways we’ve increased our blog traffic

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

One of the most exciting things about blogging is gaining new followers and knowing your content is being read. If your blog following is a bit lackluster consider the following tips:

1. Make subscription easy. The easier you make it to subscribe to your blog, the more frequently readers will do it. You may already provide an option to subscribe by RSS but if someone doesn’t know what that is or gets confused along the way, they may give up. By making an email subscription available, your blog becomes accessible to different levels of computer users.

2. Help people find it. Encourage people to visit your blog by adding a link to all of your outgoing correspondence including your email signature line. Also, add links to your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

3. Be active in the blogosphere. Reading and commenting on other relevant blogs can help drive traffic to your blog. Write meaningful and helpful comments on other blogs and include a link back to your blog. This can encourage valuable relationships with other bloggers and will also be seen by their readers.

4. Make a commitment to blog daily. The more frequently you blog the more attractive your blog is to search engine crawling. Frequent posts will also give your current followers more reasons to revisit your website and possibly pass it on to friends.

5. Brag a little. Take time to submit your best blog posts to bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious. This will help people find your blog and if they like what they see, it makes it super easy for them to come back again and share it with friends.

These tips don’t require much tech savvy and can be highly effective in increasing traffic to your blog. Success will come from being committed, enthusiastic and interesting.

Tags: blogging, Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Social media
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments

Tech Talk: What is a hashtag?

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

There’s a lot of terms flying around in this new age of “social technology”, where companies like Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter are becoming household names. But what do any of these terms really mean and why should you care? That’s what I’ll be explaining in my weekly Tech Talk.

What is a hashtag?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional information and context to messages on Twitter. This is accomplished by using a hash sign ‘#’ and having a “tag” immediately after it.

Part of understanding hashtags means understanding tags. People use tags to easily clasify the topics or categories content is related to. The classification of content through the use of tags benefits the individual as they’ll know what to look for when wanting to find the information again, and benefits other internet users who may be looking for similar content by a similar tag. This process also frequently mentioned with taxonomy.

For example: At the bottom of this blog post, you will notice there are a few tags that I have used to classify topics this blog posts relates to.

How are hashtags used?

Hashtags came about with the advent of Twitter. Without users having any formal way of organizing tweets into categories, but wanting to add additional information, the twitter community began adopting the notion of a #hashtag. As such, hashtags have are used in a variety of ways on Twitter.

For those who love LOST, on Wednesday nights, you could frequently follow the hashtag #lost for what people thought about the episode, what they were guessing the next plot twist was, or placing bets on when Sawyer would punch someone in the face.

Conversely, and much more useful, hashtags have been used to follow the elections in Iran, to keep people posted about fires in San Diego, and or to share thoughts on what the latest going on is in the news.

Tags: hashtag, nathan snell, Social media, tags, talkinc, taxonomy, Tech Talk, twitter, what are tags, what is a hash tag, wilmington nc
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments

Slow Economy is Best Time to Market Your Company

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

“Studies of the last six recessions have demonstrated that companies which do not cut back their advertising budgets achieve greater increases in profit than companies which do cut back,” Ogilvy on Advertising, 1983

In today’s economy, few of us have the opportunity to be complacent about our marketing and public relations. The competition is fierce and we’re all clamoring for the same piece of the pie. So how do we differentiate ourselves from the competitors? Take a good, hard look at your company’s reputation and image. Could it use some burnishing?

Waiting until the economy picks up to focus on your marketing is a rookie mistake. History shows us that the companies that spend the time and resources to market their company during the down times come out on top when the economy turns. Dell stepped up its marketing by 346% over two years during the economic slump of the early 1990s. Its competitors cut back their expenditures by 25 to 40% The effect? By 1993, Dell had become one of the top five computer system makers in the world.

The best time to market is when everyone else is holding back. Your marketing dollars bring even greater ROI during a downturn because there are fewer voices clamoring to be heard by your customers. Whether it’s media relations, Internet marketing or advertising, now is the time to promote your company.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to market wisely. You just have to be a wise marketer.

Tags: Advertising, Marketing, PR, Social media
Posted in Marketing | Comments

Things We Love 5/20

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Debbie loves A Dog’s Day – Owned by Stacy Boyd, A Dog’s Day is a mobile grooming company that will pick up your dog at your home or place of business, whisk her away for some primping and pampering and then bring her back just a few hours later looking gorgeous! Camden had her first visit with Stacy this week and she’s never looked better. Stacy’s prices are competitive and her love of dogs is obvious. Camden just about jumped in her lap the first time they met. A Dog’s Day also offer boarding. Call Stacy at 910-616-0069. Your dog will thank you.

Jennifer loves etsy.com - This week I have rediscovered etsy.com. While cleaning out the “favorites” on my home computer, I came across this website I hadn’t visited in a long time. Etsy offers all handmade items at very reasonable prices. You’ll find everything from accessories to woodworking on this site. You can bet that some of the next gifts I buy for family and friends will be from this great website!

Kirsty loves Scanwiches – OK this week’s pick is mindblowingly-unrelated to the worlds of marketing, PR and advertising. However, it does showcase the fact that you can find anything on the Internet. And also proves that with a really great idea for a website, you can wind up in the New York Times. So, maybe a website that features scanned images of sandwiches is not so unrelated after all.

Nathan loves Blogo – For those of you who spend a lot of time blogging, or at least spend a lot of time writing posts that don’t make it past the cutting room floor for your blog (I know I have a lot of those), Blogo is probably the best blogging software I have used. Its icons can be a little confusing at first, but it synchs seamlessly and perfectly with any blog platform you use. Best of all, it does a great job formatting your post, something that even the prestigious wordpress still does poorly. While it does cost a some bucks, Blogo is money well spent for prolific bloggers!

Shawn loves Colorado based First Bank’s latest billboard and online campaign – I’ve become a bit jealous of the great chemistry between First Bank and their creative team. The results are very edgy, current and what I consider truly “outside of the box” thinking. Advertising may be on the decline and under attack but if done well can still have a great impact. Past promotions such as “Bank in your ski mask without getting arrested” and “This is the closest thing we have to a private jet” are great examples of trusting your creative team and being rewarded with worldwide buzz. The latest campaign shines a light on small businesses – literally. They have taken the simple message “We care about small business” and brought it to life by actually showcasing small businesses. They show Mrs. Bennett and her piano lessons, Abbey the babysitter, Rod the wedding singer and Joan the math tutor. Are they real? Apparently they are. In fact, Mrs Bennett is so booked that she is referring new calls to another company. Perhaps I should open a First Bank business account.

Susan loves author blogs – Social media isn’t just for traditional businesses. There has been a big push lately for authors to have their own websites, blogs, twitter accounts, etc. Linda Gerber, a Young Adult writer, understands that to reach her target audience, she needs to go where her target audience is. So with the release of her latest novel, Death By Denim, she hosted an online release party with guest bloggers and giveaways to generate buzz. I devoured the book Saturday afternoon, joined the online party by reading and commenting on the blog, sent her a Tweet telling her how much I loved it and received “Aw. THANK YOU!” in response.

Tags: A Dog's Day, Advertising, blogging, blogo, Etsy, Linda Gerber, Scanwiches, Social media, Things We Love
Posted in Professional Development | Comments

Twitter like a CEO

Monday, May 11th, 2009

This week, BusinessWeek published a list of 50 Twittering CEOs, featuring who they like to follow and how it helps them run their business. The result is some very sound advice for people on all rungs of the corporate ladder, which made me think of these ten specific ways you can Twitter like a CEO.

1. Follow Back: Founder of Alltop.com @guykawasaki says he follows everyone back as a courtesey so that they can direct message him if need be. While he admittedly doesn’t have time to read the stream for his 100,000-some followers, he should be applauded for opening up and being accessible to his followers.

2. Create relationships with your customers: Build Direct President & CEO @jeffbooth engages with his Twitter followers and tries to be useful, rather than trying to sell them. This giving attitude has helped him to create relationships with customers who he couldn’t ordinarily.

3. Reward your customers: Mike Ferrari, Co-founder of @SmartyPig, a social media online savings site, uses Twitter to run monthly contests to reward customers for reaching their savings goals.

4. Publicity: @CommunispaceCEO Diane Hessan gets the word out about her company through Twitter. She says announcing her company’s new blog to her followers resulted in 1,000 visits that day.

5. Put a face on your company: JibberJobber.com CEO @JasonAlba tweets to put a face to his online company, which offers career resources. He freely uses his personaly to extend a personality to his company.

6. Employee relations: Twitter helps @tombed, CEO of AKQA, the global digital marketing and tech firm, talk to his more than 750 employees spread out over six offices across the world.

7. Listen to customers: @lebrun CEO of social media monitoring company Radian6 uses Twitter to listen to his customers, naturally. He practices “listening to the point of need,” in which he focuses on answering questions, delivering a solution and adding value to his followers.

8. Establish corporate culture: One of the first CEOs to embrace Twitter, Tony Hsieh of @zappos, started using Twitter to build the company culture among employees. Little did he know his customers would also catch on - to the tune of more than half a million followers.

9. Connecting: President of PerkettPR, @missusP uses Twitter to connect her company and its clients with opportunities - particularly media opporunities (like the BusinessWeek article as it turns out)!

10. Staying on the Cutting Edge: Like many companies, CEO of Socialtext @eugenelee uses Twitter to find, translate and rebroadcast interesting news and trends in his industry that helps his company stay current and position him as an authority.

Photo by: sub.site

Tags: Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Social media, Social Media in Wilmington N.C., twitter
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments

Talk on the Street: May 11-17

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Welcome to our first edition of Talk on the Street. Every Monday we’ll be posting events, seminars and meetings you can’t miss if you live in Southeastern North Carolina. So, if you’re interested in business, marketing, advertising, public relations, social media, networking and much more, check back here weekly. Send any events for our consideration to kirsty@talkinc.com.

Thursday, May 14 | Coastal Entrepreneur Awards

Join our favorite business journal and hundreds of the region’s most inspiring entrepreneurs for breakfast at the UNC Wilmington Burney Center. Co-presented by the UNCW Cameron School of Business, the event will honor the “Cape Fear region’s next generation of business stars.” Register online here.

Saturday, May 16 | Wilmington Bloggers Meetup

This is the 7th meeting of a new group in Wilmington, who informally gets together the third Saturday of every month at Connections Internet Cafe on Racine Drive, to talk about blogging, Internet marketing and social media. Whether you are a novice or an expert, you will fit right in with this group of journalists, small business owners, Realtors, business coaches, marketing mavens and much more. You can RSVP through Facebook.

Tags: blogging, Events, Greater Wilmington Business Journal, Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Networking, Social media, Social Media in Wilmington N.C.
Posted in Internet Marketing, Marketing, Public Relations | Comments

Things We Love 5/6

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Debbie loves Cracker Barrel – I made my first pilgrimage to the Mecca of southern cooking last week. I was concerned it wouldn’t live up to the hype. But it actually surpassed it. The veggie platter was yummy and the service friendly. When they learned it was my first visit, they gave me a beautifully wrapped map detailing all 579 locations across the country. The map (and enclosed Chix Stix candy) kept the Talk team well entertained on the way back from a business meeting in Winston Salem. I got a great lesson on my state capitals. And a delicious reminder on how excellent customer service and smart marketing is the best way to bring your customers back for seconds.

Jennifer loves organization tips – Those who know me know I am an obsessive straightener and organizer. I continue to be fascinated by those who can live and work amongst clutter. So, I was delighted to come across an articled titled “10 Ways to Let Go of Your Stuff - Confessions of a Clutterer” in the March issue of Real Simple magazine. The author, Erin Rooney Doland, makes some wonderful points for those who are trying to recover from this condition. You can read more at Unclutterer.com or RealSimple.com.

Kirsty loves my Share This button – I installed this plugin on my FireFox browser to help me more easily share great content I come across online. With the click of a single green button, I can email, IM, Text or post what I read to more than 30 social networking and bookmarking sites. Now, I never have to worry about looking for a post’s sharing button, or fret if they don’t have a button for my favorite sites.

Nathan loves Twitback – I wrote about a number of elements that really make Twitter better for businesses a few weeks ago, and one of these elements was creating extended profiles, or what some call “twitter backgrounds”. These custom twitter backgrounds work great for branding your twitter profile more, or giving that little bit of extra information that the normal twitter profile just doesn’t provide. It used to be that in order to create this extended twitter profile, you had to have some photoshop skills, or access to someone who did. Well, Twitback handles all that for you!

Shawn loves Birds Of A Feather, Letterpressed Together – Yes, this is another letterpress blog. But this time with a twist. Color. And lots of it. Bright colors have really been catching my eye lately. Perhaps it’s because I am redesigning our Talk business cards and Web site with a fresh new palette, or maybe I’m just feeling it this spring. Whatever the reason, the letterpress experts over at Studio On Fire really hit the ball out of the park with a colorful peacock themed wedding invitation set.

Susan loves periodic table of typefaces – I’m a self-proclaimed font dork. I can spend hours looking through sites like dafont.com and myfonts.com checking out the latest and greatest fonts. And the periodic table of typefaces make finding classic fonts I like (and even ones I don’t) that much easier. Though it only shows one or two letters, that’s usually enough for me to know if the style fits what I’m working on.

Tags: Customer Service, Graphic Design, Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Marketing, Social media, Things We Love, Typography
Posted in Branding, Graphic Design, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Professional Development, Public Relations | Comments

Why I won’t follow you back on Twitter

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Because many experts have already addressed this subject in the blogosphere, I won’t waste your time beating around the bush. There are a few, textbook, terrible things that you can do to ensure that influential tweets won’t follow you back. Keep in mind, social networking can be a trial and error type of process but if you want to get people talking about (and not mocking) your brand or message in the Twittervese, do not take on the following nasty habits.

No Profile/no photo
Having no profile or no photo says to me, “I’m pretty guarded. I’ll try this Twitter thing, but I’m not going to put my WHOLE LIFE on there!” That’s pretty over dramatic and says that you’re not interested in getting to know me, or any of your other followers for that matter.

Protected profile
If I don’t know you, I won’t request to follow you. There could be 1,000 reasons you feel the need to protect your lame Twitter updates - you’re on the lam, you’re in the witness protection program, you’re slandering your girlfriend, Samantha Ronson - and I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that.

Sex Pot name/photo
Unless you’re 19 and in a sorority, there is no reason to have the following words in your twitter handle: candy, kitten, hunny or angel. Also, if your photo looks like it could be the profile picture for a website that charges by the minute, you’re not getting followed back.

Cat got your profile?
For the most part, I won’t follow you if you have a photo of a cat as your profile pic. This just really freaks me out. Human photo is better than a pet photo, which is better than a logo.

Banned words
If you use the words: inspirational, goal, dream, leader, winning, guru, make-money-online, addict, expert, audit, network, free report, marketer or extraordinaire, I won’t follow you back.

#tcot
If you use up 5 of the 160 characters permitted in your profile to let me know that you are one of the “Top Conservatives on Twitter,” and you’re not John McCain or Michael Steele, you might be seriously deluded. This applies to other self-important hashtags as well.

Following fanatic
If I can tell from your last few status updates that you’re only interested in getting more followers, you probably won’t have me to add to the pack.

(In need of) Retail therapy
If you use your Twitter page to link to your online store and you have nothing to else to offer, I can’t offer myself as your newest follower.

I’m a celebrity, get me out of here

If you are a celebrity and you have 1,522,398 followers and you’re only following 137 people back it’s terrible twittiquete. I don’t care how interesting you are (Ashton Kutcher) or how many times your promote your tweeting on the Ellen Show (Diddy).

Essentially, you have the best chance of being followed back if you do the opposite of the activities mentioned above - be open, put yourself out there, be cautiously intimate, don’t hard-sell your product or service, be useful and please, please don’t use cat profile pictures. And when in doubt, use some of Talk’s best Twitter resources here, here, here and here.

Photo by: kopp0041

Tags: Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Social media, Social Media in Wilmington N.C., twitter
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments

Things We Love 4/29

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Debbie loves great customer service – One positive outcome of the recession may be a return to southern hospitality and good, old fashioned customer service. In today’s economy, few have the luxury to take their job for granted. The result? Service providers seem to be trying a little harder to keep customers happy. So smile and remember the customer is always right, even when they aren’t.

Jennifer loves helpful news stories – I saw an interesting segment on Dateline the other night. The story was about people who had unclaimed money or property that was rightfully theirs. Their tearful joy prompted me to get online and find out if I might have money owed to me that I was unaware of. Unfortunately, nothing came up under my name. You can read about this and check out a few different search vehicles for yourself at msnbc.com.

Kirsty loves People’s Voice Webby Awards – Have your say about the very best of the Net by voting online.

Nathan loves Facebook – For all the hype that Twitter is receiving, and it is a great service, I still like Facebook more. The content and conversations that are shared there are of a much higher value than on Twitter. Not to mention Facebook Connect, like Kirsty mentioned last week. It’s only a matter of time until Facebook figures out how to open up some of its more “private” data (like mini-feeds and wall posts) to outside sources. That’s when Facebook will really become an invaluable asset to companies. Plus I always enjoy catching a good fish with some buddies using Fish Wrangler.

Shawn loves crayons – Where would I be if I hadn’t had Crayons as part of my childhood? I remember how excited I was when I finally got a 64 pack with the built in sharpener. Such a big responsibility. I took care of my crayons. Never breaking them. Carefully peeling the fuzzy labels away to prevent rough edges. Rotating them in my hand as I used them so I didn’t wear away one side more than the other. I didn’t just color inside the lines. I took crayons to a whole new level spending hours on just one page. Mixing layers and layers of colors with lots of shading. I would use a butter knife to scrape away unwanted color or use my little fingernail to chip away wax giving the illusion of highlights. As you can see I wasn’t your normal kid coloring with Crayons. Colour Lover’s post on “120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts” brought all those memories back to me with a little more. There are fun facts, photos, Crayon inspired color palettes, Hex values and RGB equivalents for all my favorite Crayola colors.
Susan loves 1-800-Flowers.com’s Mother’s Day contest – The flower giant’s latest promotion asks entrants to go to Spotlightamom.com and write a short personal story about a mother-figure who has touched their lives. Then people can go online, read the entries and easily share their favorite stories on various social networks. Now there’s a company that knows how to tug on the heartstrings and conquer the Internet at the same time.

Tags: Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Marketing, media, Promotions, Social media, Things We Love
Posted in Internet Marketing, Marketing, Professional Development | Comments

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