Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!

Graph by Alerti social media monitoring tool:

What can brands learn?

• Make your customers feel important and appreciated…
• Reach out to them offline even if your product is partially or wholly online…
• Engage with the people who use your product!

Graph by Alerti social media monitoring tool:

How many of the different types of social media have you used or been apart of?

The amount of content consumption taking place on the popular social network has also grown substantially where nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com for the week ending November 13, 2010. The market share of page views for Facebook.com was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube.com with 6.39%. – Facebook.com generates nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US | Hitwise

However, consider what people are doing on Facebook — conversing with their friends and family, playing games, wasting time, etc. People are there to post and play and read. They are not looking for products to buy.  They are not doing research for a purchase (unless they happen to poll their friends with a question).

Facebook ads may seem like a good idea because of the number of people who are spending time there (lots of it). But ads are largely ignored (and they are ignored). People are very good at concentrating on what’s important to them. And on Facebook, it’s not marketing or advertising, or even what most companies have to say.

People may like a company or product, but they very rarely will come back to the page. Posts may show up in their feeds, but if all the posts are marketing or advertising, they’re likely to get hidden (which is easier than un-liking).

If you want to use Facebook for your business, you need to connect with people on a more personal level than just your regular marketing messages. People want to know WHO you are and WHAT you stand for. They want information that they find valuable. They want to have conversations with interesting people (not companies).

Think about your target audience. What’s important to those people (ignoring your product)? What type of content or information would they find valuable? What can you provide to try to meet that need? Is there a way that you can get people to contribute to the conversation? Perhaps tell their story?

Using Facebook effectively for business means thinking about things from your customer’s perspective and leaving the traditional marketing and advertising at the door.

How do you use Facebook for your business?

(photo by the Italian voice)

Business Cards

Out of 50 business cards, almost all of them were processed very well. The four that were not were strangely designed. For each business card, the system stores images of the front and back of the card, as well as contact information. Name, company, phone and email are visible in the dashboard and any of the data can be edited as needed, exported, or archived in Evernote.

Receipts

Shoeboxed processed 2 of the receipts as receipts and 2 as bills. The two classified as receipts were on traditional receipt paper and the 2 bills were on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. It was easy to reclassify the bills to receipts and Shoeboxed also tries to classify the receipts based on categories (auto, fuel, office supplies, etc.). The classification for the one receipt it did auto-classify was off, but I was able to change it and it’s supposed to get better as you use the system. Having receipts in digital form is certainly a much easier way to organize and manage your expense data.

(amounts have been removed in the image above)

Pricing

There are four different pricing levels – Business, Classic, Lite and Free, which differ on the amount of receipts and cards scanned, levels of service and types of services. The Business plan, priced at $49.95/month, includes 500 receipts and cards per month, pre-paid envelopes, 1-2 day turnaround time, and a free quarterly back-up CD. The Free plan includes only unlimited receipts that you scan and upload and a Shoeboxed email address for online shopping and email receipt forwarding.

Mobile

When you’re on the go, Shoeboxed offers a couple of free mobile applications for scanning in and organizing receipts and business cards.  Business cards and receipts are uploaded, verified and displayed on your online account — these scans count towards your monthly limit. You can upload unlimited receipts via an email address. If you allow Shoeboxed to share your contact information with each new contact you upload (so they can include an invitation to try their product), you also can upload unlimited business cards via an email address.

Conclusion

All the data was nicely organized and easy to export into files that could be easily used in other applications. Any errors in the processing were easy to correct. Having Shoeboxed process my business cards makes it easier for me to import that information into my CRM without having to hand enter everything.  Uploading unlimited receipts and business cards via the special email addresses is an extra plus.

While, we don’t have enough volume of business cards and receipts (yet) since most of our stuff is already digitized, I can see this as being a extremely valuable service for companies that do have a lot of receipts and business cards to file — and $50/month to be able to do something more productive for your time is a steal!

Give Shoeboxed.com a free 30-day trial and let us know what YOU think.

Disclosure: Shoeboxed.com gave us a free 30-day trial of their Classic package to review their service. This same 30-day trial is available to all consumers. Links to Shoeboxed.com in this post are affiliate links because we believe that they provide a valuable service that you may find useful. If you’d like to check out Shoeboxed.com without clicking on an affiliate link, click here.

Proctor & Gamble (P&G) came to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan about their recently successful Old Spice guy campaign.  These thoughts were gleaned from that presentation.

The success of the Old Spice Guy campaign was no fluke. P&G carefully crafted the campaign to reach a specific market segment with an engaging message. The knew who their competitors were, as well as why people bought those products and their own. They also knew what attributes made their product stand out. Once they identified the segment that they wanted to reach, they chose the attributes of their product that were important to those people and reached out in a way that successfully engaged their target audience.

Who & What

P & G identified several possible segments but decided to go after men who aren’t caught up in their morning routine but who always like to look their best.  P&G found that most of these men were just using the soap products that their wives/significant others bought for themselves.  Obviously most of these products had a feminine smell because women tend to like scented soap. So there was an issue for these men of wanting to look their best, but worrying about smelling non-masculine.

Dove had also entered the men’s soap market, but their soaps typically had very little smell because they compete on the idea of purity (which tends towards feminine anyway). Old Spice has had a tradition of scent. Many men who currently used their products did so because their fathers had used Old Spice and they were drawn to the memories the scent brought out. Smell was clearly an important differentiator.

Not surprising to most women, men don’t buy their personal care products. Women do because they are the ones who go grocery shopping. Any campaign would have to reach these women and make them want to buy the product for their men.

How

Old Spice had an Old Man’s image. Most of the current consumers were older and used the product because their fathers did. Younger men were not interested in this stodgy image. In order to break into a younger consumer group, Old Spice had to break out and do something new. Humor, edginess and uniqueness are important to these men, so any campaign would have to embrace these concepts.

Old Spice also had to speak to women who bought these products for their men. They had to want to buy the products and the reasons had to appeal to them as well.

Where

Touchpoints for the campaign would be most effective when they reached men and women when they were together. TV Shows which men and women typically watched together were used as a launching point. Separate messages and campaigns were used for channels where only men or only women were reached.

P&G also used Twitter to produce a series of 16 YouTube videos where the Old Spice Guy responded specifically to influencers (if you haven’t seen these, seek them out, they’re clever and hilarious).

What

Obviously P&G used a hip and funny message with a good looking man who speaks both to men and women but highlights the scent attribute.

Results

P&G planned for a 3-5% growth for Old Spice body wash but actually experienced 38% growth – so much so that they’re not able to keep up with demand and their products are “on allocation” because they can not produce them fast enough. Their brand channel is #1 on YouTube and the #2 most subscribed to. They also saw close to 3000% growth of their audience on Twitter and close to 300% growth in traffic on oldspice.com. There was also a measurable lift in social media and P&G increased sales in the first month.

Most telling to the P&G representatives was when the campaign was parodied by Sesame Street:

How can you design marketing success for your company?

Several of the traits on the following list of characteristics of highly effective blogs are
inter-related. You won’t be able to have one without having at least one of the others – so
consider them all important!

1. Good Community

They have a good community. Blogs are an excellent vehicle for interaction. An effective blog promotes community – interaction between the author and reader, and between reader and reader.

2. Engagement

Their owners are engaged. A blog cannot have a good community built around it
without the active participation and engagement of its owner.

3. Valuable Content

Content is king. I’m sure you’ve heard it before – and it’s true. Readers come to your blog because of your content. An effective blog is providing useful information in an understandable way for its audience.

4. Address Needs

They address a need (or needs). Basically, the valuable content the effective blog is
sharing is needed valuable content. You can write the best content in the world but if it is
about a subject of absolutely no relevance or interest to anyone else, you won’t have a lot
of readers.

5. Constantly Evolving

Like everything else in life, the blogging scene is constantly changing. An effective blog is constantly updating – as the owner tries one thing that might not work, he or she moves on to another thing to try.

6. Clear Purpose

How many times have you ended up at a blog or website only to be left wondering what in the world it is about? What’s the topic? Why should I be interested in reading this blog? Effective blogs will make it easy to determine what they’re about, otherwise people will move on to find something else to read.

7. Easy Navigation

Effective blogs take into consideration design. A really bad blog layout, one that isn’t pleasant to the eyes at all, can turn away readers – even if your content is really good. Who wants to spend a lot of time looking at something ugly?

8. Search Engine Optimized

Say the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” and a lot of bloggers will turn green. It can be a tough subject but it is an important one to learn at least something about. Search engines such as Google can be a huge source of traffic, as long as you’ve done some of the work to rank high enough for readers to find you. I have recently fallen in love with SEO Scribe (affiliate link). For bloggers, like me, who have a foggy idea of what SEO means but still need quite a bit of help, SEO Scribe is a must- have resource!

9. Easy to Follow

Successful blogs give their readers easy ways to keep up with new content. There are many ways to help readers get your updates these days – by email, RSS feed, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

10. Consistent

Readers have an idea of what to expect from effective blogs. They know about how often new posts will be written and they have an idea of what the subject of the posts will be. There is also consistency in the quality of the content – effective blogs provide content that you can expect to be good!

In your journeys around the blogosphere, what characteristics have you noticed that make up the blogs that are highly effective?

(photo by Frédéric DUPONT)

Tanya Peterson is a wife to a wonderful husband and a stay at home mom to my two little ones. She’s been blogging at Blogelina and learning about blogging since mid-2009. She is an entrepreneur at heart, always coming up with ideas and ways to “be my own boss”. She loves to share what I learn with others who, for whatever reason, also want to earn money outside of typical employment.

Delegation

One of the most difficult transitions from startup to a larger enterprise is the ability for the entrepreneur to learn to delegate tasks they did themselves previously. If something like social media is important to the future of your business, it doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself. Find someone in your company (or outside) to do it for you.

Maintain Quality

If you do delegate tasks or projects, don’t sacrifice on quality. Any interaction with customers or potential customers can have an impact on the reputation of your company, affecting future sales. When delegating, make sure things are done properly and you get the right people to do them.

Monitor Status

Just because you delegate, doesn’t mean you can check out. Stay in the loop with what’s going on and figure out how to measure whether or not things are working. Don’t micromanage, but stay interested and involved to make sure things are going the way you want.

How do you make sure you follow-through?

(image by Akaporn Bhothisuwan)

From the Heart

People can smell a phony story from miles away. A good story is part of the fabric of your company and your brand. Compelling stories are told from the heart and have an emotional connection with the audience.

Chapters of a Book

Storytelling works when everything your company does is part of an overall storyline. Every product, every ad, every person is telling a portion of the story. Overall it adds up to something that’s exciting and enticing and fits with everything you do.

Something Larger

Consumers connect with stories that they can add to and that become part of their own stories. Buying an Apple product connects you to Apple’s story, but your story also becomes a part of who their brand is. A compelling story leaves room for consumers to add their own chapters and interweave their own experiences.

The Future of Storytelling

Storytelling helps companies create loyalty and build for their future.  What’s the future of storytelling? Check out the Reinvention Summit, a virtual summit Nov 11-22, 2010.  There are 4 scheduled talks each day from 2-6pm and all sessions will be recorded and available to registrants. Use the code REINVENTION to receive $25 off an Activators or Explorers pass.  Tickets start at just $11.11.  Looks like it’s going to be an interesting event (more coverage soon).

What’s your story?

(image by Sarah Worsham)

Fixing the Problem

Bad things happen. People have bad days.There are misunderstandings — whatever. When things do happen, fix them. Ignoring a problem doesn’t fix it. People have access to have their side heard (via social media and the web). Don’t let it get to the point where someone feels they have to turn to a public forum.

In this case, regardless of what may have happened at the gate, Alaska Airlines could have easily verified that this couple had paying tickets. $1000 to fix this problem is peanuts compared to what happens when the story gets out to the media (which it did).

Everyone is in Public Relations

You may have a PR and a marketing department (or agency), but everyone in your company is in public relations and marketing.  Anyone that has interactions with customers helps shape how people feel about your brand. It’s so easy for people to share their experiences with a wider audience via social media and the Internet. Provide good customer service and make sure everyone in your company is on the same page.  Alaska Airlines obviously has some work to do.

Vital Customer Touchpoints

No matter how much you spend on fancy advertising and marketing, there are certain situations which can make or break your company’s brand perception. Anytime your company interacts with your customers is a touchpoint. Think about the touchpoints that make the most impact on your customers (or better yet, ask them). For an airline, it’s the actual flying experience:  boarding the plane, the plane trip, picking up their luggage. The people who interact with customers in these situations make all the difference to your company’s brand perception (flight attendants, gate attendants, etc.). Are these people on board with the image the company wants to portray?

What do you think?

(image by thecrazyfilmgirl)

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is a measure of how much is spent to get a sale (conversion). Take the amount spent on a campaign over a time period and divide it by the number of sales. Ideally this number is less than the average amount purchased. If your CPA is $25, but your products are only sold at $10, you’re losing $15 on every transaction made through that advertising channel.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Remember Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) from yesterday? It could be that your CLV is much more than your cost per acquisition (CPA) and so maybe you’re spending $25 to acquire a customer who will spend $100 or $200 with you eventually.  This certainly changes the equation and shows why it’s important to understand CLV.

Cost per Action (CPA)

CPA can also stand for Cost per Action. If you’re advertising in order to get people to do something that isn’t directly a sale, think in terms of Cost per Action.  For example, let’s say you’re running a Google AdWords campaign in order to increase your newsletter subscribers. Cost per Action in this case would be how much you’re spending for each new subscriber.

CLV is still important in this case, but you’d want to know what the CLV is of your newsletter subscribers.  How many subscribers actually purchase from you, how much do they purchase from you and how long are they customers? Now you can start to understand not only the value of your newsletter subscribers, but also how much you should spend on acquiring new subscribers.

What to Improve

CPA provides more data on what may need to be improved. In Google AdWords if you get caught up in your click through rate (CTR), you may miss whether you’re spending too much for each new customer. If you’re spending money to increase the number of newsletter subscribers, how much are you spending versus the payout of those customers?

How do you use CPA?

(image by Daniel Borman)

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a measure used in marketing to figure out just how much customers are purchasing over the lifetime of their relationship with the company.  While it can be calculated exactly by setting up a spreadsheet with the purchase amounts and average length of relationship, an estimate of CLV is usually close enough for our purposes.

Let’s say that the typical customer spends $100/month and does business with you for 2 years. Your CLV is $2400. $100/month x 12 months = $1200 per year x 2 years = $2400.

Using CLV

Now that you know the CLV for your customers, you can use it to decide whether or not specific marketing and advertising efforts are worth the investment.

If you’re running advertising on a website and it’s costing you $3000/month to reach 100,000 people, but only has a click through rate of 0.3%, you’re paying $3000 to have 300 people click on your ad. If your conversion rate for your landing page is 5%, then 15 people per month are becoming customers. The CLV of these 15 people is each $2400, which is $36,000 over their business relationship with you. You’re spending $3000/month to gain $36,000 additional business each month.

Long-term vs. Short-term

In the previous example, if you had just used the initial purchase amount, $100, instead of CLV, you would have thought you were paying $3000/month for only $1500 of business (15 x $100), which doesn’t make sense. Just using the initial purchase amount ignores the long term value of a customer.

What if you had larger initial purchases but customers don’t stick around very long? If a typical customer purchases $1000 but only makes that one purchase, your CLV is much lower than the previous example ($1000 vs $2400). This means you have to spend enough to keep more customers coming through the pipeline because they aren’t sticking around.

Fixing What’s Broken

CLV helps pinpoint what may not be working as well as possible in the overall lifetime of a customer. If customers purchase $1000 from you but only do it once, there’s clearly an opportunity to try to increase repeat purchases. If you’re advertising and getting pretty good traffic to your landing page, but only a small percentage is converting from that point, there’s a place to improve.

CLV is a fairly easy measurement to calculate (especially estimated CLV, but even a true CLV isn’t too difficult) and can give you a very valuable understanding of what’s going on in terms of the value you’re receiving from your customers. Calculating a true CLV (instead of estimated) occasionally is a good idea to confirm your assumptions.

Do you use CLV? How do you calculate the long-term value of your customers?

(photo by Rich Brooks)

Social Media has SEO Impact

Search engines have started to incorporate social media into the results. By being more active on social media, there’s more opportunity for you to show up in these results. For example, in this search for Biggby coffee (a regional coffee shop), there are some results from my social circle:

Build Reputation

People are more likely to believe the opinions of their friends and colleagues. Using social media increases the chance that people will see your brand, as well as increases the opportunities of having conversations about your brand (which then show up on search engines).  Since social media shows up in search engines, people will see if people in their social circle are talking about your brand when they search.

Increase Incoming Links & Traffic

Creating and posting great content and sharing it out via social media also increases the opportunity for people to see that content and then share it out to their own network.  The more your content is shared, the more opportunity there is for people to see it and click on links to view the full content, as well as post to blogs or websites which builds the links to your site (which are used for building your reputation with search engines).

Thoughts?

(photo by Ryan Wick)

Social Media Search with Options

To get started, you can just type in your company or brand. You can customize based on the type of media:

Or select specific social networks and channels to search:

Results at a Glance

Social Mention‘s results page gives you all the information you need at a glance. Down the center are results with the most recent first.  Each results has the social network or type of content, time of the post, and who posted it.  Results can be displayed by date or by source (which takes some time — seems to do another search) and filtered by time period.

Useful Social Media Statistics Summary

On the search results page are some helpful statistics as well, such as sentiment, reach, minutes on average between mentions, number of unique authors, and number of retweets.

Detailed Social Media Statistics

Sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and sources are also displayed along the left side.  Each result can be clicked to see more information.

Subscribe for Alerts

For any search, you can subscribe to the results via RSS or email.  For email, you can set up the email to only send you the latest relevant results (to reduce space) and you can control what sources and results are important.

Access to Data

Each search can be exported as a CSV/Excel file, as can the Sentiment, Top Keywords, Top Users and Top Hashtag reports. The Top Keywords, Top Users and Top Hashtag reports give you to more data that in visible on the Social Mention website.

Real-Time Social Mentions Widget

For those who want to display real-time results for a particular keyword or phrase on their blog or website, Social Mention also offers a free widget:

While this may seem like a great way to display some useful information on your blog and website, just be aware that it’s pretty unfiltered, so negative results can show up as well.  I can see this being useful to display results around a topic instead of a brand.

Conclusion

Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool.  The price is right and the data is useful. Especially nice are all the customizations available for searches and the ability to get the data out of their system via either email or rss or by exporting to csv/excel files. What isn’t as clear is how they calculate strength, passion and reach.  It would be nice if there was more information there.

The Sentiment calculation includes neutral as positive, plus since it is based mostly on what keywords are used, it isn’t great at understanding true intent (such as if a “bad” keyword is used in a positive way, or vice versa. For example, a sarcastic comment would be mis-labeled). Sentiment is one of the most difficult measures, so it’s nice to have the information, even if you have to take it with a block of salt.

Overall, Social Mention‘s results and information are extremely helpful, especially for trending over time.  The ability to get at the data is awesome for those of us who like to do a bit more digging.  I highly recommend you add Social Mention into your toolkit.

Have you used Social Mention? What do you think?

Audrey Walker is managing director of GIT Detroit and she is joined by Nikki Stephan, Jenni Murray, Trisha Verma and myself on the GIT Detroit board. “There are so many women in southeast Michigan who work in the technology field, and I felt there was a lack of organizations that catered to our demographic,” said Audrey Walker. “That’s why I rallied Nikki, Jenni, Sarah and Trisha and got them on board to help launch Girls in Tech Detroit. Some of our goals as we get this chapter up and running include creating a mentorship program and scholarship, hosting networking events, serving as a support group for women in tech fields and helping strengthen our local community. We’ll also use the national group as a platform to help get the word out about Detroit and our strong tech and digital community.”

GIT Detroit’s first initiative is Laptops for Ladies, a charity laptop drive during the holidays to support the technology needs of under-served women. GIT Detroit will give the donated machines to mothers at Lighthouse of Oakland County and girls from the Detroit Public School District via Reality Check Detroit. The goal of the Laptops for Ladies is to inspire under-served women to see the value in literacy, art and technology.

There are 6 drop-off locations throughout metro Detroit. MYTHLOGIC Computers in Ann Arbor, MI will clean up the laptops before they are delivered to the receiving organizations.

The Laptop for Ladies charity drive runs now through December 6. Visit the website for more information and the drop-off location addresses.

Those interested in joining GIT Detroit can register on the website. GIT Detroit also has a Facebook group, LinkedIn group and Twitter profile.

Winning Based on Social Network Support

This past spring, several teams, representing different cities, set out for Austin in brand new Chevys with hopes of winning an epic Tweetup for their city. While the teams had missions to accomplish, and gained points for successful missions, what put the winning team over the top was all the support from their social networks back home (which also gained them points).  The Detroit team (Dave Murray, Brandon Chesnutt, Henry Balanon and Audrey Walker) crushed the competition. Yes, they completed the most missions and their content was hilarious. But what put them head and shoulders above the rest was the number of tweets, shares and mentions that their social network in Detroit gave them.

Dave Peckens recently entered the Crackberry Idol competition where contestants advanced to the next round based on votes from their supporters. Dave is the Crackberry Idol and he won a trip to San Fancisco to attend the Blackberry Developers Conference (plus a new Blackberry). Dave won based on the votes his social network was able to give him, beating out the rest (oh, and his videos were the best too).

Asking for Support

Becks Davis blogs about events and places of interest in Detroit with her blog Detroit Moxie. Becks is currently in a competition to become a paid blogger for NatureMade SAM-e complete supplements. To get to the next round, Becks need to be in the Top 20 and is being supported in her effort by the social network she’s built (Please vote for Becks!).

What Amazing Things Can You Do?

Spending the time and effort to build a social network has let these people do amazing things. The support their social networks gave them (and gives them) helps them do things they couldn’t do alone.

What amazing things can you do with your social network?

(photo by spettacolopuro)

1. Potential customers can’t find you — Sure, you have a website, but what if someone is looking for you or your services using social media and you’re not there?
2. Lack of research available — When customers are in the research phase of the purchasing cycle, they often use online resources, as well as turning to their own networks (online and offline).  If you’re not online, interacting and building up a network, people will turn to companies that are.
3. No reaction to negative reviews — Unfortunately, people are more likely to take the time to write a negative review than they are if service was spectacular. There may be negative reviews about your company out there and if you’re not there to see them, you can’t intervene to try to fix the situation or at least post your own side of what may have happened.
4. Lost opportunities to interact — Your customers (or potential customers) are online. They are probably talking about topics relevant to your services. If you’re not there to interact with them, you’ve missed an opportunity to provide value and have conversations to build relationships.
5. Search engine optimization — Now that most search engines are also using data from social networks in their results, not being on social networks means you’re not showing up in search results as often as you could.
6. Giving in to the competition — If you’re not on social networks, are your competitors? Business is about taking advantages of opportunities. Someone will take advantage of interacting with your customers if you don’t.

What other consequences are there for NOT using social media?

(photo by THOR)

Connect on the Spot

If you have a smartphone, follow people you meet in person right away.  If not, write down their social media profiles on the back of their business cards (if they don’t already have them listed). Connect as soon as possible online so they remember meeting you offline.

Do Some Searching

If you weren’t able to connect on the spot, search for them online or check out their website to see if they have links to social media profiles (which they should). Sometimes you can also find people just by searching for their name on google (and connect in more than one place).

Followup

Just like offline networking, it’s important to followup online so people connect your online profile with who they met offline. Don’t stop there, though. Continue to converse and interact with them online to build the relationship.

Network Online and Off

Ideally you’ll continue to build your offline networking efforts online which means that the next time you see them in person, your relationship has progressed more than it could have offline alone. Make an effort to reconnect with people in person when you can. For people you’ve met online, look for ways to meet them in person at conferences or other events. Just don’t network the wrong way. Here are some tips for connecting offline and online networking.

How do you connect networking offline and on?

(photo by greg westfall)