Blog | Lead Generation, Online Marketing

If you give away stuff for free, your clients won’t value it

empty seats Like everyone else, I have been completely swept away by the Olympics. There is a pretty much unanimous agreement that London 2012 has been a huge success. Unfortunately, every Olympics have something negative they’re remembered for. And in London’s case, it will be the rows and rows of seats reserved for sponsors, officials, athletes families, and members of the "Olympic Family" that were left unoccupied.

There is one valuable lesson to be learnt from the "empty seats" fiasco that can be applied to business. If you give something away for free, regardless of how precious it is, it won’t be valued. The empty seats were the best in the house, and if they were offered for resale would have been worth an absolute fortune, but many of the ticket holders preferred to spend the day in their hotel rooms.

Don’t be scared of your competitors, network with them!

Danny BermantNetworking

networkeres I’ve just thrown yet another letter inviting me to a networking meeting in the bin.

Not a week goes by where I don’t get a phone call, an email or a client inviting me to join a networking group.

Several of the groups that have sent an invite assure me that I will be the group’s sole "social media consultant" thereby "locking out" my competitors. But here’s the thing, I don’t want to lock out my competitors, I want to work with them!

Take my industry for example. You can be a social media consultant, but you may specialise in either consumer or B2B, you may do training but not implementation, you may deal with small large businesses or you may be focused on the third sector, your expertise may focus on LinkedIn or it might be on business blogs.

Why not surprise your clients and call them?

Danny BermantEmail marketing, Social media

I have written in my recent blog posts about social media fatigue, but increasingly, there is also email fatigue, that is people who are so fed up with receiving emails, they ignore the messages. In the last few months, the problem has got a lot worse, with people also ignoring personal emails. You send a message requesting information, or you email someone to follow up what was discussed at a recent meeting, and they don’t respond.

Unfortunately you can’t blame them. People are now bombarded with so many emails (most people get over 100/day – and that’s excluding the spam) that they ignore all but the most important messages. In fact, we are all so overloaded with information that sometimes the best way to get someone’s attention is to use a bit of old fashioned marketing.

How to structure your tweets so that people actually read them

Danny BermantSocial media, Twitter

Did you know that your audience are most likely to click on a hyperlink if it’s 25% of the way through your tweet?

Why? Because your audience will be scanning each tweet from left to right and are far more likely to notice a link that appears near the beginning of your tweet.

Having a hyperlink early in your tweet breaks the message into two halves. For example, the section before the link can ask a question. And the section after the link can summarise the answer (as contained in the preceding hyperlink).

Getting a link 25% of the way into your message may be tricky, but at the very least, try and put links in the first half of your message. See the example below.

How to combine telemarketing, email, and social media

Danny BermantSocial media

Xobni So what’s the best way to generate new business?

Telemarketing?
Email marketing?
Social media?

The correct answer is all three.

As well as using the phone and email, it’s highly likely that your client will be using at least one of the main social media channels (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+). And if you want to build your relationship with your clients, you need to go to wherever they’re going.

And the best way to do that is to add Xobni to your Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. Xobni is a CRM plugin that appears on the right hand side of each email. It gives you detailed information about your contacts.

Social media should be offline as well as online

Danny BermantLinkedIn, Social media, Twitter

The most frequent objection I hear to social media is “but will it get any business for us?”

Businesses understand that social media can help improve their reputation but in these tough economic times, it’s just not enough. If they’re paying you to manage your social media for them, they want to see a return on their investment.

One of the major mistakes that marketers make is to treat social media as a purely online exercise when in fact it frequently crosses over from online to offline social networking and back again. And it’s here that the sales opportunities arise.

Why LinkedIn’s disabling of automatic tweets isn’t such a bad idea

Danny BermantLinkedIn, Twitter

Two of the world’s largest social networks, LinkedIn and Twitter, have just announced an end to their partnership that allowed users to sync updates from the two sites.

How Does This Affect Your LinkedIn-Twitter updates?

Athough not all users set their Twitter updates to automatically appear on LinkedIn, many use the hashtags LinkedIn provides to post selected tweets. Previously, LinkedIn users could connect their Twitter account, and then select the option that reads, "Share only tweets that contain #in or #li in your status updates." This way, Twitter users could carefully select which tweets they wanted published to their professional profile without ever having to go on LinkedIn itself. Users have now lost that ability, and must go straight to LinkedIn to post an update.

status update

Have you set any goals for your social media campaign?

Danny BermantSocial media

Thinking of running a social media campaign?
Planning to hire a social media consultant to run your campaign for you?
Worried that you might be throwing good money after bad?

Before a contract is signed and money has parted hands, you should be asking your social media consultant five basic questions.

How do you invite people to connect with you on LinkedIn?

Danny BermantLinkedIn

you're invited This guest blog has been written by Jennifer Holloway

If you, like me, remember Viscount biscuits, clackers and pencil rubbers that smelt like grape, you probably remember the Readers’ Digest prize draw*. You’d receive a personal invitation through the post from someone called Tom Champagne (seriously…I’ve checked it out and he was a real person) inviting you to take part in the draw to be their next big winner; but you knew that, apart from the fact it had your name at the top, there was nothing personal about this invitation – you were one of thousands receiving the same letter.

So what did you do with this impersonal invitation?

Apart from the first time I got one (when I dutifully sent back the slips and in return got nothing more than more bumpf from Readers Digest) they promptly went into the recycling. Because I’d quickly learnt that the invitations that deliver the most value, that are worth replying “Yes” to, are the ones that come with a personal relationship attached. Which brings me to LinkedIn…

There are two schools of thought when it comes to LinkedIn:

School 1: It’s about quantity not quality ie LinkedIn is a tool to connect you to as many people as possible, whether you know them or not, as the more people who you’re connected to the more opportunities can come your way.

School 2: It’s about quality not quantity** – LinkedIn is a tool to connect you to a select group of people, who you have met or would like to meet, with a view to forming a relationship which may mean more opportunities come your way, plus you can send more opportunities others’ way.

I’m firmly in the second camp, believing that gaining a connection without having any sort of relationship with them makes that person simply a number in your network. And as The Prisoner made clear, no-one likes being a number. So whichever road you take, I strongly believe the personal touch matters – especially when it comes to the invitation you send.

How do I measure the success of my social media campaign?

Danny BermantSocial media

To run a successful campaign, it’s vital that you use social media monitoring tools so that you can track progress. Facebook stats for example indicate the virality of your different updates / links. You can very quickly see which messages are attracting the highest level of user engagement. You are then able to adapt your messages the most popular themes.

http://bit.ly will let you do the same for Twitter – This enables you to shrink the size of your links down so your tweets stay within 140 characters. But it does much more than this. You can also log in to your bit.ly account and see which links are the most popular with your audience.

A couple of other useful tools…

Hootsuite: a social media monitoring tool that enables you to run several Twitter / Facebook accounts from one user-friendly interface and that also monitor who has mentioned you or re-tweeted you. You can even track who is discussing topics that may be relevant to your business. Hootsuite can also be set to deliver regular reports to your mailbox chartering the progress of your campaign.
Klout: Gives you an indication of how influential you are on twitter on a scale of 1-100. It’s not an exact science, so don’t read too much into it, but the measure is based on the number of followers and how much they interact with you. You can see the Klout score of other users so it will help you decide who are the most influential people you should follow.

If you give away stuff for free, your clients won’t value it

Don’t be scared of your competitors, network with them!

Why LinkedIn’s disabling of automatic tweets isn’t such a bad idea

How Does This Affect Your LinkedIn-Twitter updates?

How do you invite people to connect with you on LinkedIn?

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