5 Social Media Tips We Learned This Week
Social media evolves and changes quickly, and even the experts learn something new every day – if they want to remain “experts”, that is. Sometimes it can seem as if the rules for social media are constantly changing. The best way for social media marketing to keep up is to try new ideas, and constantly look for new sources of information. This week, we picked up these five social media tips. What new social media tips did you learn this week? Blog as frequently as possible. Think writing a blog post once a week is enough? High-traffic blogs post new content Read More
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouse
We often promote this blog through press releases and advance copy sent to other bloggers and journalists. Last week, Forbes.com columnist David Coursey surprised us by a draft blog post that quoted him and submitting it to Forbes.com as a guest post. “I had planned to write something about the topic myself, and link back to your blog as the source for some of the information, but I couldn’t think of anything to write except what you’d already put together,” Coursey said. Before we knew it, our blog post was featured on the top “promo bar” on Forbes.com. And instead Read More
Who Owns Your LinkedIn Contacts?
Who owns your LinkedIn profile? (Hint: it might not be you.) That was the headline on a post on this blog back in June, 2011 — and the answer we arrived at with help from a number of legal and compliance experts was, “It depends.” That leads us to a related question: who owns LinkedIn contacts — an employer or the employee? A court in England has issued an order that requires an employee who resigned to start his own consulting business to turn over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer – along with receipts and contracts proving that Read More
Managing Customer Service & Employee Privacy
After the LIMRA Social Media Conference in Cambridge, MA a few weeks ago, one of the attendees who downloaded the presentation deck used for the Customer Service Meets Social Media panel posted this question: “One of the points made in this panel is that front-line employees are often recorded (audio and video) and the results can be posted on social media sites immediately. How do I stop people from doing that? I could be held liable if one of my employees is photographed or videotaped without their permission.” In following up with the person who drafted the question, we found that Read More
Who Owns Your Linked In Profile?
Compliance is good, right? So there shouldn’t be any controversy about a new tool that enables compliance. So far, there hasn’t been much resistance to corporate social media policies or to the use of monitoring tools for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. On Wednesday, however, a press release from compliance software vendor Actiance announcing some new LinkedIn features for its Socialite social media monitoring and management software resulted in this headline: Actiance: All your LinkedIn profiles belong to us That isn’t exactly what the company says in its press release. What the Actiance press release said is: “Actiance today Read More
Personalized Selling 101
Selling is about people. One person offers something of value – a product, a service, an idea or promise. Others want what the first person is offering enough to trade something of value to get it – time, money, or attention. The better the two people understand each other, the more likely it is that the sale will happen. According to a 2010 Kelsey Group survey that’s why 97% of us research products and services online before buying them locally. In the insurance industry, most companies have two kinds of representatives who sell their products: employed or “captive” insurance agents, Read More
Drawing a Distributed Marketing Strategic Roadmap
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about two topics: The increasing complexity of sales organizations. How sales costs are outpacing revenue growth. In highly regulated industries like insurance, health care, pharmaceutical, and financial services, where distributed marketing channels are the norm, it’s even more important to look at ways to resolve these issues – and increasingly, companies are looking to technology to deliver increased productivity across the sales organization. Technology was once viewed as having only a tactical role in sales enablement, but companies that take a more strategic view of marketing automation have a better chance of Read More
Every Market Is a Buyer’s Market
Industry analyst and pundit David Coursey calls this The Age of Google, and says that the Internet has transformed every market into a buyer’s market, with empowered consumers who can (and do) compare prices and offers from vendors around the globe, and then publish and share their own product reviews and experiences (good or bad) with your company. Technology, he points out, has turned the one-way marketing messages of years past into an interactive conversation that happens in a host of communications channels that didn’t exist just a few years ago. “Among younger consumers – those under 40 – even Read More
DAM Compliance: Using software to minimize compliance hassles
Digital marketing has forever changed the way companies communicate with employees, resellers and partners, prospects, and customers. It’s faster, more personal, and less expensive than ever before. With digital marketing assets, it’s possible for corporate marketing to create the campaign, and allow local marketing teams (franchise owners, field sales, independent agents and resellers, brokers – anyone who sells the company’s products or services) to personalize or customize it with just a few mouse clicks. That flexibility comes with a whole new set of corporate compliance headaches. Luckily, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can streamline the process and enforce brand Read More
