WavyBrainy

We recently transferred our Eyechat Blog for the ophthalmic market to FatCow.com, a 100% wind powered web-hosting outfit. The point is that making green decisions is becoming much easier now that business and environmental interests are converging. Consumers are more educated about the environment than ever before. Greenness is not only a preference, but also an expectation. A study by the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario shows that consumers would be willing to pay at least a 10% premium for sustainable products.

Eco-Friendly Web Hosting Companies
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Ecological Hosting (U.K.)
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FatCow

A well-written profile on LinkedIn is key to making a good first impression and building trust with prospective connections.

Here are the key elements:

1. Who are you? Get to the point fast.
2. What do you do? Don’t be encyclopedic. Tell us what’s interesting and different.
3. Why should someone tap you as a resource or consider doing business with you? List special expertise and capabilities.
4. Convey passion and excitement for your work.
5. Cut everything else.

An analytics truism we’ve noticed with the sites we manage is that visitors from social media stay longer and look at more pages. Hmmm. So if followers are valuable web visitors and potential customers, does it make sense to advertise for followers? We’ll let you know. We’re running tests for several clients and Ideopia on super targeted sites and blogs. Following is similar to opting into an email list, but with less risk. Look for a follow-up on our experiment, and see an example of one of our Twitter Banners.

Thanks to Open Source (free) widgets you can create your own division of the NSA to monitor social media conversations about your products and competition. Using free code from TweetGrid.com we did just that for a new section on our Eyechat Blog. Dubbed EyeSpy, the four columns on the page each search the Twittersphere for terms relevant to optometrists and display Tweets that match. Though other free applications, such as Tweetdeck and CoTweet, also offer search capabilities, they’re not very portable. A widget can work just about anywhere: you’re website, mobile phone, or intranet.

Listen up, you lollygagging bunch of Googlephobes. There’s been enough analyzing, sniffling, webinaring and number crunching on this new media thing. What’s wrong little pretty print person? Fraid a little widget might tear a piece out of your superdog  boxers? Think some Tweety Bird’s gonna bring you down? Fraid something will, and you’ll have to take credit for it, and find ways to spend your big fat raise. You think that’s hard. I know hard. See that scar on my dome. Got that from an art director who went that PTSD on me from cutting type I melted iron and formed letters out of it. I stuffed envelopes, and I killed more trees than you’ve ever seen in your whole pathetic lives. So cinch up or sack up, and get your hinnies out there and take down some new media. I want you to taste it, feel it, own it. Get in the mud and put something real embarrassing about your coach on Twitter. Post a really bad quality video. Start a blog and only post once. Who cares? Daddy’s not going to spank you. Are you new media warriors, or total wimps. Now get out there and do something. Body slam an idea and go for it. No committees, no research, no internal polling or buy in. Just glory. Go grab it, team.

Seriously, you cannot put this off another day. Go to Twitter.com and signup. Create an account name, send out a tweet that says “Hi, Mom,” and start exploring. I know, you may think Twitter’s stupid, until you discover…

1. What people are saying about your brand and your competitor’s products online.
2. How you can gather intelligence from your competition better by following their tweets.
3. What’s really happening the lives of your customers, the context in which they use your product, how they talk, and how you can turn that into better products.
4. How to discover unmet needs, e.g. I wish my toaster held 12 pieces of bread.
5. Learn what makes customers happy and angry about other products and services they use, e.g. we found someone last week who was thrilled to use WiFi at their hairdresser’s.

Get Crackin’! Need help? Give us a call.

A new study from DemandGen Report shows that increasingly business-to-business marketers are adopting social media strategies to drive leads. In fact, over 28% of respondents said that social media was the most effective source of leads. LinkedIn (38%), company blogs (36%) and Twitter (31%) were the favored channels, and the most effective tactics noted were:

• Participation in industry groups (25%)
• Starting conversations on industry issues (25%)
• Answering questions (23%)
• Dynamic text ads (10%)

To vividly see the impact of social media, pull analytics from your website that segment social media users. You’ll notice all the loyalty indicators – time spent on site, pages per visit – far out-performing other traffic sources.

For many companies and individuals, Twitter appears to be a race to gain the largest following. But, one of the hidden beauties of Twitter is its effectiveness and efficiency in reaching relatively small groups. Humungous followings are great for crowd sourcing and pushing promotions, but forming smaller networks allow you to listen to a market and interact on a more personal level. Recently, to help us listen to consumers, Ideopia launched Twitter feeds for several vertical markets, including @EyeChat for the ophthalmic industry.

One of our motto’s at Ideopia is “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” Perhaps nothing fits this category better than blogs on corporate web sites. They can be hideous, pumped full of hype and hard sell, or they can be funny, chock full of useful content and make you love a brand even more. In that spirit, we offer a few observations that might help you decide to blog, or not to blog.

Do blog if you want to:
1. Entertain a small group of friends and your mother
2. Communicate and engage customers
3. Demonstrate expertise on key issues
4. Build search rankings for your site on specific business areas
5. Convert prospects and leads on the blog
6. Share information and ideas within your company
7. Make your brand come to life
8. Be open to opinions other than your own
9. Want a book deal

Don’t blog if you:
1. Need to control information flow
2. Value a corporate voice versus personality on your blog
3. Won’t accept negative comments
4. Want to broadcast instead of have a conversation
5. Just want to sell and market your services
6. Don’t have specific goals for your blog
7. Think your blog can outsmart Google
8. If you expect the same audience for your web site as your blog
9. Want a book deal

I stumbled on this conversation today. Social media and Twitter in particular is chock full of surprises. Social media relationships are driven by the types of relationships people want to have with brands, not simplistic demographics. Don’t assume your customers aren’t using social media until you look for them!