WavyBrainy

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.

Depending on your company’s industry sector, the economy is either recovering or getting worse at a slower rate. As budgets are finalizing for 2010, we’re staying true to the advice we offered our clients a year ago. Here are a few main points:

1. Invest to increase brand awareness and surpass larger competitors. Reap the rewards during the real recovery!
2. Improve your website and web marketing operations to achieve higher conversion rates. If you need to re-design, do it now before the market heats up.
3. Social media is not a fad. It’s a cost-effective way of building customer relationships and bypassing some of the expense of traditional media. Get involved.
4. Introduce new products and innovations now while market noise is lower.
5. Negotiate hard for lower media rates. The market is soft, and unsold inventory is just gathering dust.
6. Think niche. Social media, blogs and Twitter allow you to build customized channels and target pockets of highly profitable customers.

For additional information, download Ideopia’s white paper on“Marketing in the Recession”.

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.

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!

Now that Twitter has 15 gazillion users and the major news magazines have deemed to cover it in a major way, every Andy Rooney style crank is criticizing it.  Listen, pals, it’s a new way of communicating. You may not like it. You may not use it. But it’s here to stay.

Yes, there are certainly millions of dumb tweets about people shaving, getting ready for meetings, and wanting to buy your gold filings. But there’s a valuable idea here – micro communication. And it’s important, because it means you don’t have to get married on a social level to garner important rewards from an off- and on- again relationship with a fellow tweeter. Small bits of information, a url here or there, a connection, a new idea can make a big difference. If you approach Twitter with a “Friends for Life” expectation, you will most likely be sorely disappointed. Twitter isn’t a conversation, but it can be the most gratifying form of digital eavesdropping. About those gold fillings, the Ideopia Tweet Team can hook you up.

See symos.com for a great overview of Twitter stats.

http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

1. Some people think the name of your company is Error 404
2. Nobody knows your name, especially Google
3. Sales people have stopped complaining about your site
4. Websitesthatsuck.com has featured your site
5. Something that’s not funny on your site looks funny
6. Your site contains one of the following visuals: two white men shaking hands, a puzzle piece, or a dollar bill
7. Your site has a splash page that contains the words excellence and tradition animated
8. You have a task force thinking about a blog and a Twitter account
9. When your website comes up at family gathering, there’s an embarrassing silence.