As a Denver marketing firm, using social media for marketing is key.  Currently one of our team members is embracing the opportunity to take a Social Media class offered at his local university.  This is a senior and graduate level course meant to give students a better understand of social media and how to use it from a public relations standpoint.

We have decided to analyze how the Social Media class is going to be taught, and ways that we believe a college social media class could be improved beyond what this one college is teaching.

The course that our team member is taking has required reading of the book Putting the PR back in Public Relations. This book looks specifically at the social media revolution and how public relations practitioners should embrace the revolution.  It talks of how the old model of public relations is overused and annoying at times.  The book encourages readers to embrace social media and understand that it is taking the place of traditional public relations.

The second part of the class involves practical social media experience.  The class is split into teams and assigned local businesses.  These businesses have agreed to partner with the class in order to develop a social media plan and see it implemented.  This allows for students to have a hands-on experience in social media.  They are encouraged to promote across multiple social media platforms, however they are also encouraged to do only what the client wishes.  Students will be graded based off of reasonable quantitative and qualitative goals set by the professor.

Due to the structure of the class, the professor also offered up the floor to topics that students would like to see covered in the course. Students asked for things such as Landing Pages, QR Codes, Location based Services, Google +, and YouTube.  Our team member suggested Inbound Marketing, Video Optimization (with SEO), and will be teaching the part on Twitter.  This is unique because it’s fulfilling what students know they need to know more about in order to succeed in social media.

All of these things are well and good, however what should students really be taught about social media?

For public relations and journalism students, the required reading for the class fits with the practical application.  However if this course were tilted towards marketing students, it would need to be taught differently.  Inbound Marketing would need to be a focal point.  A good course would involve a focus on inbound marketing techniques coupled with practical application.  These are the things that students need to know for the future.  Understanding how to use each platform strategically for inbound marketing and creatively starting meaningful conversations with consumers are the two keys to using social media as a marketing tool.

As the world begins to shift its focus online, the need for an understanding of social media for business will be crucial.  Universities that embrace this and begin to prepare their students for this shift will benefit greatly in the future.

What are your thoughts? What do you think should be taught in a college social media course?

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To think: this question could one day influence whether or not a person will be hired or considered for a sponsorship.  As a Denver internet marketing company we follow web trends and sites that have influence on how the web works.  Klout has become one such site.

Klout is a website with the goal of measuring an individual’s online influence.  Started in 2008, when Klout reached mainstream it was measuring the influence of individuals through just their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Klout measures influence across three ideas: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Influence.  They look at true reach by how many people an individual is connected with.  Amplification deals with how people respond to the individual’s social media posting: do they share, comment, etc. Finally, network influence deals with how influential an individual’s true reach is, coupled with how often their social network shares the individual’s message.   These three areas come together to form an overall score that spans from 1 to 100.

Recently Klout has begun to expand beyond just measuring Twitter and Facebook, to measuring LinkedIn profiles, Foursquare check-ins, and Youtube videos.  All of these were added within the last two months.  Then this week Klout added measuring capabilities for Instragram, tumblr, blogger, Last.fm, and Flickr.  We can understand that social media moves fast — however, this expansion beyond just the typical social media platforms raises red flags.  Is Klout expanding too fast? One would hope not.  They seem to be expanding at their own pace. Only time will tell.

The other question that has been posed is “Where do businesses fit in?” Klout currently only measures personal Facebook profiles and not business pages.  They have yet to release their reasoning, but hopefully in due process Klout will offer this feature.

The main place that businesses can use Klout is knowing which influential people are talking about their niche, and sometimes specifically their product.  This offers so many advantages for companies to offer the right product placement with people who are going to project their message to the masses.  This changes the game when it comes to marketing.  Doing this gives faces and personal connections to products that have never been seen before.

Klout has begun offering “perks” to these people.  Most notable so far has been the Spotify perk: allowing Klout users in America the first look at the new music application.  Other perks have gone to people who are influential about food, movies, department stores, electronics, and hygiene products.  The opportunities for perks are endless.

As social media becomes more of a marketing medium, recognizing who is influential about topics is going to help companies stay on the forefront when it comes to marketing their products and services.  Klout found a niche in the online world that not only individuals enjoy, but companies find useful.  It seems that they will be around for a long time, as long as they stay accurate in determining who is influential.

As individuals, finding our niche that we wish to promote in social media will be key for our personal futures. Right now we must understand that Klout is built towards the individual and realize that businesses themselves may not have the highest Klout score.  We must also keep in mind that it’s not just about having a high Klout score, but specifically what topics a person is influential about.  Some people may have a low Klout score but still be influential within their social media network or in their search engine rankings.

The closing question for you readers is: What is your Klout? Comment with your score!

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In our last article we established the need for including email in your marketing plans, and why you can’t afford to ignore it. So now you’ve decided to start running email campaigns. You’ve set up an account in your email marketing system of choice, you turn on your computer and you stare at the blank screen in front of you — now what? What should you write that will catch your audience’s attention and make them want to read more? Great question. First off, let’s talk about some things NOT to do:

1. Don’t be overly self-promotional. People get plenty of emails everyday — they don’t want to waste their time suffering through a long email hitting them over the head with sales pitches: “Our products are the best because…,” “Our company has the best customer service because…,” “You should buy from us because…,” and so on. Come on — do you enjoy reading that? And if you don’t, then why would your target audience enjoy reading it either?
2. Don’t be spammy. We’ve all seen them: “You’ve won!!1! Click here for your FREE prize!!1!” “The Secret 3-Step Process That Will Make You Rich TODAY!1!!” “Click here to unlock the POWER of your mind, and make your DREAMS come true!!” Language like this will make your recipients reach straight for the delete key. Worse yet, it will likely trigger the spam filters in many email clients, so that most people won’t even see your message to begin with.

So, now that we’ve established some things not to do in your email campaigns, let’s talk about things you should do.

1. Include interesting, educational and engaging content. Rather than blasting your recipients with self-promotional content, give them content that is useful to them and helps make some aspect of their lives easier. For instance, we run monthly email campaigns with articles and tips for how our clients can improve their online marketing — articles like this one that you’re currently reading, for instance. This catches your recipients’ attention, makes them want to read more, and demonstrates your company’s intellectual leadership in your subject matter area.
2. Include incentives. People love contests and giveaways. Let’s say you are looking to increase your Facebook fan list or Twitter followers. You could run a giveaway whereby anyone who becomes a fan or follower on Facebook or Twitter can get a free e-book. Or you could run a contest for an iPod Touch or an Amazon Kindle — people just need to become a Facebook fan or Twitter follower for a chance to win. Then you announce the contest or giveaway in an email campaign, and you’ll be amazed at the response rate (of course, don’t forget to avoid the spammy language we talked about previously).
3. Include strong calls to action. You don’t make sales by sending out emails that people read and forget about. What you want to do is produce emails that will lead people to click through to your website, where you can entice them to become customers with special offers, free trials, or other incentives. For instance, we mentioned earlier that you should include interesting, educational or otherwise engaging content such as “how-to” articles. But you don’t want to put the whole article in the email — what you want to do is include a headline and a short teaser to the article, with a prominent link to your website where they can read the whole article. This has two benefits: one benefit is that it doesn’t take up too much space in your small space available in your emails, and the other benefit is that your website is a much more effective place to sell or upsell to your readers, and thus you want to direct them there as much as possible.

We hope this has given you some good starting points on how to get past “the tyranny of the blank page” and to start brainstorming some great, engaging content to put into your email campaigns. In our next article, we’ll be talking about when and how often to send your email campaigns to your recipients.

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As a Denver website development company, we look for ways to generate leads for potential new clients.  As a website development company we tend to look to generate leads via the internet.  Although we very much value the aspect of face to face lead generation (which we will touch on here in the blog post to a degree), because we spend most of our time online, developing leads through the web has become essential to growing business.

We will look at four specific ways leads can be generated through social media.

1. Twitter

• Following: Obviously the easiest way to develop a lead via twitter is to simply follow a potential client and hope that through some form of communication a lead will develop.
• Tweet-ups: These are a great way to connect with like minded people in your area.  Here you have the opportunity to put a face to a Twitter account and help do lead generation in a Face-to-Face manner.
• Searching: People use Social media to ask and search out answers to their questions.  If you are looking to potentially gain some leads in an unconventional way, set up searches related to your business so that you could be the first to respond via Twitter and help those looking for your services before they even come to you.

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows for connections with other business people.  Those who need help with a service can find highly recommended people through their connections that they already have.  Creating and developing a network of professionals on this social media site will allow for your business to potentially develop leads through a referral manner.

3. Facebook

4. Blogs

Commenting, sharing, and maintaining a blog could by far be the best way to generate leads for potential clients.  Commenting on other companies blogs can bring about the potential for that company to change to your services because you are visible in front of them.  Maintaining a blog helps to amass a following in that blog which can lead to more lead generation.  Finally sharing a post or entire blog can help a company see how interested viewers are in the site as well as help encourage other companies to purchase services.

There are plenty more ways that leads can be generated through social media, if you have some that have worked for you leave a comment and let us know what they are! Hopefully in the near future the effects of using social media to build leads will be realized by all of us!

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After taking a break from our Inbound Marketing series last week to talk a quick bit about Google+ this week we are back on track talking about Competition Analysis and On-Page Optimization.

Competition Analysis is taking the time to analyze businesses that are similar.  Once the businesses that are in competition have been determined, the analysis begins.  First create a visual analysis, are they exactly the same as your company, what are their goals and strategies as a company, what are they doing good as a company?  Then begin to assess, if your company were to do business different from them would they even notice?

These are great things to consider as a company, because not only does it help your company be more competitive it also helps give your company a direction to look towards.  As a company you are able to grasp what other companies are doing and adapt upon that to build a better company.

The next level is to begin seeing if you can find examples of competitors work and prices.  Knowing their quality and what they charge for it is definitely helpful in order to stay competitive.

On-Page Content Optimization is about building into a site good Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  This is about building keywords into a web site, making sure that the meta tags and keywords match up.  Other things that can be done is giving keywords specific headers in the coding of the site as well as larger and bolded font sizing.

Obviously we don’t know the algorithms that search engines use, however they search for keywords.  So making sure that the site is a majority of keywords specific to your company is a must for content optimization.  A good measure is to make sure that no more than 20% of the site content is keywords.  Make sure though that headers, titles, and bold words are all tagged as keywords.  Also simple and concise.

Another great part of content optimization is making sure that the site stays up-to-date with new information.  As a site gets updated search engines stop by to see what’s new, as well as it boosts links (if it’s not replacing old information) that lead to the site.  This is one reason why we suggest keeping a blog attached to every website.  Having a blog is a great way to keep new information coming every week that not only draws search engines but individuals as well.  When more individuals view the site, the search engines notice the site more as well.

When a company stops and takes the time to do some competition analysis they can search out the On-Page Content and see where they can out optimize the other company.  As we have stated throughout the series: Inbound Marketing all ties in together.  This can be seen as we have talked about not only Competition Analysis and On-Page Content Optimization but also Blogs, SEO, and Keyword Traffic.  So remember it’s not just about taking one or two of these blog posts and putting them into action.  It’s about putting all of them together and seeing Inbound Marketing spread its charm.

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