This infographic from KISSmetrics shows and provides case studies on how online marketing can drive offline sales. It’s a great starting point when working with all types of business, large and small to determine where to start your digital and social media planning to meet business goals.
Found a great animated infographic on the role and impact of digital marketing in healthcare on Life Healthcare Agency’s YouTube Channel. This video does a great job of communicating the importance of digital communications in how we research and discover health information. It follows great storytelling practices by:
Creating a compelling argument for the role of digital communications and social networks using user and traffic statistics.
Establishing that healthcare as a topic is huge in volume: 2nd most search topic on google and 3rd largest web activity across generations.
The physician survey data displays how doctors are using digital media to research and learn about practices and medicine.
Consumer research shows how web research can lead to patient asking doctor for a branded drug.
The closing message “healthcare is digital…life is digital” shows how we are becoming a digital nation more every day. Plus I really like the use of Lego people!
LinkedIn rolled out some new features for company profiles last week. The new features allow you to do more than list your company location, description, Twitter ID and recent blog posts. The is a new link at the top of the companies page called “Services and Products” where you can list your company’s specific product and/or services.
While creating a service listing for my consulting practice I noticed some areas that can stop you in your tracks if you do not think ahead and came up with these tips.
Have a thumbnail image ready if you want to include an image. LinkedIn will re-size the image to 100 x 80 pixels so I suggest you re-size the image yourself to avoid any klugey resizing and image distortion. Also when resizing down to thumbnail size you can also trim out unnecessary white space and determine if the image will work at smaller size. If you do not re-size your image your file size limit is 2MB.
For each product or feature you can add a bulleted list of features. Each bullet item is limited to 45 character so trim the fat and keep your bullets short and to the point. You can add more features but the limit is 10. So plan out what you want to communicate in less than 450 characters.
There is an option to include a landing page for the product or service so if you have a large website go ahead and find the link before entering the form. I also noticed that short links don’t work here so have the full URL address.
You can add contact names from your company but you must be linked to that person to include them on the form. So make sure you have identified the proper contact(s) and that you are connected to them on LinkedIn. Also communicate to them that you are listing them as a contact so they are aware when requests are sent to them from the site.
The coolest feature is that you can add a YouTube video to the listing. You have the option to list a title and the video URL. Again short links won’t work here so have the full URL and create a title that not only reflects the subject matter but also has keywords for search optimization.
As much as I don’t like the level of litigation that exists in our society, you can also add a disclaimer about the product/service. If yo have specific language around your company’s offering make sure you include it here to cover yourself. Better safe than sorry.
After you have created the listing you can ask for recommendations from customers. I wish this feature allowed you to share existing recommendations on LinkedIn but if you have good relations with your customers take their existing recommendations and tailor it for the product or service.
What would a social media site be without sharing? LinkedIn allows you to share your new product/service listing on your status and you can push to your Twitter account. The one thing I noticed is that it will create a tweet with the title and a short link to your new page. Below is what I pushed out when creating my first page. It’s very basic and ideally I would add more text and call to action in the tweet.
I hope these tips help you update your company’s product or service offering pages on LinkedIn. Below is a screen shot of what my first service offering looks like. You can see the page on my company’s LinkedIn Profile.
For my third episode I travelled to Chapel Hill and met with David Rose (@dbrose67) COO of Magent Video (@magnetvideo) to talk about how to shoot short corporate video. David and I talked about the challenges of producing a great 30-60 second video for your website that keeps your audience’s attention. Some of the interesting tactics I learned were:
Keeping your script down to 150 words and clearly communicating your core message.
How to use analytics to see how your customers are looking at videos and then interacting with your company.
How and where online to manage your video library.
David’s office had some great places to shoot. His partner has several motorcycles on display and we chose the sweet BMW in the front lobby to use as our shoot background. Thanks again to David and Magnet for participating!
In my last post I talked about what makes a good storyteller and I thought this post would be a good follow up to talk about how to use the web and social networks to spread your story. Now we all love a good story and want to share with our friends. But if you are managing an online brand what’s the best method to spread your story via the web and social networks.
We all hear the experts say start with a blog or web site. While this is the starting point it’s important to look at channels that can help spread your story. Feedburner and RSS feed tools are one great way to allow users to subscribe to your content and stay abreast. But are there other avenues to help spread the word?
The answer is yes and to explain this point I’m going to use a recent example I came across. A few weeks ago my friend Greg Ng @gregoryng asked for volunteers for a Freezerburns episode on frozen hamburgers. I was excited to be chosen as one of the taste testers for his “frodown” where he had three fathers taste frozen hamburgers and choose their favorites. The episode was a big success for Greg and even made the front page of YouTube on Father’s Day.
Wow exciting right? But what really caught my interest was when I went to Freezerburns site and check out the subscribe page. I expected Greg to have the leading subscription options like YouTube and iTunes. But what I found was that he had that and much more. A total of 13 subscriber options are available for his content. The usual suspects like Feedburner and email options as well as Twitter and Facebook are present. But what impressed me were some of the lesser known, at least to me, video and podcasting options Greg managed his content through. Take a look below at his subscriber options listed on his page.
Now I know there are tools that allow content creators to autopost to multiple sites. But at the same time that’s only half the work. Setting up accounts, moderating comments and keeping up with all the necessary options, updates and other tasks on these networks is time consuming. What this impressive list tells me is that Greg is dedicated to his audience and wants to deliver content to audiences on sites that are relevant to his content type, video. I know that I’ve had to sometimes not use some social networks or distribution sites for some of the online brands that I manage because I’m not sure if it’s the right audience or if anyone is really going to the site. However in making that decision I may have missed some readers and opportunity to connect with potential customers and audience.
What channels are you evaluating when distributing your content on the web?
This video was from the Triangle AMA (@TriangleAMA) Social Media Training Camp. I shot and co-edited the footage with Jeremy Smith (@jeremysaid) for the chapter. The event was a great success and one of the best Raleigh Social Media workshops to date!
BP unveiled a new multi million dollar PR campaign this past week. I first saw the commercial while watching the morning news and watched with great interest. First as a US Citizen I wanted to know what this European based company was doing to clean up the worst natural disaster in our country’s history. I have family that lives in that part of the country and I felt a bit snarky when BP’s CEO Tony Hayward said they would take care of all the problems and he’s sorry that it happened.
Even President Obama said that BP should be spending more on the clean up than on a PR campaign. However would his opinion be different if he was a PR person? I mean we keep telling everyone how this new social media channel allows us to have a conversation and that companies need to communicate to us and not just sell us goods and services? Recent case studies I’ve read about companies doing it wrong continually point out that some companies react and stop the communication in fear of inflaming a difficult situation or crisis communication.
No doubt that the effects of this spill will continue to affect the Gulf region for years to come. It’s a terrible tragedy that in a perfect world would never have happened. But it did and BP as well as those affected have to deal with the aftermath. BP could not continue to run its typical brand advertising in the face of what happened. That would have been a big slap in the face to Gulf coast residents and others that care about our environment and livelihood of our fellow world citizens.
In writing this article I visited the BP YouTube channel to find the link to the ad. While there I noticed that BP has many videos produced in the past several weeks addressing the Gulf spill across a variety of topics. The videos range from updates on the progress of trying to cap the pipe, technical videos on the processes and how they work to environmental awareness and animal release information.
From a PR and social media perspective BP seems to be doing the right thing by engaging and communicating to the public. The ad shows some sincerity in apologizing for the disaster and promises to clean it up at no taxpayer expense. Of course we know that’s not true as the multitude of federal, state and local government workers that are dealing with the problems that have arisen due to the spill. However it appears that BP is following the conventional wisdom of owning up to its responsibilities and taking ownership and communicating that to its audiences. Of course time will tell how well they actually do just that.
What do you think of the recent BP PR campaign? Is it the right step at the right time or just damage control?
