BarCamp Ends and My New Startup Begins
by | posted in: Social Media Marketing, Startup Life | 0

BarCamp Boston 7The past couple of months I’ve been busy with Boston’s largest annual geek unconference, BarCamp Boston. A yearly event I help to organize, we had at least 550 attendees this year, despite conflicts with PAX East, Anime Boston, Passover, and Easter. An event where the content is meant to be generated entirely by attendees takes a surprising amount of work to make happen. Arranging a venue, finding sponsors, ordering t-shirts, creating the right structure, planning food, creating web apps that facilitate attendee connections, arranging additional programs like hardware recycling & a programming contest, and promotion, promotion, promotion.

BarCamp Boston … [Read the rest »]

How to Make Twitter Take Less Time
by | posted in: Digital Skills, Social Media Marketing | 0

Making Twitter Take Less TimeIf you’re using twitter professionally, efficiency is important. There are some simple ways to save time without sacrificing substance. Building lists, saving searches, queuing content, and using Tweetfilter can help you keep twitter valuable, effective, and low-cost.

Build lists of the people you want to interact with

You want your audience, influencers, and others to follow you, but you don’t want to be a spammy follower. Good twitter professionals understand that while following another user is one of the best triggers for a follow-back, having a positive relationship with the person you’re following is key to making that succeed. Lists … [Read the rest »]

How to Fail at Social Media – Ignore Customer Complaints, Like Bolt Bus
by | posted in: Social Media Marketing | 1

Smart companies know that twitter is where conversations (including conversations about them) are happening, and there’s much benefit to joining in. Engaging fans and earning referrals, smoothing over mistakes and saving lost business, and enticing potential customers to try them are all benefits from joining the conversation. But once you’re in the twitter room, it’s as rude and alienating to ignore customers talking to you as it would be if it were in person.

A particularly bad offender I’ve noticed is Bolt Bus. During a bad experience of my own last week, I tweeted at them three times over the … [Read the rest »]

What is content strategy (and what is “content”)?
by | posted in: Social Media Marketing, Startup Marketing | 0

It’s how businesses are earning attention, getting customers, and shaping their industry. It’s content strategy: a plan for producing and sharing information and media with audiences you want to reach, to achieve goals like customer acquisition and press coverage.

Three Quick (Fictional) Examples of Content Strategy

Lapadio Logo (Fictional Content Strategy Example)B2C: Lapadio, an online music company, wants to get more iTunes users to sign up and upload a list of their music library. They host monthly contests for users to build playlists for unique themes and add commentary, from their uploaded library. The content (and links to it as users promote their playlists in … [Read the rest »]

11 Twitter Tools for 2011
by | posted in: Social Media Marketing | 2

Twitter applications are becoming essential for marketers that want to excel at creating value on twitter. Finding conversation opportunities, improving content timing & engagement penetration, and measuring value are all challenging, time-consuming tasks. There are some excellent twitter apps out there, but I’m still finding some big holes that have yet to be filled.

Finding Conversation Opportunities

Twitter is about relationship-building. The last thing you want to do is spam members of your target audience with @replies linking to your product. It’s a complete waste of time, it’ll get you kicked off twitter, and it gives your brand a terrible … [Read the rest »]

7 Improvements I Want from Facebook Marketing in 2011
by | posted in: Social Media Marketing | 0

Facebook sucks at making money. If you’ve ever used their advertising tools, you’ve been briefly amazed by how useful it is to be able target based on interests and fine-grained demographic detail, and soon, disgusted with how terrible Facebook’s implementation is. This post is not about bashing Facebook or their business model: socially-targetted advertising will be as big of a deal for marketers as search marketing (a $16.6 billion industry) is. This post is about how Facebook could do a much better job of providing marketers with effective tools, and serving users a more engaging and relevant advertising experience.

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… [Read the rest »]

Social Network Strategy for Web Services
by | posted in: Social Media Marketing, Startup Marketing | 0

Your web service needs connections, in every sense of the word. When you need people, you go to where people the people gather. These days, those places are social network services, and if you ignore them, you’re ignoring both your current customers and your potential customers. You need to know how best to leverage social network services(SNSs) to benefit your current users, and thus, gain new ones. I’d like to help.

A Company’s Place in Social Networking

The first and most important thing to remember is that while you have a place on a social network, your company… [Read the rest »]