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Safety First

You may be aware that earlier this week the BBC launched their ‘Share Take Care’ campaign, encouraging everybody to actively protect their online activity. As a society, we are concerned about the photographs, status updates and information we share with fellow family members, co-workers and friends, taking time to monitor our own security settings. However, how many of us apply the same effort and methods to protecting our business accounts online?
Social media presents businesses with many opportunities, including customer support and the ability to communicate quickly with customers and suppliers. The communications giant NETGEAR recently commissioned a piece of research looking at how important social media has become for businesses. NETGEAR asked 300 small business owners and IT managers how they were using social media in their company. Nearly half of those polled said they were using social media to stay in touch with their customers and nearly 60% said they were using social networking for internal communications. But only 29% said that had made moves to educate their staff about the risks social media may present to their business and what they should be doing to monitor their brand awareness online.

The reputational risks of social media can easily equal or exceed the reputational benefits. The reason is simple; the vast reach of social media platforms enable brands to communicate every second, globally, providing both opportunities and risks. You may remember last year, TLC Business highlighted key areas to help protect your business online.  We thought now would be the prime time to inform you again of the simply steps you can perform, in order to secure your business and its reputation on social networking sites.

Educating employees:

The developments in social media are here to stay, so empower your employees with best practices and guidelines.

  • Create, update, communicate and enforce a company policy that specifies social media do’s and don’ts, including how employees may interact with visitors and use visitors’ information.
  • Identify the key players who will be responsible for developing, executing, and monitoring your social media strategy. Assign at least two administrators for your account. The admins should monitor and promptly respond to new Facebook and Twitter policy changes and features, always considering the impact on the business
  • Sit down with your team and explore the topics and voice you would like to channel to your target audience; create a content plan that employees can follow and use as a guideline throughout the year.

Monitoring conversation online:

Here at TLC Business we recommend Google Alerts as a vital tool to monitor what is being said about your brand. Google Alerts is about understanding what type of information is out there that’s tied to your name, and most importantly your business.

Google Alerts are email updates that are sent to you for whatever keyword or phrase you decide to set the alert. As soon as your name is mentioned anywhere on the Internet, you are sent an alert immediately.

There are other tools out there that do a similar thing but be aware that the results are not definitive, the web is a massive place.

There are only 5 pieces of information that you need to provide to start using Google Alerts:

  1. The word or phrase you want to be alerted about: company name, your name, your products, etc
  2. The type of search: news, blogs, video, discussions, or everything
  3. How often: as it happens, once a day, or once a week
  4. Volume: only the best results or all results
  5. Where the alert should be delivered: email address or feed

One of the latest social media activities to come under fire is a campaign ran by McDonalds. The fast food chain started a campaign on Twitter promoting #MeetTheFarmers, to show how good McDonalds is, but suddenly they changed gears to #McDstories; which unfortunately backfired when people shared their horrifying stories.  See below for some of the tweets circulated worldwide:

  • #McDStories Take a McDonalds fry, let it sit for 6 months. It will not deteriorate or spoil like a normal potato. It will remain how it was
  • ‘These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald’s 10 piece’

Like any business feature or marketing activity, creating and communicating a clear plan is crucial to avoid mistakes. If you are worried how your brand is going to be perceived online, spend time evaluating the right message you want to send out to your target market, what information they will find useful and more importantly what messages can be monitored and dealt with by your team.

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Top Marketing Tips For March 2012

  1. Following on from this month’s blog on Google+, we have provided you with a useful website that includes 5 simple steps to building a good business page on Google+.
  2. Pinterest is the latest social networking site aimed at sharing what interests and inspires users. Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. The website allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. Pinterest’s goal is to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.
  3. Twilert is a Twitter application that enables you to receive regular email alerts of tweets containing keywords associated with your brand, product and service. Think of it as theGoogle Alerts for Twitter.
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Google+ Just Got Interesting

For many, the term Google+ is relatively new. Unless you’re not actively participating, it is easy to shy away from updates and news surrounding yet further developments in the social media sphere.
Google has produced a number of social networking sites over the years, Orkut, Buzz and Wave spring to mind. However, none of them made Google a serious competitor in the social networking market….until now. Last June, Google released its latest social networking tool. When Google+ first launched, millions of users flocked to the new service, ten million in 16 days to be exact. However, only recently has Google+ allowed brands to showcase their services. So where does Google+ fit in your marketing plan for 2012?


Back to basics, so what is Google+ exactly?

Let’s start at the beginning; Google+ is Google’s latest attempt to enter the “social” world, currently dominated by Facebook and Twitter. Google+ is an amalgamation of several services we already use, the idea, according to Google, is to do them better. The easiest way to think of Google+ is not as a place like Facebook but as a layer on top of all the Google services we already use daily. Google has a lot of services that are at the centre of people’s online lives: their search engine, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail and so on. Google wants to create a central hub, where all their services can come together.

Think of a Google+ business page as a mini website for your business, with social networking features built in, and hosted by Google. Google+ allows brands to build relationships between businesses and consumers. Like Facebook, you are given the ability to share, promote, and measure your fan engagement. Statistics show that in January 2012 there were over 90 million Google+ users, significant growth and the catalyst for businesses to start integrating Google + into their social media mix.  Both Google+ profiles and business pages provide robust platforms for companies that want to grow their web presence and create real conversations with prospects and customers. There is also another benefit. Having an active Google+ presence for your business, brand or name has powerful implications for search engine optimisation….of course. Google is still the largest search engine in the world, not to mention the owner of YouTube and now the +1 button appears in search results.


What key features can you expect from Google+?

  • Circles, you can organise all your contacts into circles. You have the ability to target different segments of your audience through the Circles, enabling you to group prospective customers; people aged 18-35, Men 60+, or even employees into different circles.  This means you will be able to control and target different messages to different circles. You can also see what conversations are going on in each of the circles.
  • Hangouts is another feature of Google+, which allows group video conversations to take place. Google+ gives you a “start a hangout” button, which will publish an update to your profile saying, “TLC is hanging out”. Up to 10 people can be in a hangout at any time, they’re free and they can be private or public. Users can also watch YouTube videos in sync with the other people in the hangout, a useful tool for virtual meetings etc.


What your business can do with a Google+ business page:

  • Conduct video conversations with employees
  • Live Q&A sessions
  • Product demos
  • Customer service “office hours”
  • Focus groups
  • Free training
  • Recruitment

Take a look at how Virgin have used Google+
Virgin has been busy using its Google+ page to help recruit 500 new crew members and offering followers a chance to meet CEO Richard Branson face-to-face. As well as Virgin, many other of the group companies are present on Google+, from the airlines Virgin Australia and Virgin Atlantic providing travel updates, to Virgin Money, sharing all the latest details of their mission to rejuvenate the banking system.

You may think. ‘Well my business isn’t exactly a big consumer brand like Virgin, Toyota or Pepsi’; however, Google+ business pages offer exciting opportunities for even the smaller brands, allowing great potential to target key Circles with specific messages and  derive SEO benefits for your website.

Google+ is still at the start of its long journey to social media domination; however, starting to think about building your business page, the interesting content you can display and the ways you can further engage with other businesses and prospects effectively online, can only be an added bonus to your marketing plan in 2012.

Visit our March Marketing Tips to get started with Google+ today.

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Pinteresting…

Recently we mentioned Pinterest in our March marketing top tips and we thought it would be a good idea to share a little more about the latest social media trend and how your business can get involved.
Pinterest recently hit our social media world with an almighty bang, receiving more than 103 million visits in February. If you have not yet joined the millions of other social media enthusiasts on Pinterest, it may be hard to understand the fascination. At first glance, the Pinterest home page may appear to be a wall of fashion trends, cupcakes and food thumbnails. However, once you start searching your own interests, you may find yourself quickly addicted to the new world of pinning.


How Pinterest works:

Pinterest invites visitors to set up their own  virtual “pinboards”, incorporating interesting images, designs and styles into different categories that the user invents.  From kitchen designs to jewellery collections, there is an array of ‘interests’ to suit everyone’s needs. So how is Pinterest a social networking site? Well, Pinterest allows members to comment on each other’s images and follow their pinboards. If a photo strikes a user’s fancy, then they can simply repin it.

Who’s involved? 

 Google Ad Planner recently showed that nearly 1.5 million unique users are visiting Pinterest daily, and spending an impressive 14+ minutes on the site. Pinterest is very much tailored towards the US market at present but it is rapidly growing in the UK. According to Andrew Lipsman, ComScore’s Vice President of Industry Analysis, females account for 68% of the site’s visitors worldwide and a whopping 85% of the activity. However, in the UK, the demographic is different, with a mostly male audience, interested in more than just re-pinning and showcasing photographs. Instead, they are focusing on the web statistics and analysis associated with this new social networking phenomenon.

How can my business get involved?

So, can a business benefit from yet another social networking site?

SMEs who currently promote their brand on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ should start thinking about adding Pinterest to their mix. Pinterest HQ suggests that businesses first spotlight “aspects of your brand that may not come to mind at first,” such as charitable activity and coporate social responsibility schemes. They also suggest incorporating other aspects of social media, creating a communication hub to new and potential consumers.

Currently, Pinterest works best for brands that can display their service or product in thought provoking, attractive and sometimes funny images. Photographs are a great way of engaging users and encouraging them to follow and interact with your brand. Businesses can also make sure that a Pinterest user who clicks on their photos will be taken directly back to their website, where the product or service is displayed. According to top marketing researchers, last month, Pinterest delivered more referral traffic then Twitter.

However, like any social networking site, Pinterest comes with a warning. There have been recent headlines claiming there are copy right issues regarding Pinterest. Our advice would be, as always, be careful what you upload online, if you ‘re pin’ an image, check that the link goes back to the original website, thereby providing referral links & traffic to the copyright owner. Inform your employees of your social media best practice and finally use this as an excuse to upload original and creative content that reflects your brand and engages your consumer.

See below for a couple of brands using Pinterest, one you may expect and the second one you may not.

Unicef:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GE:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more advice on safe social media for your business, click here.

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March Top Marketing Tips

  1. Not long now until March 30th when Facebook roll out the timeline update to the business pages. The Timeline is a cosmetic change to the format for displaying content on Facebook profiles. The Timeline format makes Facebook content more engaging and highlights the history associated with the page in a chronological order that makes it easier to navigate to older material. Take a look at the TLC Business Facebook page.
  2. TouchRetouch HD is an app that lets you remove unwanted content or objects from your photos, using just your finger and iPad. This is a great app for editing shadows, wires, blemishes, or even a person that you want to remove from your photograph.
  3. Pixable is a new app which sorts images from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into piles such as “Top of the Day,” “New on Twitter” and “New Profile Pics,” making them easy to view and interact with. The app is accessible via the web and can be downloaded from the iTunes store for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
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Top Marketing Tips April 2012

  1. Total Send is the latest email marketing web service that is easy to use and represents a viable alternative to established platforms, Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp. It manages subscribers, sends campaigns and tracks results. Total Send includes all the features you need for running a successful email marketing campaign for your business and is extremely cost effective. Click here for more information.
  2. If you find yourself taking a long time converting your meeting notes into a digital format, take a look at Dragon Naturally Speaking. After initial scepticism, we have found it incredibly effective at reducing the time we spend typing up our notes. For more information click here.
  3. Keen to monitor your social media activity’s effectiveness? TwentyFeet is tool that pulls in data from Facebook and Twitter and presents it in graph form. TwentyFeet’s stats include friends and followers, retweets, mentions and Facebook status comments. To find out more click here.
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Growing your greens

Strategies to help your green marketing flourish:

When it comes to corporate responsibility and green marketing, an increasing number of companies are recognising the importance of including environmental sustainability amongst their goals….TLC Business are one of them.

Green marketing definitions can be a little confusing, since green marketing can refer to anything from promoting the environmental benefits of a product, advertising a company’s sustainability initiatives, to simply channelling your marketing message in a more eco-friendly method.

When many people think of SMEs going green, methods such as recycling paper and conducting more meetings over the phone spring to mind. However ‘green’ strategies can incorporate even more day-to-day business activities, from using social media more effectively, to the tools you use to market your product or service.
Green marketing can take many forms, below are some of the systems and tools you can adopt in your business:

  • Green digital media
    Green marketing has gone digital with the help of social media and technology. Utilising Facebook or Twitter instead of print advertisements and providing digital versions of press packs are all steps businesses can take to more effective green marketing. Below are examples of how global companies are using social media within their green marketing mix:General Electric has introduced the Ecomagination Challenge, which challenges people all over the world, from businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators to students, to generate ideas how to improve the planet’s energy future. This project is promoted through the company’s website, blog and Twitter.IBM has created a Smarter Planet blog and encourages visitors to participate in conversations about creating a more sustainable planet. IBM also uses Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to keep the conversations alive.
  • Re-design your materials with green in mind.
    One of the most effective ways to go green is to consider the potential environmental impact of your printed material at the design stage. That means taking into account factors like paper weight, item size, and mailing format at the beginning. This may seem extreme but a smaller, lighter piece will not only reduce the amount of paper you ultimately use, but also the emissions of the trucks delivering your pieces.Puma is a great example of a company planning ahead. The major sports brand is reducing its carbon footprint by redesigning the packaging for its shoes. Instead of packaging the shoes in a traditional cardboard box, which then necessitates a plastic carrier bag, Puma has designed a new product, dubbed “The Clever Little Bag”. Puma’s new packaging is made of a reusable shoe bag with a built in handle, thus eliminating the need for both a cardboard box and a carrier bag at the end of a sale. Puma’s green effort alone is projected to reduce the company’s paper consumption by over 65 percent, as well as cutting down on annual carbon emissions by 10,000 tons.
  •  Clean up your database:
    An up-to-date database can also play a key part in your green marketing strategies. Whether you are sending a direct mail campaign using your new eco friendly marketing collateral or you are sending regular e-marketing campaigns. You can save money, reduce paper use and delivery impact, simply by cleaning up and reducing the size of your database. Regularly updating mailing lists and removing undeliverable addresses, duplicates and bounced email addresses, will play a part in saving resources.
  • Adopting a lifecycle approach:
    Selecting green materials and products for marketing materials and adopting a lifecycle approach that looks at the whole campaign, thereby foreseeing areas of potential waste. More and more companies similar to Recycle Match are evolving. Recycle Match operates on the philosophy that one company’s trash is another company’s treasure and matches businesses who have waste products, such as used billboards, textile waste, and salvaged building materials, with businesses who need them.
  • The Green Community:
    Finally, community is another component to successful green marketing. The green revolution has caused the growth of thousands of organisations and causes, each championing their own method of fighting for the environment. Find the businesses that fight for green living in the area, which relates to your product or service and contact them for support.

With the current emphasis on going green, recycling, and saving the planet, it would be foolish not to engage with the green consumer. However, it is important that your actions are credible and sincere. It is all too easy to employ ‘green wash’ when communicating your ‘green’ policies. Organisations that do this run the risk of attracting negative feedback and potentially damaging their reputation. A business doesn’t have to implement all of the suggestions above, simply adopting one or two can be a step in the right direction. Like any marketing or business activity, having a plan is essential.  Your green plan doesn’t need to be complicated or lengthy, but you should outline the steps you need to take to ensure effective execution and alignment with your overall marketing strategy.

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Top Marketing Tips May 2012

  1. The LinkedIn iPad app has finally arrived. The app is designed to be a personal assistant, with features such as calendar integration and a focus on LinkedIn’s personalised news feed, which showcases popular news articles and updates.
  2. LinkedIn’s Signal is another tool that can be applied to your LinkedIn account. Signal allows you to filter and browse only relevant status updates from your LinkedIn streams. You can target updates from colleagues, competitors, etc. The tool also allows you to narrow or expand your view based on the following filters: network, industry, company, time published and location.
  3. This month we provide you with a book dedicated to LinkedIn. Social networking Guru Neal Schaffer’s Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn, explores the potential for professional and personal networking through LinkedIn. This book goes beyond the “business” genre to expand upon the world of social media marketing, branding, and career management.
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Are your Lead Generation campaigns LinkedIn?

You may be aware that we regularly discuss the importance of social media for a business, providing you with insights into the latest social media trends and top tips about how to engage effectively with your consumers within the variety of social media platforms available.
From our experience of working with SMEs, the same questions pop up time and time again, ‘How can social media fit with my industry’? ‘How is social media going to generate sales for my business?’

Not all social media sites are relevant for every business, for example, product based B2C businesses are more likely to engage with consumers on platforms, such as Facebook and Pinterest, where a business can take advantage of the visual functions available. If you want to communicate to a B2B audience and business professionals, then LinkedIn with its 150 million members is a good place to start.

LinkedIn enables members and businesses to create profiles, connect with like-minded individuals, share blogs and news items. However, more and more businesses are now discovering the hidden powers of LinkedIn, not only as a social networking site, but also as a platform that can be the foundation for marketing campaigns and a vital component in a company’s lead generation efforts.

So how can your business use LinkedIn for lead generation? Think of LinkedIn as a treasure trove with over 150 million contacts that can be used to support your business activities. LinkedIn is rich with information you can use to help qualify prospects, target businesses and research competitors.

Below are some examples of how your business can use LinkedIn effectively:

  • Do you have a list of potential companies that you wish to target? Are there contact names missing or is the list simply out of date? If so, LinkedIn is a great tool for identifying key decision-makers working in the organisations you are keen to engage with.  This helps eliminate the dreaded entry phrase ‘I can’t put you through; we work on a no name basis’.
  • Is your business launching a new product or service and you are keen to research your target audience? We use LinkedIn as a valuable market research tool. It gives you access to a range of groups and contacts, many of which are keen to share their opinion. Post a question on a relevant group and engage with your target audience to get their thoughts and ideas, there’s nothing better than a service or product that really addresses the challenges and problems customers face.
  • Join groups and develop yourself as an expert in your field. LinkedIn enables you to join and set up industry and career specific groups. Groups of like-minded professionals are excellent for gaining knowledge, sharing news and conveying your expertise. LinkedIn groups allow you to see the issues that your target audience are facing, providing you with an opportunity to share your knowledge and build relationships with potential customers.

A great example of a business getting to grips with the power of LinkedIn is Cathay Pacific. Cathay Pacific Airways is an international airline based in Hong Kong, offering scheduled cargo and passenger services to over 140 destinations around the world. Cathay Pacific faced the same challenges that most businesses face, how to crawl through the jungle that is an overcrowded marketplace and reach their target audience with a message that is compelling. In order to achieve this, Cathay Pacific turned to LinkedIn to help target people who would fly business class between the United States and Asia. The aim was to identify members who belong to LinkedIn groups related to business travel in Asia, such as Global Workers, China Networking Group and Hong Kong Connection, in order to engage with time-strapped business travellers in an environment where they were already comfortable, engaged and spending time.

Cathay Pacific established a company page in LinkedIn and started to engage with the groups and individual members, providing regular status updates. As well as increasing the brand awareness, Cathay Pacific’s LinkedIn activity generated a total of 1,324 responses from business travellers, produced 97 LinkedIn page recommendations and increased the clickthrough rate on to their main website.

With the ever increasing array of social networking sites available to businesses, large and small, and the constantly evolving digital world, a business must establish the platforms that offer their business most value. Social media is free but your time is not. You need to use it wisely. We believe that increasingly, if you operate in the B2B sphere, LinkedIn represents an effective investment of your time. It is now so much more than just an online CV; it unlocks the doors to millions of opportunities for your business.

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Are you tweeting?

Twitter now has 10 million active users in the UK – Is your business one of them?
The once personally focused micro-blogging tool, Twitter, has developed in popularity with individuals but equally amongst businesses in the UK. Twitter may have been a source for celebrity status updates in the past, however, the times are changing and more and organisations are realising the potential behind the social networking site. According to research published this week, over one-in-six businesses now use Twitter to scout and engage with new customers.

So how are small businesses achieving success through Twitter?

  • The London Studio

Theo Paphitis of Dragons’ Den launched a Twitter competition called Small Business Sunday. Once a week, Theo started asking entrepreneurs to tweet him about their business, choosing his six favourite, which he then flagged up to his 240,000 followers and on his website.

One of the companies that tried to attract the attention of the successful dragon was a multidisciplinary design studio called The London Studio.

“I tweeted Theo hoping to tempt him to look at The London Studio website and see the products I’d designed,” says the MD.

“He did — and his single tweet saw my website’s traffic more than double on its weekly average. I thought the server might break. Sales jumped too — gift shops and other independent retailers got in touch and asked me to be a stockist, and existing ones put in larger orders. I sold an extra 13,000 cards in the month after Theo’s tweet. Twitter has been great for business.”

  • Big Green Bookshop

The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green tweeted on the 24th of February 2011 that without help they would have to close the doors to the book shop in nine months due to an unpaid bank loan. Shortly after the tweet was sent, the topic started to trend on the social media platform, growing in popularity, spreading throughout the social media realm. Due to Twitter the shop sold enough books to cover its bank repayments for two months and is now trading healthy.
Is your business one of the 10 million active UK users on Twitter? If so, has you ‘tweeted’ or ‘followed’ in the last two weeks?  Take a look at the top tips below to get your business on the path to social media success.


Tips to get your Twitter activity up and running:

  • Follow other relevant small businesses – Quality rather than quantity
  • Share tips related to your industry
  • Post links to original thought pieces
  • Give referrals via Twitter
  • Communicate with potential customers, strategic alliances and suppliers
  • Engage with industry magazines, editors and journalists – you never know who might read your latest news or blog feature.
  • Ask your audience questions

Twitter is more than just a status update, the opportunities are endless….Get tweeting today!

For more social media tools and tips, click here.

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