Category Archive: Web 2.0

5 reasons a business needs a blog?

Posted by Milena Regos on November 3, 2009

Social media is changing they way businesses do business and people are demanding this change. Companies no longer have complete control over their brand. Some very savvy companies and CEOs are turning to blogs as a way to create online communities, communicate with their customers and employees and bring transparency to their business. Below are 5 reasons why a blog is a good idea:

1. Listening tool: It creates online space for people to interact with your brand. They can leave comments on your posts and allow you to get feedback. Although there are better ways to listen to what people are saying about your business, your own blog provides one more channel to receive feedback.
2. SEO: A blog can help you with search engine optimization. By continuosly adding engaging and fresh content, while still incorporating your main keywords in your posts, your positioning on the search engine will improve. Google, Bing and Yahoo will rank your website higher with your blog (make sure your blog is connected to your domain) thanks to your content and it will improve your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
3. Create a vibrant online community. By providing interesting content, uploading videos and photos and writing often about topics of  interest to you, you will create loyal readers on your blog. By building trust with these people, they will be most likely to purchase from you than from a competitor business that doesn’t show interest in engaging with their customers.
4. Expert positioning: By writing a blog about the topics you are knowledgeable and expert in, you will position your business as a leader in the industry. You don’t always have to write about your business, products and services. If you represent a hotel, you can write about the surrounding areas, special events and happenings, local tips, shopping places, ways to save when you travel, and anything else related to general travel or the activities that your customers mainly engage with why staying at your  place. You can highlight your chef’s specials, contribute some specials recipes and cocktails and make people feel at home before they have even arrived. When people start looking for a place to stay,  they will consider your hotel first because of the existing relationship they already have with you.
5. Engagement & Transparency: You are not afraid to put yourself on the web and open up to people’s feedback whether that’s positive or negative. You embrace the fact that people now have a lot more control over your brand than they used to. You are open to receiving feedback, you are listening and hopefully making changes to your business based on customer feedback.

These are my 5 reasons why a business can benefit from a blog. There are many more reasons why a business blogs. What are yours? What do you think abusiness blog can do for the bottom line of an organization? What are your favorite blogs? Why?

Image used under creative commons license: Annie Mole

Categories: Blog Business eMarketing Interactive marketing SEO Small Businesses Social Media Technology Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | No Comments »

How to measure social media

Posted by Milena Regos on October 30, 2009

Social Media.Yes, it’s great but how do you measure it? I hear this statement a lot by business people trying to grasp with this new way of communication and its applications for marketing, sales, customer service, PR, research and more. A lot has been written about the topic of how to measure social media. Some people are for measuring every dollar and minute that goes into social media efforts, and some are against measuring it. Some people are justifying it with a simple statement of “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?. You do it every day,right?” or  “How do you measure the relationship with your husband/wife?”

So, how do you measure social media? Is that such a thing as ROI, whether that’s Return on Investment or Return on Interaction? Should we measure ROE – Return on Engagement?

Olivier Blanchard developed a very nice presentation on how to measure social media efforts. It’s one of the best I’ve seen so far:

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

A survey by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research states that  there is a “significant gaps between community goals (such as generating word of mouth, customer loyalty and brand awareness) and how success is being measured.

The top two analytics for measuring success are the number of active users (34%) and how often people post/comment (32%), which indicates that participation is still considered to be the biggest measure of success.”

A few more examples of how some people/businesses measure their social media efforts:

1. Scott Gould, founder of Like Minds, put on a conference that was strictly promoted via social media. His conference produced sales of 5,800 British pounds with 0 marketing budget.
2. The Huffington Post reported Facebook referrals increase of 48% through their Facebook Connect feature which has accounted for 3.5 million visits.
3. Pure Michigan soared to 20,000 Facebook Fans. In a previous post I wrote I referenced Gammet Interactive and Dave Serino’s study of how social each US state is. Michigan at the time of the study came up to Number 7 in the country in terms of how well they utilize social media.

In my opinion, before you struggle to find ways to measure social media, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why are you engaging on social media? What is your purpose and business objectives? This will lead to what’s important to you to measure.
2. How do you currently measure your marketing efforts? There are many similar measures that you can use in measuring social media.
3. How do you currently measure your PR efforts? There are metrics that you could implement for your social media efforts as well.
4. How do you measure your customer service? A simple metric like Net Promoter Score could be used as a benchmark prior to your social media efforts and after you get involved.
5. What website analytics are you using? There are various services that implement social media measurements with your website reports to provide a global view and give you a really good idea of what’s working best.

The measurement tools exist. My challenge to you is to think about social media more in terms of a two-way dialogue and less in terms on dollar signs. If you are transparent and authentic, bring value to people, answer their questions and give them information they seek, they will remember you when it’s time to purchase your product/service. Your bottom line will improve.

What do you think? Do you currently use social media? Are you measuring it? If so, how?

Categories: Analytics Blog eMarketing Measurements Social Media Social Media Marketing Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | 2 Comments »

Using Web Video Marketing

Posted by Milena Regos on October 18, 2009

Videos are extremely powerful marketing tool and can be used very well in business. People like to watch not read and videos can sometimes showcase your product much better than any press release or print ad will.  With social media gaining more and more momentum and people spending countless hours consuming user-generated content, videos will become a part of your overall marketing mix. Did you know that it will take you 460+ years to watch all videos on YouTube?  It’s fairly easy to integrate videos in your overall marketing campaign. You just need some strategy, creativity, a Flip camera and some time.

I found this great presentation from ReelSEO on how to incorporate videos in your online press releases. You can use videos to help with your SEO efforts as well.

There are some excellent video stats in this presentation. I recommend that you quickly read through it. As marketers, we need to know how to use this medium well. Even a small business can benefit from videos distributed online on various portals.

Video Marketing with Press Releases

View more presentations from Mark Robertson.

Do you use video for your business? What have you found that works or doesn’t work?

Categories: Blog eMarketing Interactive marketing SEO Social Media Social Media Marketing Technology Video Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools | No Comments »

New FTC rules in effect

Posted by Milena Regos on October 6, 2009

Twitter Chat Room #mrktchat will discuss the new FTC ruling

Every Thursday at 2pm PST we are going to meet live on Twitter and discuss the latest hot trends and topics in the social media world and internet marketing specific to tourism marketing people. Join us on Twitter with the hashtag #mrktchat. What is a hashtag?

This week, the hottest topic in social media is the new FTC regulations for disclosing any special interests when writing a blog post regarding a product or service. You can read the blog post from the leader in social media,  Mashable and see what they think about it. The entire regulation is available on the FTC website.

Bloggers are subject to fines up to $11,000 for not disclosing their relationship with a product or a company.

How is this going to affect your tourism marketing business? If you receiving free lift tickets, hotel rooms or dining certificates you need to make sure you use the proper disclosure when reviewing the company. Honestly, this is good news for social media as it will add to the transparency and elliminate some dishonest reviews. The monitoring part is going to be interesting but there are plenty of listening tools online.

What do the leaders think?

I checked Chris Brogan’s blog and I can’t find anything on it about FTC. I also checked Jeremiah’s blog and you can find his disclosures right on his homepage. I also found a good post by Jeremiah regarding the topic from Aug, 2009. I didn’t find anything on the Altimeter Group. The KBuzz wrote about the topic but didn’t really give any opinions as to how this is going to affect social media.

If you have an hour, this audio recording of the WOMMA webinar on the topic is worth it.

Understanding the New FTC Guidelines

View more documents from Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

What do you think? Good or bad?How is your company going to be affected? What measures are you going to take? Join us here and on Twitter this Thursday at 2pm PST at #mrktchat to discuss this issue.

Categories: Blog Business eMarketing Social Media Social Media Marketing Technology Twitter Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Twitter chat room for tourism and travel marketing professionals

Posted by Milena Regos on September 29, 2009

Twitter is a great medium to meet new people, network, exchange ideas and get advice.

In the spirit of Twitter, I launched a new chat room under the hashtag of #mrktchat. You can search for #mrktchat on Twitter or pull it up on your TweetDeck, Seeismic, etc desktop application to see everyone that has joined in. It’s a free place for people to gather and exchange ideas.

This Thursday, Oct 1st, at 2pm PST Eric Hoffman- @eric_hoffman from Park City and myself – @milenaregos are going to lead a discussion on Twitter under #mrktchat. Join us for an interactive session and get creative on how to exchange ideas in 140 characters. Some of the topics that we will cover in this first session are:

- Building brand evangelists 140 characters at a time

- Is social media a function of marketing? PR? Sales? Customer Service?

- What keep you awake at night? How are you changing your marketing to adapt to the new world/economy/media?

- Summer travel and predictions/implications for winter?

What other topics would you like to discuss? What suggestions do you have?

This is your place. Use it. I would like to keep the focus on marketing for travel and tourism. I hope it becomes a popular place on Twitter for marketing professionals, PR people, sales and customer service people interested and involed in travel and tourism. Help us grow it!

Categories: Blog eMarketing Social Media Social Media Marketing Twitter Web 2.0 | No Comments »