It is no secret that if you want to increase your website statistics and increase your brand’s revenue, you are going to have to implement some sort of social media campaign into your marketing mix. Instead of plugging a brand with a press release or an advertisement, Twitter and Facebook are becoming the most relevant forces in a brand’s life cycle. While most of the people on these services can be labeled as followers, a very select few have a certain je nai sais qua and are able to promote beyond belief. Here are 5 types of social media users who can generate buzz for brands:

The One With the Hollywood Credentials

All of the recent celebrity social media news has surrounded Alec Baldwin and his recent “run-in” with an American Airlines flight attendant. Baldwin refused to quit playing the popular game “Words With Friends” and caused a scene when he got kicked off the plane. According to The Washington Post, Baldwin’s tirade caused #letalecplay to trend worldwide and boosted the number of people playing the game. Baldwin’s scene was such an effective form of social media marketing that he will even get cross promotion for his television show 30 Rock out of the ordeal.

The One With the Industry Authority

From digital marketing to information technology, the biggest players in the game are going to have the most followers on Twitter and the most subscribers on Facebook. These are the types of people we turn to when we need a highly technical question answered. By Tweeting them, we are participating in a much more personal and social form of communication than a general Yahoo! Questions conversation. If you’re business’ website is mentioned by an authority, expect traffic to go through the roof.

The One With the Weird Taste in Music

The pop princess, pretentious indie kid, or heavy metal slacker are all cultural memes that most of us knows very little about. They dig deep into their respective underground worlds and come back out with music to share with us. We may not like to admit it, but most of us follow a couple of these people on Spotify in order to further satiate our ever growing and increasingly eclectic tastes in digital music. This is great for touring musicians who need to get their name out there.  They can freely distribute their music which can then be shared on Spotify and seen on Facebook.

The One With the Local Weatherman

While the national news media has a far reach, there is no more trusted authority than our local media personalities. National media can advertise large products and brands, but the smaller, more local personalities are making sales and generating publicity for small local treasures. Everything from restaurants to special events can benefit from social media posts from the local media.

The One With All of the Followers

By sheer coincidence and luck, some people are able to generate a staggering number of followers. While you may not know how they got so many people to listen to them, the A/B testing they can provide for a brand is phenomenal. Those who want products endorsed should latch on quickly because these types of people usually amount to a flash-in-the pan.

While your traditional media mix is still important, having the proper social media influence can propel your brand to new heights. Figure out the audience you want to reach and try to do some outreach with the types of people they follow. If all works out, you too can have massive social media influence.

About the author
Guest post by Nick Jameson. He is a freelance writer specializing in business and marketing

Guest post by Nick Deyong

In today’s world, everything happens at breakneck speed and, to offer a clumsy version of an often-used expression, “we’re too busy gazing off in to the distance to notice what’s right in front of us”. Or something to that effect.

The same can be said when considering the practice of marketing; amidst all the promotion to the wider world it is easy to overlook a key stakeholder group – internal colleagues and suppliers. A curious occurrence, when it is clear that without employees operations would grind to a halt.

Not just that, but without enthusiastic staff who are fully behind the task at hand, know exactly what their role is and how important they are to the business, all the clever marketing in the world would ultimately prove futile. You see, employees are a company’s greatest ambassadors – treat them well and they will pass on this positivity to future customers and staff in a way that is wholly more honest and authentic than any advertising campaign.

Then there’s other highly desirable by-products of a happy and focused workforce – better recruitment and retention, greater productivity, increased profits. All these are a CEO’s dream and can easily be achieved through moulding the manpower’s mindset.

So, how can an organisation instil such an attitude in its workforce? Firstly, there’s education – ensure that every employee knows what the business’s objectives are and how they can help to achieve them. Too often, staff simply clock-in, do their bit (and nothing more) and clock-out without ever having an idea of the bigger picture. Staff working in silos without consideration of what is happening around them or beyond their office door is potentially very harmful to a company as it breeds inefficiency, selfishness and a lack of co-operation amongst colleagues.

Secondly, there are incentives. If a rallying call to arms doesn’t motivate, then maybe a chance to win a luxury cruise will? Material, yes, but also highly effective as many a company will testify. But it shouldn’t just be all about sales – if someone’s contributed towards some form of success, whatever it may be, then even something as small as a gift voucher through the post can spur an employee on for months to come.

On a grander scale, motivation and incentive programmes can inspire staff; whether through once-in-a-lifetime experiences for teams or individual reward packages for high achievers. Even with such beneficial enterprises, however, there are pitfalls to look out for, namely, that staff forgets why the incentive is there in the first place – to achieve within their role. Instead, employees can become so pre-occupied with ‘winning’ the next prize that it’s to the detriment of other colleagues and morale begins to suffer – thus having the reverse effect of what was initially intended.

About the author
Nick Deyong is the managing director of NDL Group, a prize promotion agency that delivers incentive and motivation schemes for customers and employees, as well as events, partnerships and digital services. Nick set up NDL Group in 1997 with the goal of creating a great place to work that provides solutions to clients based on expert delivery and service.

Guest post by Susan Daniels

When most people think of blogging, they don’t conjure up images of brand blogging. However, even Coca-cola has a blog to further empower its brand. Brand blogging helps your business out in two ways: it gives your customers a sense of community and it allows you to gain greater online visibility.

But starting a brand blog doesn’t simply mean writing an article every couple of days or so. To make your brand’s blog successful you need to incorporate the following into your every day posting:

Media

A brand’s blog should never be text only. Images and videos including the brand should be integrated throughout the blog to make it more appealing to readers, and you don’t need to hire a creative agency to create these for you. You can easily take and create them yourself; however, if you aren’t competent with your video editing, hiring a professional may be beneficial. Including images and videos also give you a greater chance of a post going viral which can greatly increase your PageRank – and thus, your overall online visibility.

Relevancy

One of the most important aspects of blogging is content relevancy. If a soda product is your brand, then you don’t want to be writing about dog food. Instead you want to be writing about anything and everything that pertains to your brand – the people behind the brand, different flavors being released, projects you may be involved in, and any other interesting tidbits.

Hype

When you have a blog that is focusing on a certain brand, you want to make sure that you are able to create hype through your posts. If you are improving a brand or making changes to products and services, you want to give your brand loyalists little insights into doing so. Not only will this get them excited and coming back for more, but this will also keep them from panicking when an updated product or service is released that may be slightly different from the old ones.

Creating an image of a company is hard, and trying to get as high as you can in the search engines is no easy feat. However, blogging can greatly help you attain new customers, engage the old, and manage your online reputation – all of which are needed if you wish to remain successful.

About the author
Susan Daniels is a freelancer writer that specializes in business and technology.

When trying to reach a global market, many companies (with enough relevant examples in the IT&C industry) rely on strategic and local partners and resellers to place and sell their products and services. What they sometimes tend to overlook is that promoting the product or service is as important and can become a shared task. While initially new partners might need guidance to understand the overall strategy, your product’s top selling benefits and the type of customers you are targeting, over time then can turn into strong regional allies.

Think of a big release of a new product or service. You might draft the communication plan, have the new literature, press and blogger pitches, press release and special offers ready and then share them in due time with your partner network. They might, in turn, reach out to their customer base, press contacts and enthusiastic evangelists, boosting your promotion effort.

Of course, some will be more savvy when it comes to PR and Marketing, others might need some ongoing guidance. You could suggest how they can reach out to media outlets, how they can identify where the potential customers who need to be informed about the product or service are. If they need convincing, you need to focus on their benefits: properly communicating with customers, audiences, the press means more business coming their way. That does also mean a share of the income goes to you, but the main beneficiaries are the partners.

When considering a successful partnership, businesses need to stop thinking in terms of sales alone. Yes, how much a partner makes by selling your product is important. But can you also collaborate on increasing brand awareness, spreading the word about your product and getting more revenue for yourself and the partner in question? Can you collaborate on getting feedback from their customers to help improve your products and services and subsequently sell more, maybe even for a better price?

How often do you come across people hired to promote a company or their products? I’m referring to those spreading coupons, those showcasing products at stands placed in malls, at those looking nice and interesting at trade events and promoting contests for visitors. How many times were they either too pushy or completely unable to help you?

The person you pay to spread out flyers of all kinds, to present your products or just look hot near a car you’re launching, is a company representative in the eyes of your customer. Customers generally don’t care it’s a temporary gig for them, that you had no time to train them or that maybe they’re just having a bad day. Potential buyers either want answers fast or not to be bothered by pushy people.

First of all, when you choose people to represent you, make sure they fit the profile of your potential customers. Don’t send a funky 16-year-old that knows nothing of business notebooks to present a high tech product that addresses, you guessed it, business customers. I for one need to know details like how much time I have to work when on battery, processor details, the graphic card and technology behind the screen and how much the product costs when I need to buy it. I also need contact details form a sales person. If the kid is fun but clueless and presenting a Lenovo notebook, I’ll just walk away with valuable time wasted.

On the other hand, if you’re targeting teenagers and young people that love having fun and smiling a lot, send out a fun person that likes chatting with them, giving them a bunch of cool details and has a genuine smile. Don’t send out an older company rep that has forgotten how it’s like to engage kids and is too technical for them.

After selecting who to use, make sure you train them, even if it’s for 15 minutes. Tell them not to be pushy, tell them to smile and try not to look like fate is punishing them in every second of their lives, tell them a bit about your company and the product or service they’re advertising. It would also be great to supervise them and make sure you are there to help when they are faced with a situation they were not told about and to give them on-the-fly advice about how to approach customers.

If you tend to forget it, write this on a piece of paper and post it somewhere visible – the people you employ represent your company in the eyes of your target audience. Customers identify them with your brand, your products, services and company value. If they disappoint, potential buyers won’t be disappointed by a random individual, they will be disappointed by your company!

The Expendables, a movie long awaited by many fans of the action genre and the action stars it features, has just hit the theaters and topped this weekend box office, cashing 36 million US dollars this weekend. For a film that got harsh reviews from everyone, the numbers tell a different story: people actually wanted to see it. And post-movie watching comments show they thoroughly enjoy it.

Why is the movie such a smashing success? The story has nothing really special and is not very thick either. The plot description on IMDb says it all: “A team of mercenaries head to South America on a mission to overthrow a dictator.” It’s an 80 million dollars movie in which all funds were spent on getting some once god-like action stars, some that are still on the wave of success and to orchestrate explosions, fights and lots of gun shooting.

Let’s take a look at the cast: Sylvester Stalone, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts. Plus some backing vocals from Arnold Schwazenegger and Bruce Willis. This movie clearly targeted a certain audience: keen on action movies, some of them with a history of watching them. Take it from someone who grew up with Chinese kung-fu movies, Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Segal, Stalone as the impressive Rambo, Dolph Lundgren in Universal Soldier and Eric Roberts as a Mafia bad boy, I just can’t wait to see the movie and I couldn’t care less about the storyline.

A couple of comments left for an article asking people what they thought of the movie clearly explain the phenomenon and, if possible, what is missing from “The Expendables”.

orgasmic … i want a sequel with van damme and wesley snipes together …would be epic.

They are right the story is straight out of an Episode of The A Team.
So what !!
If you want a deep and meaningful story then this is the wrong film for you.
If you want Action, Explosions ,Car chases with a ton of one liners (good and bad) and one of the coolest scenes i’ve seen in a long time in a movie, then this is for you.
Its a hark back to the movies i grew up watching as a kid With Stallone , Arnie , Seagal and the others, Not to much on story but always fun to watch.
Well done Stallone Bring on Expendables 2

The truth is, although there’s talk of a sequel from the fans, everyone growing up seeing such movies felt this was good-bye. Sly, Arnie, Dolph and Bruce making a final stand in the action movie arena and leaving us with an afterthought of how great action films used to be and how wonderful the actors were. Everyone who has ever enjoyed one action movie in the past will go see this one.

As far as I can tell, from a marketing and PR perspective, the team of “The Expendables” played a magnificent part and they will cover all expensive to then make some nice profit off this project. We are talking US box office here! just wait until this movie hits cinemas across the globe to see how much money they’ll make! Plus there will be the DVD, probably Blu-Ray and some memorabilia plus branded T-Shirts. I am sure I speak for many saying I want to be able to make this statement soon enough: “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt”.

Blogsessive.com has just published a guest post written by yours truly on how to make your blog and twitter account work better at promoting each other. And the solution is simple: notice what they have in common, notice the differences, and if it’s a team you want, then create one!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and your own tips on how to create a dream team out of your blog and Twitter feed, so head over to Blogsessive to read the article and share your insight

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Our weekly roundup has been MIA for quite a while now. But we’re back with 5 great articles I stumbled across last week. I’ll make it short and sweet and as always invite you to add to the list!

A great way to learn is to find out what you should never ever do, no matter who does it and thinks it’s cool. Darren Rowse of Problogger came up with a top of the worlds’ 10 worst strategies to promote your blog.

When you send an invitation to a party, people expect to show up and join the fun. Not to first submit a form and then get a second approval to attend the party. Karen Swim perfectly explained how this situation applies to social media in general and Twitter in particular.

There are some words or phrases that we hear on a daily (or should I say hourly?) basis. We’re so used to them, that we sometime believe just hearing them is enough to know what they mean. Open source is one of those phrases. Before starting to use it and other related terms, read this list of definitions published by Seth Godin.

Readers’ attention is hard to get and even harder to mentain. We are in a rush, a little bored and sometimes lazy. So grab words, as explained by Alex Cristache of Blogsessive, are always a great way to make sure we read a piece you’ve wrote.

Bloggers are a growing force when it comes to PR and Marketing. That is why a lot of companies and agencies what them to cover their stories. But bad pitches are common, so here’s another article on how to pitch bloggers from the VallyPRBlog.

Hope you like this week’s articles! Till next week, feel free to share your own findings

When you think of marketing a product or a service, you have to consider what kind of issues it will help your customer with. But just telling them what problems you’re solving might not be very convincing. You need to also show how it all works. So what can you do: talk to your current customers and start writing a few case studies. Then move along to publishing a few testimonials on your site.

But when you’re new, there aren’t hordes of customers to show off. And even when there are, they might not be cool enough to draw that much attention. So what can you do then? Well, it’s easy: scan the papers, magazines, portals and blogs for news on a problem you could solve popping up in the life of someone important. A star, a state department, some sort of royalty, there are dozens of possibilities.

Use the case to educate your potential customers. Try an article on your site, a blog post or a press release. What ever you choose, make sure you don’t let the effects of your cool idea slip through your fingers because of poor or completely lacking promotion. Your famous partner’s name will help, but it might not magically do the trick for you.

And here’s a great example: security firm generates some buzz around its name by telling people how to protect their privacy on Facebook. Nothing extraordinary, except they used the case of Bono and some teenagers partying and then spreading photos on Facebook as an example. Instant popularity! The Register, which usually picks up extremely relevant security news, published it.

Of course, if your customers don’t back up the problem solving story afterwards, you won’t close too many deals. But if you can jumpstart your business and hold your promise to help out with a set of issues, you’ll later support your fictional stories with real case studies. But more importantly, you’ll be able to rely on your happy customers, and we all know how important their recommendation is to getting new business.