DIY Marketing

Creating A Google+ Brand Page

You may have heard some of the buzz about Google+ brand pages and whether they are worth the effort. They became available in November and have generated a certain amount of controversy. There seems to be no doubt, however, that they are already affecting search results, especially for people who include your brand/business in their circle. They also offer one nifty feature that other platforms do not. They offer a hangout--basically a free video conference that could be used, for example, to help your customers as they use a new product.  Here’s a good, straightforward blog post that links to an ebook with more detail on how to set up your G+ business page. I’d like to share what I learned setting up mine.

If you have a business location, you should already have a Google Places local listing. If you haven’t claimed yours, I wrote a post about doing that a year or so ago. If you have already done it but haven’t looked at it for awhile, the option to create a QR code has disappeared; you can still offer coupons, though. Google is rolling out stickers with more functionality, but it’s a city-by-city rollout not yet available here. You’ll want to use your Google Places listing in setting up your page.

You also want to be careful to sign out of your personal Google account before you start to set up a page. If you’re using your business account fine. If you need to, set one up here.

Other issues:
1. The business pages require a real person, with a profile. That person will be the administrator of the page. Look at the Google bar at the top left of the page to be sure you are posting as the +business, not as the +person.
2. You can add additional administrators if you wish.
3. Moving back and forth between being administrator and person on a single page seems impossible. In other words, if I’d like to post part of the time as +person and some of the time for really official stuff as +business, you just can’t do it. You may have run into the same issue on a Facebook brand page.
4. You add your logo when you create the page. The five images across the top are added on your profile page. See this G+ post for instructions: basically the images must be 125 x 125.
5. Most important of all: you can’t add people on a brand page; you have to invite them and only if they choose to add your brand page to their circle will you be able to see them.

Now that you’ve read all this, you’re wondering if you really need a Google+ page. That’s a good question! If you want to bolster your search ranking, you do, but then you have to make the effort to build followers. If you have a Facebook page and are happy with that, it’s possible that you don’t want the extra effort of a G+ page.

As you think about it, you’re welcome to take a look at the page for our Internet marketing textbook and a more detailed post I wrote on my own blog.

Timberland Aces Social Media

Link: http://technorati.com/business/advertising/article/timberland-aces-social/

Article first published as Timberland Aces Social on Technorati.

Timberland’s Sundance Film Festival Night Out events add to their already deep experience in social and mobile. They’ve had a mobile site since at least 2009 and are leaders in social in aspects from their interactive Facebook page for this promotion (see the Photo Contest tab also) to their use of 2D bar codes. Their current series of events has a lot of moving parts and required professional PR support. However, the pieces are clear, and smaller businesses can pick and choose to DIY their own event.

The event came to Boston last week and store manager Sara Keneally was gracious enough to include my social media marketing students in the invitation-only event. They went, they saw, they bought, and they came away with a host of ideas that can be applied by other organizations, large and small. They’ve posted videos; the Boston video gives a good sense of what happened there from DJ to the stylist outfitting attendees in Timberland merchandise to the photographer snapping their pictures. Play the video on my blog.

The next day they sent attendees a thank-you email. It included their picture taken the night before (good system at work here) and encouraged them to go to the promotion’s Facebook page, upload their picture, and register for the Girlfriend Getaway Sweepstakes in which the winner and three friends get to attend the Sundance Film Festival. Entering, of course, requires that applicants Like the Timberland Facebook page. It has over half a million Likes at the moment.

For attendees and non-attendees alike they produced a print publication featuring merchandise and promoting the events and the sweepstakes. Old media, you say? The print document has a Microsoft tag on the final page. When you scan the tag, it takes you to a mobile landing page. The landing page has a video, encourages the viewer to Like the Facebook page, and links through to the Women’s page on the Timberland site, nicely optimized for mobile. Try it yourself and see. The only drawback is that you have to download the Microsoft Tag Reader if you don’t already have it. They give the link in the promo, but it would really be nice to have standardization in the 2D barcodes so we don’t have to have separate apps.

The centerpiece of this promotion is the Girlfriend Getaway Sweepstakes. I count media channels that include website, mobile website, special Facebook page, a partnership with the local-oriented Lucky style magazine, PR of various kinds, the live events, email followup, outreach via print and the web to women who didn’t attend the live event, and I’ve probably missed some. I didn’t see use of Twitter (with identifying hashtag) or Foursquare. I doubt they were worth the effort in this instance, but both represent easy-to-use and free options to support a live event.

Marketers large and small can study this promotion, learn from it, choose the pieces they want to focus on, integrate them, and DIY their own SOLOMO (social local mobile) promotion. The pieces are all there; it’s a matter of creativity and effort, and Timberland excelled at both.

Marketing for Holiday 2011

Advice to retailers on preparing for the holiday selling season has been around since late summer. I’ve been collecting it but was stimulated to write this post by an email from my friends at Unbound Commerce, announcing that there is still time (barely) to get a mobile site for the holiday season.

Important dates are coming soon. According to Media Post, in 2010, the top five days by sales conversion volume include Cyber Monday at 16% [Monday November 28 this year; the deals start promply at 12:01 am]; Black Friday at 23% [Friday November 25 this year]; Tuesday, Nov. 30, 17%; Sunday, No. 28, 17%; and Dec. 6, 17%.

It’s a good idea to review your email marketing from the last holiday season and see what went well and what didn’t. Entrepreneur magazine has good advice about integrating your email, social media, and mobile marketing. If you’re using banner advertising, be sure that’s ready to go. If you’re using Google AdWords, review your results to find areas for improvement.

All the pundits agree that mobile marketingis going to be huge this year; retailers miss out at their peril. Leapfrog gives good advice that makes two points that many of the experts stress:
1. The holiday season is time for selling, making customer acquisition jump out front of retention for a few short weeks.
2. The LOMO (local mobile) part of the equation is due for a break-out this season as more consumers use their smartphones to search for stores and merchandise nearby. That makes it important to be sure your Google Places and Yahoo! Local sites are correct and up-to-date as I explained in an earlier post. It’s also worth claiming your listing on Yelp and Foursquare; making sure they are correct or creating a listing if you are not there. You can offer coupons or deals on any of these sites.
 
Entrepreneur has good mobile marketing advice specifically for the small business; the more you can accomplish by the holiday shopping season, the better! Small Biz Trends has advice for preparing for the holidays—operations as well as marketing.

Happy Holidays!

Monetize Your Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing isn’t a popularity contest. Some marketers and business owners like to brag about the number of their Facebook fans or Twitter followers. But having fans or followers is worth nothing unless you monetize them. For most small businesses that means increasing sales. There are numerous avenues leading to increased sales.

In a study reported earlier this year small business owners were more likely than all others surveyed to say social media increased the exposure of their business. It also lead to new partnerships, qualified leads, and reduction in marketing costs as well as increasing their sales.

To successfully monetize social media efforts requires disciplined attention to the chosen social media platforms, most likely Facebook and/or Twitter. It also requires focusing on the kind of activities that bring customers to a website or a retail store with the intention of buying things.

Consider the case of John Fluevog who sells funky shoes on the web and at retail in Canada and later the US. He told  marketer GingerMelbourne that sales increased 40% in 2009, the year his company begain social media marketing. They encourage reviews on local sites. They have an active Facebook page where they make special offers and publicize sales and where customers love to show off their shoes. They promote these same offers on Twitter, where they also answer customer questions quickly and helpfully. They make it easy to access all their communications channels (except Twitter for some reason) on their Facebook wall page. That’s a good place to tie it all together.

Another example is the Emerson Salon in Seattle. When they bought the salon in 2008 the new co-owners decided the Internet would be central to their business. Two years later 75% of their bookings came from the Internet—their website, Facebook, and Twitter. Their website is a model of social activity and styling advice—another example of how to tie it all together. They’ve build their own community of followers at the same time they’ve become a vital part of the Seattle community. See more about their story and 4 other success stories on Mashable.

Blogger Dave Folkens says that small businesses “can carve out space and connect in an extremely crowded marketplace. When companies participate on the social web in a meaningful way, it helps create a personal connection between customers and the brand.” He offers good advice and more success stories on his blog.

The point is to keep your eyes on the prize—happy repeat customers and newly-acquired ones that generate sales and recommend the business to friends. Thinking about it that way makes it clear that the effort on social media can be time well spent, and that includes the small, local business!

Creating Your Own Barcode

In part 1 of this saga, I advanced my knowledge about using smartphone apps in shopping and promotional settings. What I was really looking for, though, was the answer to the question, “Can I do this myself?” Not that anyone cares that much, except that if I can do it, anyone can!

First, the terminology. The series of lines known as bar codes are featured on all products that move in distribution channels today, and they are essential to maintaining inventory all along the supply chain. However, in spite of the fact that they hold a large amount of data, they became too small for newer applications like mobile shopping and promotion. A new generation was introduced, the 2D or matrix code. I first misinterpreted this as saying that the QR code and the familiar bar code were different animals. Not so, as this list shows. There are a variety of 2D codes and there is no real standardization. Selecting one that can be accessed by the most common readers is key, as I suggested in the previous post. As a commenter suggested, standardization is needed—and I heartily agree.

Note that the Barcode generator page contains a barcode generator that appears to be useful only if you have a numerical barcode already. If you don’t, this post tells you how to get one. If you want “free,” it is not necessarily unique and just for your own use, say in a retail store to maintain inventory. I’m also not convinced that “free” is as easy as this post suggests, although there are low cost solutions available.

I used the Kaywa QR code generator to create the QR code shown in this post, on the sidebar, and at the bottom of the page (same qr image, different sizes for different placements). It is one of the solutions featured by Mashable, which has written extensively about barcodes. See the demo slideshow on their post to get started. I use the text option in order to get a message into the code.

My own experience so far has been twofold:
1. Not all codes work on all scanners. In many cases it appears that the code has to be registered with the reader’s own database to register properly.
2. Changing the size of my code made a  difference in readability. I’m told that the code is  more readable if it’s on a white background—thanks, Charles.

Another piece of personal experience is also puzzling. I have had good luck reading QR codes in print media. Lynkee is my favorite reader, although I’m finding print codes generally easy to read. Reading the codes on paper seems to be easier than reading them on screen; maybe that’s the white border issue.

That said, I’m sorry that Google Places has eliminated the ability to print out a QR code poster from its listings. That was easy, and it worked for me. According to ReadWriteWeb, Google is moving to NFC technology in partnership with MasterCard and Visa, working on an e-wallet, apparently.

You’ll see more QR codes around. Home Depot has just started a promotion—in print and in store—using the Scanbuy solution. It will be worth following, but I’m interested in DIY efforts.

Anyone in the mood to make their own QR code poster for their office or store window?