Just How Influential Are You, Anyway?

Perhaps for those who use Facebook and Twitter only to keep in touch with friends and family, measuring online influence may not be a huge consideration.  For companies that use social media and for the growing ranks of job seekers who have incorporated online networking into their job search strategies, however, knowing the size of their engaged audience (the number of friends and followers who actively listen and react to their messages) and the likelihood that their messages will generate actions such as comments, “likes” and retweets can be highly valuable information.  Imagine how useful it would be to know, for example, just how many people actually saw that tweet you sent to your 100 Twitter followers about your job search. 

Klout.com and PeerIndex.net are both influence measurement tools that track your own activities and the activities and profiles of your friends, followers and connections across, among other things, Twitter and Facebook accounts and blog feeds, and then carry out calculations to provide you with an influence score.  In the case of PeerIndex, the tool also takes into account the subjects that you talk about most often and includes graphical representations of its findings.         

Both Klout and PeerIndex are free to join, so why not find out just how much online influence you really have and, better still, make your online presence more productive?

Make sure your employees know your company

If you’re a manager, there’s one thing you’ll want to be sure that your employees are armed with—and that’s knowledge about the company and the products or services you sell. A fatal flaw for many companies and managers is that they assume that employees already have this knowledge, but the truth is that lots of times they don’t. So take it upon yourself to meet individually and go over some of the basics with those you feel it is necessary for—new employees, underachieving workers, etc. Make sure you do this tactfully. There is a natural way to deliver this information through conversation without making people feel they are being singled out in some way. Make sure that employees understand the overall goals of the company and what they do fits in the big picture. Sometimes employees just don’t get this for one reason or another, and it’s your job to make sure that they know what they need to do—a good job for you and the company.

"Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome

"Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach his goals."

Social Media Meets Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is changing the way people interact in their social media networks. More and more mobile users are able to access their social network right from their cell phone and business marketers are looking for any way possible to combine these two powerhouse technologies that are turning the business world on its ear. Are you worried that you missed the boat? Don’t be – yet.

From 2009 to present day, Facebook and Twitter – social media’s little darlings – have seen massive increases in mobile traffic (347% for Twitter and 112% for Facebook). Furthermore, 91% of mobile web users socialize online. And one more statistic to add while we’re at it – by 2013, mobile usage will SURPASS PC usage. It’s time to bring your social networking to the 21^st century. Facebook is ready to introduce Facebook Zero – a text-only version of their popular social platform – dedicated to its mobile users.

Consumer s have already begun to embrace the whole mobile web revolution and it’s time that businesses add this powerful resource to their overall marketing plan before they’re left behind.

How Video Marketing Works

In order to be a successful video marketer you need to know the basic principles of video marketing, and how it works.

They can be summarized in three important steps:

1.  Make a Video:
Before you can distribute a video, you need to have one.  Don’t worry, this really is not that hard to accomplish!  This website will show you how to make a video using software you already have.  You can even make a video without  a video camera or even a microphone.

2.  Submit Your Video to Multiple Video Websites:
You can make a video for YouTube or any number of other video sharing sites. This site will show you the best places to submit your videos for maximum exposure.  We will also cover how to optimize your video submissions, and automate this process if you wish.

3.  Receive Backlinks and Traffic as Your Video is Distributed Around the Net:

This last step is automatic.  Once you have your videos distributed, just sit back and reap the benefits.

Before you start cranking out videos, you need to consider what goes into a great video.

The main goal is to make sure that people find your video to be “worth watching”. Our second goal is to ensure that after they view the video, they will want to learn more about the topic and will click the link to your website (and hopefully buy something!)

The videos that you want to go viral you will need to spend more time on. The videos that you are using purely for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes don’t have to be award winning.

Video Marketing for Business

Video marketing for business is one of the quickest growing kind of marketing of all time.  There are number of online marketers who take advantage of video marketing promotion.  The sort of targeted traffic you can generate by executing proper video marketing promotion can be extremely huge

Online video marketing for business has made a significant surge.  However, if you watched online video several years ago, you'd have probably thought that it would never have made the leap to the business world.  Much of it was kids performing tricks on skateboards and funny pet tricks.

Online video marketing for business has quickly become the "must have" advertising, marketing and communications tool for businesses in NJ and NYC of all kinds.  No other marketing medium connects with busy business people as effectively as online video marketing.  Online video is unique in its ability to attract, captivate and engage customers, thus increasing lead conversions of casual browsers into paying customers…in some cases increasing conversions by 52%!

There are so many benefits of Video marketing for business that you’d better start right now with it. All you need to do is follow the right steps to maximize this marketing strategy. For very low costs you can get really high profits as you can get to more prospects that can turn into your clients or associates.

One of the major benefits of Video marketing for business is that you get a great exposure for free. You can have as many videos as you want in all the video platforms on the net. When done correctly, this is a great advantage as there are literally billions of views every day. This means you will have hundreds or thousands potential prospects for free.

Connecting With Video

Think for a moment about all the websites that you visit when you’re on the web. Do the majority of them have some sort of video incorporated into their website? I bet they do! There are constantly new ways to incorporate video into your website. If you’re not using video yet in some way, maybe it’s time to jump on the bandwagon because it is surely not going away.

Interviews

One of the easiest ways that you can produce content on the web is to conduct an interview. Now who you conduct the interview with is entirely up to you, maybe it’s your favorite blogger, an expert you know personally within an industry, or maybe you can even get a best-selling author to do an interview with you for your website. To me the best way to conduct these interviews is through video, possibly using Skype or some other video type of platform. The benefit of doing a video interview is it takes less time and you can have a casual conversation with other individuals and pump out some really great content for your website viewers, versus the text format interviews which can take a long time if there are tons of questions. Plus with video you really get a sense of the personality and passion the person you’re interviewing has which helps to create a real connection with your viewers.

Testimonials

Why not spice up your testimonials by having those who provide them to you do a video instead of submitting text? Again, it creates more of a connection for the viewers since they can actually see the person and see how much they have benefited from using the product or service you’re offering. One company that is really doing this well is bigcommerce.com. They have a handful of testimonials submitted by satisfied customers of their product and I found them to be really interesting to watch. They were short and to the point of why the product works for them. So if you have some customers who are not shy about video why not go this route?

Video tutorials

Now this is somewhat similar to the how-to videos, but video tutorials are more for explaining and demonstrating the product that you are offering. Video tutorials are a huge asset to have in the help center for your customers. Speaking from experience as being a customer, I always try to solve the problem myself and if I run into a problem or have a question the first thing I do is go to the company’s website in search of the help center. Within that help center the one thing that I hope to find the most is a video tutorial series showing me how to effectively use the product. In the end it saves me the hassle of having to call you for help or e-mail you and it saves you, the product provider, the time of having to help me solve the problem; plus answer the same question or problem for others.