The Galveston Daily News (reg required) had an interesting article recently about Island Bicycle Co.was using MySpace to market to its customers locally. Kudos to Kevin at Buzznetworker for finding this story.
I often hear people complain that MySpace traffic is bad traffic as it doesn’t convert, and you cannot use it to effectively market to locally. Well the Island Bicycle Co. debunks both of those myths.
MySpace offers a lot of potential for small businesses according to Carlon Haas, Austin-based Internet marketing expert and president of Brave New Marketing:
Great article by Jeremiah Owyang about social media strategies. What makes Jeremiah worth reading is that he has walked the social media path, as he helped Hitachi develop its social media plan.
In his blog post, Jeremiah outlined his 12 strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program. The top ones I thought were:
Recognize the new influencers: Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.
Track who’s who. Create an index of bloggers and influences in your industry, consider putting on an internal list, an internal feedreader or even on an industry wiki.
Some interesting numbers from HitWise and the Guardian about how we interact with social networks, and the news is surprising. According to Bill Tancer, an analyst with HitWise , only 0.16% of visits to YouTube are by users uploading video for others to watch. And only 0.20% of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos.
These numbers are even less than what in line with what Guardian writer Charles Arthur noted last year, when he suggested that an emerging rule of thumb suggests that for every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
A new environmental friendly social site called Riverwired.com launched recently. The environment and eco-friendly products are generating a lot of positive press these days, which is something that RiverWired founder Catherine Billon is hoping to build on.
“All over America, people have a shared goal of living greener. Our mission is to help by providing a one-stop-shop for our audiences to easily find, showcase and share stories, information, and entertainment having to do with living green.”
RiverWired hopes to earn revenue by selling advertising on its site that targets those concerned about environmental issues.
Internet Retailer reported recently about how apparel designer Roots Canada is successfully driving traffic to its Roots.com web site via niche social networking sites like ThisNext.com and TotallyLoveIt.com as well as the bigger social media sites like MySpace and Facebook.
The Roots marketing plan includes posting apparel related information on social networking sites. Interestingly, James Connell, director of e-commerce, digital marketing and new media at Roots says that “I recommend products from Roots as well as other retailers.”
Interesting article on Internet Retailer recently about how Bloomingdale’s is trying to reach out to a younger audience through social retailing. Shopping is a very social activity, but it is difficulty to have a group shopping activity online.
So Bloomingdale’s came up with an interactive sales floor where not only will shoppers be able to view themselves in outfits, their friends can recommend additional outfits as well as leave comments and suggestions.
If web-based social networking can work wonders as a marketing and branding tool, online social retailing just might do the same for in-store retailing”, says Tom Nicholson, CEO of IconNicholson.“We see this is a way of bringing the power of the web into stores to support customer sales.”
One common misconception about social media marketing is that it is not appropriate for the small business, especially those businesses that are local in nature. Nothing in fact could be farther from the truth. Social media marketing actually offers a lot of opportunities for the small business owner. Social media tactics can break down barriers to entry and offer an ROI that is far better than traditional marketing offers.
Here are five social media marketing tactics that a small business can easily implement.
Interesting take on the SES conference from Rohit and Kate Zimmerman. Now the SES conference had standing room only for many of its sessions, with the new social media track generating a lot of interest.
Since this was a search engine conference, most of the focus of social media was on driving large busts of traffic and generating large numbers of incoming links through link baiting.
Yes these tactics work, but social media optimization is so much more than that. As Rohit wrote:
At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York last week, one of the sessions was titled Wikipedia and SEO.
The most interesting presentation was given by Don Steele from Comedy Central . Comedy Central uses a lot of different tactics to drive traffic to its web site and one of these tactics is Wikipedia!
When Steven Colbert is not satirizing Wikipedia, the Comedy Central team is in full reputation management mode, making sure that their content is being highly reference and referred on Wikipedia.
