Mediaboss Marketing

As influencer marketing is rapidly becoming a key channel for brands across the social media spectrum, influencer marketer #Hashoff announced today a new partnership with social marketer Kinetic Social to include direct access to #Hashoffs network of more than 150,000 influencers across platforms.

The collaboration means that #Hashoff will provide the technology and expertise needed to enable Kinetic Social to identify and activate the audiences that matter most to their clients.

#Hashoff released a report last month addressing the trend of relying on micro-influencers to share brand messages.

Nearly one-third of influencers have grown their audience by 20-50 percent in the past year, their report suggests, while one-fourth have grown their audience by 50-100 percent, and 17 percent have more than doubled their audiences.

"Our mission is to provide brands solutions to engage audiences and influencer marketing is a vital piece of the puzzle," said Jeff Thompson, senior vice president Platform Partnerships at Kinetic Social. "Influencers are providing a new way to combine the authenticity of a brand ambassador with the targeted focus of a digital campaign. Our partnership with #Hashoff is another step toward ensuring our clients can engage us to design and execute all of their social marketing campaigns."

Partnering with an industry leader like Kinetic in a complex landscape was a natural fit, bringing together two companies committed to pushing the envelope of what's possible on social," said Joel Wright, president and co-founder of #Hashoff.

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Influencer site #Hashoff partners with Kinetic Social as influencer ... - The Drum

Recently, Manta surveyed small businesses about their participation in social media. Among the more interesting findings is that 51% of those surveyed don't have a Facebook page for their business. This, despite research from the Pew Research Center which finds that more than two-thirds (68%) of US adults have a Facebook page.

Why are SMBs holding off on Facebook?

"The top reason many small business owners don't have a Facebook business page is because they don't think they need one. However, from our experience, a Facebook page is an invaluable asset for small businesses. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of all U.S. adults are Facebook users, which makes it a great place to reach more customers, especially considering the bulk of consumers do truly seek out local businesses online," said John Swanciger, CEO, Manta.

Manta's research also found that, of those SMBs with a Facebook page, most believe the time invested in Facebook pays off for their business. The top reasons for continuing to build a Facebook presence for these SMB owners is to increase their brand awareness, and find new customers. Swanciger agrees with this.

"Let's take a plumber for example," said Swanciger. "A plumber may think that because they don't have a storefront, they don't need a business page on Facebook. However, as more consumers turn to their smartphones to find and research local businesses, Facebook has become the new yellow pages and word-of-mouth rolled into one. And those are vital marketing tactics for local service providers like a plumber."

Tags: facebook marketing, Manta, SMB trends, social marketing

Originally posted here:
Expert: Why Facebook business pages are important for SMBs - BizReport

Social Marketing: How To Use Social Media Platforms To Reach Customers

Are you ready to expand your audience and customer base? Want to learn how to leverage social media to benefit your small business? If youre new to social media, at least in the business sense, and have yet to harness its marketing powers, you wont believe how easy it is to dive right into its sea of potential customers. Heres a look at how to get started with four of todays most powerful social media platforms and how to make them work for you.

Facebook With over1.94 billion usersworldwide, Facebook is the ultimate medium for connecting your business with people in your locale and all around the globe. Considering the wealth of Facebook advertising and exposure options, its an ideal starting point for any business. Facebook can be used in the traditional sense to share videos, photos, updates, and more to foster a growing sense of community around your business or product. However, you can also set up a Facebook ads account and laser target customers for pennies on the dollar.Whichever route you take, if you opt for one over the other and not both, Facebook is a goldmine definitely worth exploring.

Twitter Twitter allows you to post short text comments and updates, photos, videos, polls, links, and more to share and interact with others. Although its not as widely used as Facebook, it ranks among the top 10 websites in the U.S. in terms of popularity and is used by over 300 million people worldwide. If you have fun or interesting content to share, Twitter can help you quickly spread the word. Hashtags can be used to help boost posts, and if something you post is retweeted by someone with a large following, your content and your business can potentially go viral. The result will be a flood of new interest and sales.

That being said, you dont simply want to share your own media and links all the time. Instead, you should share plenty of relevant, interesting content from around the Web and other Twitter users as well. The key is finding the right balance.

Pinterest Pinterest allows you to pin content to digital bulletin boards for display. The pins can also be organized into categories for easier viewing. For example, someone may have a holiday board featuring pins of different craft Christmas decorations or a food board with pins of recipes and so on. Rich Pins can also be used to share special information like location maps, event details, and product descriptions. Pinterest is highly visual. In fact, each post can only be a video or an image. While you dont have to spend all day pinning on Pinterest, making sure your boards remain organized and easy to find can be a little time-consuming.

Pinterest is also more of a niche network and geared towards a female audience. In fact, some of the platforms most popular categories include beauty, fashion, photography, exercise, food, and DIY projects. Nonetheless, theres a bevy of ways to use this innovative platform and benefit from its highly active user base.

Instagram Instagram is another highly visual social media platform based specifically on image and video posts. Owned by Facebook, Instagram has been undergoing a popularity explosion in recent years and now has over 600 million active users who post primarily about travel, art, fashion, food, and similar subjects. Unlike the other social media platforms, Instagram is by and large entirely mobile. While its not quite suitable for all niches, if you want to harness the power of Instagram to boost your business, its important to post only the highest quality photos and videos. Like Twitter, hashtags can be used smartly to help ensure your Instagram success.

For some business, marketing through a primarily visual platform isnt always intuitive. Getting creative with your marketing and making use of these platforms, however, can greatly expand your customer base. Some companies, like ACN Inc, have managed to build successful marketing campaigns on these platforms, and you can too.

Bottom Line As a business owner, chances are you have limited resources and a lot to accomplish.Fortunately, social media marketing is incredibly low-cost and allows you to directly connect with current and prospective customers. However, what you save in dollars youll pay for with your time, so you need to be smart with your tactics and efficient with your resources. By doing so, youll be building your brand and pulling in social media profits in no time at all!

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Social Marketing: How To Use Social Media Platforms To Reach Customers - HostReview.com (press release) (blog)

As with all relationships, social media relationships must be earned PHOTO: John Loo

When Facebook and Twitter arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s, people soon started using them to share opinions, complaints and ideas sometimes aimed at the companies they did business with.

Brands have been playing catch up ever since.

Some best practices have emerged in the years since to ensure marketers make the most of these direct lines to potential customers, while at the same time listening and supporting their customers.

The first of this four-part series covered the first steps to social media marketing success: listen and plan. In this, we'll dive into the foundational elements of relationship building and trust.

A true relationship has to be earned. It's about respect and trust. And a balanced relationship is reciprocal. You do something for somebody else, and they do something for you. You exchange ideas. You use each other as a sounding board. For a relationship to last, it has to be a two-way street.

Followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook are not equivalent to relationships. Just as in the real world, a true relationship on social media has to go deeper than just a surface connection. Having 5,000 followers or 10,000 friends is meaningless if you don't truly connect.

Not convinced? Go ask one of your Twitter followers for an opinion on that white paper you're writing. If nothing happens, you've got your answer.

One of the keys to nurturing real relationships on social media can be found in the manner of your engagement. People want to be valued. And once they feel you value them, they will most likely feel a connection with you and some degree of loyalty.

They will also expect an ongoing dialogue to reinforce those feelings, so you'd better deliver if you expect the relationship to grow and strengthen over time.

Successful relationships are also about helping to support others. It's not all about you, your company, or your agenda. Social media is a community, and as a member of that community, you should not only contribute to it in various ways, but you also should recognize the contributions of others. For example, promoting other people's accomplishments by "liking" their videos, retweeting their tweets or sharing their latest blog posts will go a long way toward building connections and real relationships.

And don't let those relationships stop at the keyboard. Get to know your social media connections in the real world whenever possible.

The success of virtually every brand relies largely on the bond of trust generated between customer and company. That same bond can obviously be created between individuals as well. But as is the case when building relationships, trust also has to be earned.

To begin with, your social media messaging must be authentic. Whether you're speaking for your organization or yourself, always be you plain old honest you. Pretending to be someone you're not is a shortcut to a credibility gap, and that spells trouble in the trust-building business.

Being the real you and growing the trust factor needs to come with a good dose of personality as well. However, don't exhibit the steamroller mentality: a pushy, get out of the way, I'm on a mission-type attitude. On social media, it's too easy to distance yourself from people like that just by unfollowing or unfriending them. So instead, strive to be known as a thoughtful, considerate, supportive member of the social media community.

Exhibiting an inquisitive nature and a funny bone can keep you in good standing, too. A great sense of humor is always an effective ice breaker and door opener.

In addition, strive to be as transparent as is reasonable. The more open and honest you're willing to be and the more information you're willing to share the more credible you'll appear. And always do what you say you're going to do. Nothing will impact trust in a positive way more than living up to your commitments.

As a marketer, you must realize that responsiveness also plays a major role in building trust. Especially when you're dealing with a complaint or other negative issue, be prepared to address it head-on, and do so quickly.

Check back next week as we continue this series with a look at the impact leadership and community building has on social media marketing success.

Kent Huffman is a fractional/on-demand CMO at DigiMark Partners, which offers strategic and tactical marketing services to CEOs and owners of small and mid-sized businesses. He is a growth-oriented B2B and B2C marketing and branding executive, C-suite advisor, change agent, and published author with expertise in virtually all aspects of the marketing discipline.

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The Rules of Social Marketing Success: Relationships and Trust - CMSWire

The limbic system | Image Credit: Rewire Me

Change is hard for all of us. Including those working for change.

Recent events in the United States and beyond have forced many of us to take a very careful look at our strategies and tactics when it comes to engaging people at scale. This kind of assessment is essential if we want to be effective. In fact, its key for any kind of meaningful innovation. However, are we going as far as we need to, when it comes to our assumptions about what we call engagement and behavior change? I argue the answer is no and that this is one of the most critical areas in which we must get very clear if we are going to be effective in our world.

Organizations (including agencies) tend to rely on well-worn theories of change, often based on implicit assumptions when it comes to how humans behave. I have come to call this the theory of change muddle. This is where various approaches and strategies from social marketing to values-based messaging to behavioral economics and gamification, or the latest storytelling trend blur into a muddle. This muddle is abundantly evident in the language we use: usually a generalized approach based on levers, drivers and the need to mobilize or get people on board.

However, many of these theories have conflicting underlying assumptions about people. These different approaches also carry implicit attitudes about the people we seek to reach, usually revealed by our language. For example, segmentation terminology such as disconnected or hard to reach offer clues to these attitudes about those who are not yet fully on board with our causes.

This is where the urgent need to engage more with psychology comes in, no matter if you are an agency, a consultant or a Fortune 500 company designing an engagement campaign.

Despite the fact that we now know more than we ever have about the nature of the human psyche and how we cope (often badly) with change, anxiety, uncertainty and ambiguity, many of us still base our work on the notion that people are self-aware, transparent and values-driven.

We continue to assume that if we only focus on positive storytelling and aspiration, we will get the scaled need to actually change our world.

This is simply not the case.

The messier reality quickly revealed when we learn how to really listen is that many people are conflicted, contradictory, unconscious and anxious. Many of us are deeply ambivalent about the increasingly urgent news about declining species, the warming climate, what we eat and how we get around. This is not the same as not caring, or holding different values.

Contrary to the overriding fixation in most sustainability-driven enterprises, this is not only about values. This is about how humans construct a life full of competing needs, desires, aspirations and worries, and how easy it is to allow our limbic system to drive the bus.

We know now about how our brains process challenging, difficult and alarming information. Our prefrontal cortex becomes secondary to the limbic system, which is about survival, fear, us/them, polarization, and the inability to process complex data.

The limbic system is currently on overdrive in our country.

A fear-based mode expresses itself with othering; targeting enemies; denial of real threats; and avoiding at all costs any hint of shame, guilt or blame when it comes to our current predicament. In that scenario, it doesnt matter if people value health, economic viability or nature, because values are higher-functioning entities.

This is why a focus on values alone or on aspiration or even on solutions is not sufficient.

Values and problem-solving belong in the prefrontal cortex, where we can reflect, strategize, imagine and yes, clarify our values. However and this is the key part it involves addressing our fear-based, short-term survival-focused neural networks in the limbic system. Meeting the limbic system with a values-based message is akin to being tone-deaf. Would you ask someone who is fearing for their security if they value something? No. You would ask them what they need, now, to feel safer and more secure, before you can engage in the conversation you really wish to have.

If even a fraction of this were to be taken on board, we would immediately be redesigning our research, strategies and tactics differently. We could be inviting new and different people to the table, new kinds of practitioners who understand cultural change, psychosocial dynamics, and how to translate this into brand strategy beyond polling, surveying and focus group experts.

We would pause to rethink the heavy use of social marketing, such as ambassadors or champions, heavy reliance on celebrity endorsements, and coming up with yet another values-based messaging platform. We would be focused on messaging according to empathy for these Three As Anxiety, Ambivalence and Aspiration.

We would be designing our insights and research methods to capture the deeper layers of anxiety, ambivalence and aspiration, by using more conversation-based methods. We would be funding projects that leverage insights already gained from ethnography, marketing, psychosocial research and innovation sectors. We would not be focusing only on what people view or demand or how to mobilize, but on what people are experiencing where the anxieties, ambivalence and aspiration (The Three As) live. To do this requires rethinking our deeply held, even cherished ways of doing things. It means being open to new and emerging practices, and collaborating with new kinds of practitioners from different disciplines. It also means recognizing that we are all in this together that our lessons learned are what are going to help us protect and preserve the vulnerable humans and nonhumans amongst us, who are depending on us right now to show up and be effective.

Perhaps most importantly, if we take this opportunity to truly do a reset, wed encourage each other in our community to compassionately yet ruthlessly examine our assumptions about people, why we behave as we do, and what we bring to these interactions.

We would be as honest as we can with ourselves about our frustrations, sadness, anger and distress over what appears to be retrograde and harmful trends. We would push ourselves to be ruthlessly open to new ways of thinking and doing things. In so doing, we would be supporting each other to be our best, our most creative, and ultimately our most effective at connecting with those who feel overwhelmed, scared and concerned, and looking to us to be partners in a different future.

A version of this appeared originally on Climatesolutions.org.

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The Opportunity of the Reset: How to Go Beyond Social Marketing to Effect Real Cultural Change - Sustainable Brands