LISTENING TOOLS, CONVERSATIONS AND MICRO-BLOGGING: Tools to help you listen to what’s happening around the world in your niche along with help you manage searches and other platforms and also networking your SM platforms updating several at once.
Wired Magazine has moved to cutting edge technology with flashy publishing by integrating it’s magazine with the interactive iPad.
Digital Magazines
Adobe now has a digital publishing platform that will allow ANY magazine publisher to have this snazzy, flashy interactive application. They have introduced “a rich, immersive digital magazine experience available on the iPad, and created in collaboration with Adobe using Creative Suite 5 and new Adobe Digital Publishing technologies.” (courtesy of Adobe TV)
PCWorld states the following in their blog – “Adobe’s work with Wired has resulted in a digital magazine format that creates an immersive experience, allowing a publication’s unique content, look and feel, and advertising to stand out in the digital realm,” said David Burkett, Adobe’s vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions. “We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms.“
Readers can flip through articles with the flick of a finger, scroll through a timeline view of stories, rotate and zoom in on images, and more. For any publisher whose content involves a lot of imagery — and who wants to appeal to advertisers — these kinds of features are great eye candy taking magazines and newspapers to a completely different level. Imagine your magazine or newpaper coming to life with articles full of live content – reader’s can be reading along following your hot news right off the press with a video or slideshow inserted. The object is to give readers the design fidelity of a print magazine and the dynamic interactivity of digital media, Adobe says. Realtime magazine with realtime content can it get any better than that? Yes it does…
Consumer Interaction At Your Fingertips
According to PCWorld – What the viewer technology does for editorial content also applies to advertising. Looking at the Wired project, advertisers used the program’s interactive features to deliver more innovative ad campaigns. Creating a more personal look and feel (consumer control), it encourages readers to interact with the products and the content. While giving the consumer this control to interact at their own interest, it also maintains the magazine experience. This new digital magazine medium can give publishers the opportunity to expand advertising, reach readers in new ways, increase circulation, and deliver incremental digital revenue. Florida Today brings up the fact that companies are paying newspapers AND magazines up to five times as much to place ads in their iPad apps. Lou Cona executive vice president of Conde Nast Media Group states ” I think it will redefine publishing and also redefine how advertisers connect with our audience.
With these changes continuing to evolve, advertisers and publishers are on the watch for consumer interest and demand. Are you digitally prepared?
Internet Marketing…That’s the BIG buzz word lately. You want to optimize? You want to create a niche market? Are you branded? Have you targeted your audience? All these questions…and your head is spinning…
Where do I start? How do I know what is effective? Who knows how to get there most effectively?
Taking the First Step
Step 1: Research what people are interested in.
Before you develop your product, the best place to start is research…finding out exactly what people are interested in and want. With the available technology, you have unlimited resources to create and market your product to a global community.
Ok..so you’ve researched, you have your information, you have a targeted audience…so where do you go from here?
Develop a great web site.
Step 2: Develop your image online
Question: What is a great web site?…what specifics do you need to know to set you apart?
Let’s start with a great web site. A great web site targets your audience, it’s designed to sell your product, it specifically draws the visitor in to become your customer. When you write your site, write specifically towards one person, identifying with that visitor’s need. Whether it’s a solution, or how-to, or a help guide, write explaining why your product is their solution and explain how it can help them by solving their problems. Great web sites are also SEO friendly…like WordPress sites. These are equipped withtitle tags that can be easily customized for optimum rankings and branding purposes. These along with permalink structure and header strategies are what can make you highly visible in search engine rankings.
Set Yourself Apart
Step 3: Set yourself apart from others.
Question: How can you be set apart from all the others?
That is one of the top questions being asked by businesses. Online businesses are growing by leaps and bounds. To set yourself apart, you need to stay on top of current marketing strategies. Current marketing strategies are focused online making yourself available to the consumer-client 24/7. This creates an attraction along with maintaining your consumer/client relationship as you provide helpful information available at all time. With today’s mobile society (via internet mobile devices) that’s becoming a number 1 priority!
Use Social Media and Relationship Management.
Step 4: Use Social Media Marketing and Relationship Management.
Question: How can we use Social Media Marketing and Relationship Management?
SMM – Social Media Marketing which includes Search Engine Optimization and Relationship Management. It is a know fact that consumers feel a stronger connection and feel better served when they are able to interact with companies.
Interactive Marketing – According to Forrester Research, Interactive Marketing is on the rise…it invites more efficient interactive tools: via search marketing, Display advertising, Email marketing, Social Media and (the new kid on the block) Mobile marketing. It also includes: consumer participation with “value-added benefit”, Service, Focus on meaning and making a positive impact.
Marketing…Internet Marketing, Relationship Marketing, SMM, Interactive Marketing… it all leads to this:
“the process of attracting, maintaining, and enhancing relationships with key individuals over time.”
“Relationship marketing is one of the most time-consuming, but most effective strategies for marketing Extension programs. Relationship marketing is a process, not a one-time event; clientele must understand that you are committed long-term and that they can depend on you to provide education.
To be effective, you must establish a relationship with the audience you are targeting by making a connection with them over time. In order to build a relationship, as with any other relationship in life, Extension needs to be constantly in touch with its audiences. By making a connection with diverse audiences, Extension can build strong community networks that promote the programs we market beyond the limited scope of small workshops and community meetings.“
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the future of marketing and advertising in REALTIME.
SMM (Social media marketing) predicted to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums…Social Media Marketing Management integrated with your traditional marketing starts to develop your digital “word-of-mouth” brand awareness (Fans/followers spread your message). Informs in realtime, with relevant up-to-date information. This creates realtime web presence when partnered with Social Media Marketing.
Social Media 101 - Realtime SM Training – basic training course helping employees understand the hows, whys and where to engage in socialmedia…Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Social Media Train-the-Trainer 201 – course introduces more complete tools and helpful tips to help ‘Make Conversations’, ‘How to Listen’, authorized to train fellow employee’s along with strategy building from the ground up…how to design your social media campaigns, action plans and organizing your time effectively in SM.
Recapping what Social Media is and what SEO does to help businesses.
As Social Media embraces a wide variety of formats, each format provides users with a personal preference appeal means to interact and share information.
Breaking News: Places like Twitter, FaceBook and blogs give ordinary people the ability to share news and events before the news media even gets there. Items like iphones and blackberries, laptops, along with these sites have increased the news sharing so much that online news or traditional news has almost become snail paced.
Information Distribution Center:Depending on the format, Social media allows one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many communications. Information can be distributed in multiple fashion, including Twitter updates, RSS feeds, blogs and podcasts, postings on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning and YouTube.
Building online communities around people, events and brands: Using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace along with blogs, enables people to gather and participate with like-minded people.
Consumer input: Enables user contribution serving as information filters by content sharing and ratings, using the strength of comments and submissions on Twitter, blogs and video sites, also known as wisdom of the crowds.
Social Media has forever changed the traditional content marketplace making it readily available in a large variety of formats. This way the individual or business can mold it into whatever their needs are, making this a very appealing change where companies are in charge of their own personalized media content.
So how does this tie in with SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization brings you to higher rankings in your Search engines like Google, Yahoo, ect. As more and more businesses are launching web sites, blogs and venturing in the online arena, page rankings have become increasingly important. How to get higher page rankings? Have a clear and precise strategy using SEO and Social Media. Why do I need both? Because you can’t succeed at one without the other.
If you venture the SEO path, great…so now your optimized and everything is in place. So how do people find out about you? Answer: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, these are just a few examples of important avenues to use in Social Media. One Tweet on Twitter can drive up your traffic. As YouTube and Facebook have become daily routine for most people, an informational video clip of 2 min or less can broaden your traffic, along with increasing your page rankings. So can a Facebook page or blog, inviting discussions, comments, and reviews/share your story places. People are looking for quality, caring and real places.
I also really like how Lee Odden states in his blog-”if you’re going to create it, why not optimize it?” His Social Media Readiness: 6 Questions is also a great information siteand a must read.
Are your Social Media Strategies compounding results?
