Now your brand has a bigger chance of getting discovered on the Web thanks to those journalists who are using search and social media as sources of information for their stories.

As reported on guardian.co.uk, a recent US survey has revealed that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors use social media sources for researching as 56% say social media is important for reporting and producing the stories they wrote.

Another good reason why you should bring your business online!

The survey which was conducted by Cision and The George Washington University, found that among the journalists surveyed, 89% of journalists use Blogs, 65% use Social Networking Sites, and 52% use Microblogging Sites to research information for their stories.

Such results demonstrate the fast growth of social media, how it’s spreading and how it’s also being exploited by journalists and editors not just brands and businesses.

In addition, it’s an eye opener for companies and marketers who are still skeptical about turning to the Web as an alternative and complimentary strategy to market their brand or products.

Now more than ever, marketers should strongly consider using tools such as optimization or activities such as participating on social networks and posting good, relevant content online as to make their information more accessible, and easily traceable to journalists who can then feed themselves with data originating straight from the real source.

I’d like to go back to one of my blog posts from last week, Building Good Online Branding While Being Consistent, and discuss one very important factor that was kindly brought to light by Dominique Lahaix co-founder & CEO of Cairn Inc., a privately held software technology company.

His comment was the following:

Thanks for the article. I like the stress on having an objective.

What I think is also critical is to target a specific audience.
Most marketers define their audience as “social media” and I think this is a huge mistake. The web is made up by a myriad of communities and tribes (that connects thru blogs, twitter, facebook) and what marketers should look at is how to select the communities that matter and develop the right value proposal, messages, strategies for these communities not to broadly and loosly diffuse messages into “social media”.

And my response to his statement was:

Yes, I entirely agree. Strategies should be developed to cater a specific audience from a specific network. It’s like having a campaign targeted to a Spanish-speaking audience and using the exact same campaign with the literal translation in English to target the English-speaking crowd…it’s just not going to work. Community profiles are different,they have different customs, demographics, psychographics,etc. Great point!

Like I said, great point. And this is why I decided to dedicate a couple lines to explain this very important aspect.

It’s true that in the thriving world of social media, things won’t always be as easy as they seem. At times, trying to define a comprehensive social media strategy for your brand can even be overwhelming.

But as Dominique stated, marketers cannot assume that the citizens of the ’social media’ universe are all the same, that they have the same likes and interests, speak the same language, or practice the same hobbies.

Before determining your social media objectives you need to first understand your audience. Once you have distinctive goals for your digital brand strategy you can then embark on ‘mini-campaigns’ which target specific audiences in specific channels. In short, your company goals will automatically help you determine the crowd you want to reach and further define the message you want to depict.

For instance, Twitter has proven to be effective on the CRM and customer service front, whereas Facebook can be more useful to interact with customers and foster relationships. And this translates to two different approaches for two different networks.

In addition, measuring your campaign results will become a less daunting task since the idea is to be able to examine each one of your campaigns individually and track your ROI until eventually pinpointing the social media channel that best fulfills your company’s objectives.

(hat tip to Dominiq for the inspiration)

Below is a list of activities to help you bring your physical event online by leveraging online tools like social networks and the likes.

BLOG

If you have a blog already, make sure you write about the given event well in advance and also a few days prior to it. Look into your sector’s blogging community and identify the bloggers that would be most likely interested in blogging about the event, and of course, don’t forget to invite them to the event.

CREATE A FACEBOOK EVENT

If your brand or service already has a Facebook Page, include the event on the page, plus highlights of the event, keynote speakers, images, ways to participate, etc. Event’s can be easily shared between users and if you like, you may also promote your event by launching a highly targeted Facebook ad campaign.

After the event, you can add photos of the participants, tag people and even thank them for joining. It’s a great way to start conversation between you and your audience.

TWEET! + HASHTAGS

Tweeting during the event can generate great buzz and get people talking. If people talk and comment about it, that’ll get more people interested and awaken curiosity about upcoming events. A few days ago I attended the Forum Digitale della Comunicazione here in Milan and it was great in the sense that they had a Twitter live stream being projected in a huge screen and all tweets being shown included the dedicated event hashtag: #fd10tag (no idea why they added the ‘tag’ at the end).

The good thing about hashtags is that those who couldn’t make it to the event can 1. keep up with the live streaming as the event occurs and 2. look up news on the certain event using the hashtag on the Twitter search field.

SOCIAL NETWORK STATUSES

We all love the ‘what are you doing’ or ‘what’s happening’ questions, but moreover, we love answering them. Why not make good use out of these and promote your upcoming event, where you’re headed, which event your attending, why you’re looking forward to it and who your favorite guest speakers are, etc etc.

USE BUSINESS NETWORKS

Take advantage of online communities such as LinkedIn or Viadeo to promote your event. Networks such as these are advantageous for joining groups and communities where you can easily find subjects related to your industry or sector. Also, now that Twitter updates can be synced with your LinkedIn account people can keep up with your tweets and current activities as they are broadcasted on your status update.

UPLOAD PHOTOS + VIDEOS

A good way to generate some good noise is by creating photo albums on sites such as Flickr or Facebook or by uploading videos on YouTube. Online sharing applications are the best to manage your photos and share them with the world. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words…People enjoy viewing pictures/videos, not only are they entertaining, they also serve to inform and give people a general idea of what the event, conference, roundtable was like.

Try these out and let us know how it goes!

A few months back we wrote a post discussing the importance of dedicating time to customers and how the rise of social media use can positively impact customer service as well as enhance interaction between brands and consumers.

This still holds true as we haven’t stopped witnessing great efforts on behalf of brands, for instance, @WholeFoods, who have turned to social media and harnessed channels such as Twitter and Facebook to reach their customers and build relationships.

On this particular post, however, I wanted to discuss the importance and the role of employees in a business when it comes to social media sites.

If you think about it, your employees are the people who are most familiar with your product or service, hence, they’re your biggest brand ambassadors. Because the interent gives everyone and anyone a voice through these social platforms, why not use the opportunity to leverage  your employees and make them active advocates of your brand.

According to Nielsen, 2/3’s of the world’s interent population visit social networking or blogging sites. Your employees are now on the web more than ever and being very social. Facebook, for example, has recently revealed that the average user has 130 friends on the site. Just about anyone can get access to the Internet and communicate with likeminded individuals who share the same interests that they do.

You can make your employees your biggest fans and have them showcase why your product or service is their absolute favorite. Make your employees feel like they can engage online by encouraging them to participate in social networks, forums or blogs.

The idea is for your employees to start dialogue, give valuable insight about the company and become influential enough to encourage others to join the conversation.

Your employees represent one of the best solutions to connect your business with your customers and start conversation. The more natural, spontaneous and sincere their interactions are, the more they will appear like real humans who are not trying to sell anything to anyone…and this can only result in one thing: open, friendly dialogue.

Some common marketing challenges for marketers may include, increasing sales, increasing market share, boosting profits, reaching a wider audience, identifying new audiences, building a community, interacting more with current customers/prospects, creating brand awareness, so on and so forth.

When implementing an internet marketing strategy, whether it’s through a company’s website or via social media, it’s important you keep two things in mind: consistency and differentiation.

You want to make sure that whichever strategy you decide to implement is consistent with your brand, your brand personality and your commercial image.

Creating original and recognizable campaigns that communicate your brand’s values and benefits to your clients while keeping a consistent voice across all of your e-marketing channels is one way to go about.

Another aspect of it is identifying your unique situation in order to gain competitive advantage. For this you need to study the competition and pin point the areas that make you stand out from the rest and use that as your selling point and the angle for your campaign.

The key to an efficient online marketing strategy is to be consistent in your message and stay focused on the actual brand strategy marketing.

Every day new online marketing communication channels are introduced, which  slightly complicates the situation since businesses try to harness these as much as possible in order to drive traffic, generate leads and convert sales.

However, the focus should be on both- delivering the right message the right way while maximizing the internet marketing opportunites available.

Then I found out Facebook had just rolled out their new post insight product which allows page admins to view the number of impressions each of their posted stories have generated, plus the percentage of the total number of impressions that result in actions, ie: likes + comments.

We find that this new measuring tool is quite useful and can come in quite handy for us and our clients since it gives us a precise idea of how each post is performing by displaying how many people have actually viewed and interacted with them. Often, I personally used to wonder how the posts for client XYZ were doing and if they were getting any clicks, views etc.

Below is an example of what the new page upgrade stats look like:

Another good aspect about this function is that you can further review your posts judging by the number of impressions and optimize the quality of the content you’re providing your fans with. You can also run a post comparison and observe which type of post triggers the most interest, whether it’s a video post, a question/trivia-like post, opinion post, photo post, etc.

There’s another change Facebook intends to roll-out and it’s explained in the following statement:

Selecting your industry will enable the Facebook Ads team to provide you with more relevant support. In the future, we hope to offer industry-specific resources including more robust best practices guides and case studies. The more we know about our advertisers, the easier it’ll be for us to provide the most useful information.

Millward Brown recently presented their predictions with regards to where the digital marketing is headed in 2010, suggesting a series of insights about viral videos, online display ads, location and mobile marketing.

The marketing research company disclosed that marketers will be experimenting with larger ad formats that will not only be innovative and eye-catching to consumers, they will also prove to perform quite well. However, one must not forget that large also equals intrusive, therefore, only the most efficient formats will be able to survive and be adopted by marketers and advertisers.

Online videos will continue to experiment continuous growth and in result, more sophisticated viral video analytics and services will be available for marketers to measure the impact of their campaigns. Rather than just placing videos and hoping for a massive viral effect, marketers will instead be able to invest in viral seeding strategies thanks to the information provided by the new and advanced viral monitoring tools.

According to the Mobile Marketing Association, mobile marketing spend will grow to $2.16 billion in 2010 from last year’s $1.7 billion. With the increase in iPhone usage (33.75 million units sold worldwide to date/Q4 2009) and popularity of the Google Android, mobile web usage is only bound to increase as access to the internet becomes cheaper. The advantage of mobile is that it provides the ability to target by site, phone model, demographics and location, all of which can be very useful to advertisers.

On a similar note, geo-targeting continues to rise thanks to the increasing number of GPS-enabled devices available in the market today. comScore has reported that 11% of their mobile panel is currently using map or direction-based applications on their devices, representing 41% year-on-year growth and potentially stealing market share from standalone GPS devices. The downside could be that consumers won’t always share their location with brands, however, brands are able to do so without a problem, and will often be seen making location a fundamental feature in their ad campaigns.

We’ve been reading about Facebook’s new privacy settings…not as comprehensive as you would have imagined.

As part of this initiative, Facebook prompted  its users to review and confirm their privacy settings. You must have seen the notification message on your profile page without knowing what to do or where to go.

The message listed the items with privacy that needed to be confirmed in order to give you the option to keep your existing setting or change them to a setting Facebook recommended. The options were either to tighten your privacy settings or leave them as they initially were.

There are numerous settings that may be complicated making it harder for people to make informed decisions about their privacy or about the Facebook experience they want. AllFacebook narrowed it down for us in a post titled 10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know, which included options such as ‘understand your friend lists’, ‘avoid the infamous photo tag mistake’, ‘protect your albums’ and the list goes on.

Today, AllFacebook published the video version of their post from last week, in an attempt to help users understand the new Facebook privacy settings one by one. Check it out:

New Types of Data

The eradication of information overload. This has become one big concern due to the fact that it’s time-consuming and results must be refined in order to find what you’re looking for. Google’s goal is to refine search relevance and accuracy by making significant improvements in understanding search queries.

Semantic Search

The meaning behind words in a search query via semantic and statistical processing does not only require matching queries with the keywords and delivering results. Google takes into account every single element of the search query, from synonyms to morphology and other variables in the search equation.

Cloud Computing

More people are using the internet, therefore they are growing more comfortable with using cloud based apps like Gmail on a daily basis. As this tendency increases (and it already is) more and more information will be stored from the hard drive to the various cloud services and the easier it will be to find information and relevant content online.

Real Time Search

Real time will become even more big. People like to be updated with the latest news and updates on-the-spot. No matter where they are, people are more and more thirsty for news and information. And its basically one of the reasons why Twitter became such a phenomenon in 2009 and will continue to be so.

Mobile Web

People need information on the go, regardless of their location. This is why more people are accessing the web via their mobile devices. Therefore, business be well prepared to cater to the increasing number mobile web users and build mobile versions of their websites.

Any predictions you would like to add to these? Please feel free.–

A vast number of brands have already adopted and harnessed many of the digital marketing tools to communicate, engage and interact with customers and prospects to establish a solid online presence as well as increase awareness and build brand image.

Among the list of top online strategies that were mostly used in 2009 were:

*Social Media- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube: Used to engage with customers on a personal level, interact with brand followers, friends and loyalists more directly. This strategy also helps increase brand awareness and generate a lot of buzz about a product or service.

*SEO/SEM: Used to achieve a high ranking on the SERPs and to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search result pages. The higher the position on a page result, the higher the probabilities of people clicking on your website, knowing about your brand or product and generating a higher ROI.

*Online PR: Used to generate positive buzz around a brand or product. Word of mouth is one the most powerful forms of communication and can greatly influence people’s opinions and consumer purchase behavior.

*Email Marketing: Used to send useful information as well as offers and discounts about a product or service. It is also a vehicle that helps obtain a continuous flow of new business contacts and users who are genuinly interested to your products or service.

*Paid search marketing: Used to bid on keyword phrases relevant to the brand or product. Its highly measurable and helps maximise your return on investment.

*Link Building: Used to build a brand’s credibility. It’s a fundamental ingredient to get a brand’s website higher in the search engines since it’s a key element in search engine optimization.

*Blogging: Used to provide additional information as well as viral and website content on a particular brand or product. Blogs are helpful to build brand credibility and spread valuable information all the way across to the different social networks, thus generating more brand visibility. When a particular blog obtains a certain level of popularity, it is often used as a point of reference for followers and prospects to go back to for general industry information.