5 Tips of the Day - 20 October 2012


1) 3 Tips for Creating an Effective Work Team

Have you ever worked in a group or team? How did the team function? What was the demographic makeup of the team, and how did you all get along?

Creating an effective work team is by no means a simple task, and can involve getting the right group of people together, setting appropriate goals, using the right leadership style, and more. Although not a complete solution, the following tips might help spark some ideas on creating your own effective work team.




One of the biggest challenges that any owner of a small business faces while trying to publicize the same is the limited budget that they have in their kitty for the exposure and advertisement and spreading of the word regarding their business. In case you are thinking that something on these lines of advertisement is necessary for the big companies alone and you can well do without it thanks to word of mouth, well, you are nothing but extremely mistaken in your ideas.

One of the most important necessities of any small business is to find their footing in a competitive market and this is why marketing, advertising and spreading the word with a moderate budget is extremely necessary. Here are 2 cost effective ways to implement the same:





They are an executive’s worst social business nightmares.

You launch an online community for customers, partners, or employees, then two things happen.
          1) Nobody contributes to the community.
          2) New members join the community, are not engaged, and then never return.

These two scenarios create a spiral of fear that prevents many organizations from launching their social business strategy, even though all indications point to customer communities playing a central role in the future of customer relationship management.




Quality and Quantity: Strive to publish great content as regularly as possible. Some of your articles won’t always hit the mark but when they do, they have the potential to go viral and your thought leadership will be shared widely across the social web.

Size Doesn’t Matter: There is no standard issue for the length of an article, duration of a video or number of pages in a white paper. Great content can run to many thousands of words or just a couple of sentences. Just make sure it’s relevant, interesting and timely – and you won’t go far wrong.




5) 5 Tips Before You Go Global

If your business is healthy enough for you to be thinking about international expansion, kudos! The prospect of doing business beyond U.S. borders is an exciting one for any entrepreneur--how often do you get to enter a whole new market with a huge, untapped pool of customers and revenue?


But it's not just about changing the language on your website and accepting payments in a foreign currency. It's about a whole different mindset for the way you do business. You need to go through every aspect of your company with a fine-tooth comb (ideally with an attorney and financial adviser on hand) to make sure everything is set up to successfully handle doing business in a foreign country.



5 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Monitoring


There are hundreds of social media and web metrics that you could look at everyday if there was enough time and context to understand each of them.  But without overwhelming you with data and drowning out what is important, there are a few key metrics that you should be monitoring at all times.  Today we’ll cover the 5 metrics social media metrics that you should be aware of and monitoring for a pulse on your social business.
Let’s jump in, and happy monitoring!
Pinterest-Quote-Engagement1. Engagement – Engagement is one of the most critical areas of social to measure.  Are conversations happening with your brand when you release content?  Are fans liking or commenting on your Facebook page?  Are users pinning images, or retweeting tweets?  There are a slew of different ways to look at engagement depending on the social outposts your are participating on, but the key is that people see your message and interact with your brand.
If you notice a particular set of messages is not working, dont give up but try changing the messaging and measure the type of response that you achieve.  Look at what and how your competitors are doing across their social outposts, are they achieving a level of engagement?  If so what are they posting that’s different?  Evaluate their outreach and share information that makes your brand unique, that will likely bring the most engagement of all.
Tip: Make it fun to interact with your brand.  You dont have to post your latest press release on Facebook all the time, try some humor (if your audience will react well to it) and different variations of content to get fans involved.
2. Reach – What size is the audience seeing your content over all of the social networks that you participate in?  Is this audience growing or shrinking and at what rate?  These are key questions to consider when looking at your total social reach think of it as  the number of potential people that have potential to see your content.
Facebook-insights
Reach by itself does not tell the whole story but should be used in conjunction with other metrics to calculate the specific metrics that you are looking for.  For example, if we wanted to find out the percentage of people that were engaged with your page this week and tallied up all our ‘likes’ (let’s assume 609,750), then we would use the following formula:
Weekly Total Engagement Rate =  609,750/ 12,449,380 or 4.898%.
The point is that you can use total reach for a number of different metrics that are important to you and your business and simply calculate them by switching out the formula.  Try it out on your own metrics.
3. Referral Traffic - Getting fans to interact with your brand at various social outposts is great, but the real goal should ideally be to drive more sustainable and repeat traffic to your website.  To determine if you are accomplishing this look in your web analytics tool at referral traffic to see specifically where traffic is coming from.  For Google Analytics users, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.
Once in this dashboard take a look at your top performing referral source, and the respective time on site and bounce rate for each.  If one particular source is producing a number of visitors but they are only staying on your page for minimal time and driving your bounce rate up – then it is likely not the right source for that particular piece of content.
Diving one level deeper, you can click on any content referrer to see which specific content is driving traffic or switch the primary dimension to landing page and then viewing the referring source that is driving traffic to that content.  This is important as if you have different series of blog posts and your first series is generating great traffic through Facebook, and your second through Pinterest than you now know where to target these different segments of posts for sharing.  On the whole that is simplifying the concept a lot but you should understand that if sharing content on a network is driving down your time on site, and your bounce rate up then it’s worth re-evaluating that as a real traffic source.
4. Share of Voice -  Share of Voice (SOV) is basically a measure of how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison with your competitors.  If your competitors are being mentioned far more often share of voice is an easy measure of showing you this.  Ensure that you are participating in all of the relevant conversations for your brand regardless of where they occur, but most importantly wherever your key customers are.  There is a free tool to help determine your SOV Socialmention or if you have a budget it’s worth looking into a tool like Radian6 (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
5. Influence - There are a number of different influence startups emerging like Klout, PeerIndex, andKred.  Influence is an important metric to monitor because even if the people talking about your brand have large followings, whether they can influence others to take action is critical.  It’s also a great quick snapshot at how your brand is participating in social media against some competitors.
Tags: Facebook, Google Analytics, Social media, Social network

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5 SEO Articles You Should Read Today - 20 October 2012

1. Is Your SEO Agency Any Good?

Within organizations, some very smart people want to understand enough to know whether their SEO agency is doing a good job. While good results are pretty easy to define, what's more concerning to these folks is that it's unclear how their agency is achieving results; and that carries risk.

Why should it matter about the quality of the work when you’re getting results?

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2. How to Choose an SEO Agency for Your Business

Well-optimized, effective websites aren’t just for Fortune 500 companies and tech companies anymore. Now more than ever, it’s important for small business owners to fully understand just how beneficial a successfully executed website can be for them as well.

In order to make your website successful, you need to make sure it’s fully search engine optimized and unless you’re an SEO expert yourself, you’ll no doubt want to hire a team of experts to help you get the job done right. Here’s how to make sure the experience goes as pleasantly as possible.

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Most people tend to start their own blog or website for different reasons. Some of them might want to sell stuff, earn some money blogging, build their online portfolio and others just want to share their personal thoughts. In order for their sites to be successful they need to have visitors or readers. These readers can be anyone looking for interesting things. Visitors can come from word of mouth like when your friend tells his other friends to visit your site, others from article directories or in most cases from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

SEO or search engine optimization is the most important thing your site needs to have. This will drive a lot of traffic to your site and more visitors mean more earnings. So how do you optimize your site for search engines? Here are the basic things you can do to optimize your site.





Today Online marketing is tremendously rises on internet. Everyone wants to attract more customers to increase their business online. Doing SEO for your company’s website is the best way to increase more visitors and customers online. Search engine optimization provides a huge exposure to your website on the search engines, where already so many websites are available and helps your site for online promotion.

There is lot of benefits of doing SEO for your website. If your website is not properly optimized than your customers will not find your website and goes to your competitors, which lead down your online business. Many users still not aware about the advantages and benefits of SEO, but it play a great role to rank your website on the top of the search engines. Here are some advantages of SEO, which surely make your mind for doing SEO of your own website:

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5. Effective Tips And Strategies To Make The Most Of Your SEO Techniques

If you have the right background information, you can use this powerful set of tools to increase your site’s traffic and improve your business. The following article offers great search optimization tips.

You should research what keywords are going to best fit your business. Before building your website, know which keywords should be included in the titles. Your keywords research will help you ascertain what search words and phrases are being entered by your prospective customers as they look online for products or services like yours. By using relevant keywords, you can help increase your rank on search engines.

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5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 20 October 2012


1.  Big Brother meets Big Data: Governments start scrutinizing credit card records

The economy is so bad in Argentina that the government recently said it would start taxing overseas credit card purchases. It also demanded that banks report all credit card transactions -- foreign or domestic -- saying the data would be used to find tax cheats.

Even George Orwell couldn't have imagined this meeting of Big Brother and Big Data: a handy database of every single purchase made by citizens, ready to becategorized and analyzed by the government. Let your mind wander for a moment and you can imagine the disturbing possibilities of a government so invasive that it knows when and where you buy milk and bread.

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With all the talk of “Big” data from vendors and their sale forces, consultants excited by new opportunities and business people grappling with whether or not their revenue will go up, it is vital to understand the “Big” picture and the best way to do this is see where architecturally everything fits together.

Getting an understanding of the integrated architecture of Big Data is vital if any organisation is to understand how much of their current investment in their information environments including items like hardware, software tools and people’s skill sets can stay, need to be replaced or be upgraded.


3. Batten down the analysts, it’s a big data-BI storm

Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act.

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Most big data initiatives currently being deployed by organizations are aimed at enhancing customer experience, said a report byIBM and Said Business School at the University of Oxford. Despite a strong focus on customers, less than half of the organizations engaged in big data are currently collecting and analyzing external sources of data.

Social media and other external data are being underutilized due to the skills gap.Having advanced capabilities requires analyzing unstructured data - which includes geospatial data, voice, images and video - as well as streaming data remains a major challenge for most organizations. Less than 25% of the survey respondents say they have the required capabilities to analyze highly unstructured data - a major inhibitor to getting the most value from big data. Organizations need to embrace and manage data uncertainty and determine how to use it to their advantage.

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While Big Data has evolved into one of 2012's most buzz-worthy topics, one of the next big buzz topics -- machine-to-machine (M2M) communications or "the Internet of Things" -- is actually going to make Big Data even more powerful.

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12 Tips To Kickstart Your Content Marketing Strategy

Quality and Quantity: Strive to publish great content as regularly as possible. Some of your articles won’t always hit the mark but when they do, they have the potential to go viral and your thought leadership will be shared widely across the social web.


Size Doesn’t Matter: There is no standard issue for the length of an article, duration of a video or number of pages in a white paper. Great content can run to many thousands of words or just a couple of sentences. Just make sure it’s relevant, interesting and timely – and you won’t go far wrong.

Words and Pictures: It might be a clich̩ Рbut it still rings true. A picture is worth 1,000 words and when available you should always use them. If that picture moves (i.e. video) Рeven better.
Get to the point: There is no need to dazzle your audience with endless streams of eloquent prose introducing your latest concept or best practice. Get to the point (starting with a solid headline) or you’ll risk losing your audience at the first hurdle.

Solve Problems: The best content helps to solve your customers’ problems and therefore validates your position as an expert. Don’t try and second guess your customers problems, ask them what makes their lives difficult and they will probably give you a list to work from.

Always Include a Call to Action: Remind your audience to do something after or during consuming your content. “Buy Now”, “Learn More” and “Register Here” are all good starting points. Remember this is marketing and it should lead to an action that can be tracked and reported against.
Make it Easy to Share: Make your content easy to share by including social media “share” buttons on every piece of content.

Re-Use, Re-Appropriate and Re-Cycle: Could a blog post be turned into a more detailed white paper? Could a webinar turn into a physical event or YouTube video? Great content has legs and screams to be used across a variety of media.

Don’t Forget Email: If your content has value (and it should do) then let your customers’ and prospects’ email addresses be the currency used to pay for it. Use email gateway pages to grant access to detailed content or include email registration forms or pop-ups on blog posts to drive subscriptions. Email Marketing services like iContact will provide you with all the tools you need to set this up.

Get Social and Distribute Widely: Great content is the foundation of any social media strategy. Distribute it, discuss it and review it via social media. Social engagement will lead to more ideas, new opportunities and wider recognition of you, your brand and your position as an expert in your own particular niche.

Online PR: Great thought leadership is highly newsworthy. Use an online news release tool like PRWeb to distribute your content to journalists, influential bloggers and across all the major search engines (this will also aid your SEO efforts significantly).

Just Do It: Your content needs to be well thought out and planned – but don’t let over planning delay your output. The best content marketers are agile and can turn ideas around quickly to take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise.
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