ION Digital

This post also recently ran on MarketingProfs

Businesses have begun to flock to Facebook Pages the last year, and no wonder.  With a Facebook Page, you can post company news, announce events, offer tutorials, highlight videos, conduct polls, and  create community with discussion boards.  Facebook Pages are good for building your brand and creating conversations, allowing users to get more deeply connected with your business.

Recent changes to Facebook Pages mean they’re now more like personal profiles, with a real time news stream and the ability to create your own specialized tabs. Facebook pages are also searchable from outside Facebook, and they’re easy to set up.

They’re also potentially viral. (more…)

This week I came across two articles that helped clarify an issue I’ve been pondering for many months: why is it hard for so many companies to make the leap into the new world of social media?

The first piece was on the art of digital small talk (social media discussions) in the Wall Street Journal. The second article in MarketWatch was about the futility of selling via social media platforms, by John Dvorak.

These two articles have nothing to do with each other. But together they help me think through The Question from a little different angle. The answer revolves around the mindset in which we approach social media in corporate America; in short, we’re trying to sell and market when social media is about people, not products. (more…)

I knew I would struggle when I started blogging a few years ago. I blame my years of journalism work. Sentences had to be carefully crafted, and words chosen carefully. My first editor at BusinessWeek told me, “Magazine real estate is precious. Use it wisely.”

Now we live in a new world that is no longer shaped by printing presses and information scarcity. Yet everyday I see companies that make these mistakes: they want to launch the perfect blog, create the polished video, craft the right message.

They are suffering from the curse of the corporate perfectionist. (more…)

Sometimes I walk away from a conference with as many questions as answers. Such was the case at the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in SF. Great speakers, great content, great ideas– an idea-fest for social media types. But after the two day session ended, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this so hard? Why aren’t more companies getting it?

The answer is both simple and amazingly complex: It’s woven into the very fabric of the the way we think about marketing.

My company has worked with many companies the last three years on social media programs, from Fortune 100 giants to small shops, giving us ample experience to see how good intentions come up short in making the transition to the new marketing world. The mistakes usually fall into one or more of the following areas, the seven deadly blind spots of traditional marketers: (more…)

This week’s Inbound Marketing Summit provided a nice display of some of the best thinking on social media on the planet. They were preaching to the choir here, folks who believe the social media movement is long overdue.  So you didn’t get a lot of contention or debate. What you did get was some exhilarating ideas, strategies, tips and techniques.

Many of the sessions were only 20 minutes so speakers had to blaze through their material, but most pulled it off smoothly. It was an interesting mix of consultants, web types, businesspeople, freelancers, former journalists, marketing and PR people and others that I couldn’t quite categorize (I met two people out of work; jobless, well might as well hang out with the social media crowd).
The conference ended the second day as strong as it began, with Louis Gray providing tools to deal with the information overload and Tim O’Reilly giving a spirited speech based on “creating more value than you capture.” Along the way hosts Chris Brogan and Justin Levy kept the trains running on time and the mood upbeat.There were too many great sessions to cover all of them  but here’s a sampling of key takeaways for me. (more…)