It’s easy to get caught up in the buzz, and the hype, around social media. ve been working with many B2B companies to help them figure out when and how to use social media in their business. The answer is always a bit different depending on the product or service. One area that few people have written about is how to use social media for solution marketing. Let me demystify the topic a bit by sharing five ways I’ve seen it really work. 1)   Is there a market for your solution? Wouldn’t it be nice to know upfront what that conversation is about and the needs the participants are expressing? MORE >>

Paid, owned and earned media. Those three words, often shortened to “POE,” have bounced around for years. And, like the contemplations of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, they have taken on new meaning with the collision of traditional and digital marketing strategies. In 2009 Forrester issued a report that outlined the world of interactive marketers in the digital space. Since then the volume of “conversation” has increased dramatically over the entire social landscape — to the tune of BILLIONS of posts each year. It’s about the death of traditional marketing. MORE >>

Vitrue a social media marketing platform determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 when it comes to a Media Equivalent Value (MEV) per year. This calculation is based on the brand posting to their Facebook Fan Page twice a day and that they have a million fans which equates to 60 million impressions per month at a $5 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), so 60 million impressions. This would result in $300,000 a month in Media Equivalent Value or what the brand might have to spend elsewhere to get the same eyeballs. So then the math goes $300,000 month, which is $3.6M MORE >>

For years, sentiment has been a widely used measure of how customers view a company’s products and services. But sentiment analysis has inherent flaws. First is what it cannot tell you because it only considers a small amount of the available data. Only about 25 percent of posts actually contain sentiment, either positive or negative, which means three out of four posts are neutral, revealing no sentiment, and are effectively being ignored by the analysis. Thus, decisions are being based on what only a quarter of the posts are saying. MORE >>

No this isn’t a scam or a trick to get you to buy one of my books (but please don’t let that stop you from doing so). This is a really basic technique that a number of Fan pages are still missing out on and that is … make sure your landing page for first time visitors of your page is a welcome tab that consists of a nice big arrow pointing to the like button. Bingo that’s it! Special thanks to Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal for not only calling me out on this for my Fan page called Facebook for Business. see photo below). Its simple, its elegant but most importantly its really effective. MORE >>