Marketers no longer have to rely on expensive, contrived focus groups; social media provides a vastly larger, richer, more real-world source of information. Customers are increasingly seeking support through social media channels, as well as complaining via social media about poor product and service experiences. Using social media channels for customer support can both improve a company’s image—by demonstrating, publicly, responsiveness to customer issues—and reduce customer support costs. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, community sites (e.g. MORE >>

Personal Branding: The five elements of being seen as a thought leader through crowdsourcing Marketing Research: Cold, hard cash versus focus groups Social Marketing: Twitter contest boosts followers 43% Online Marketing: Cyber Monday reactions from 17 of your consumer marketing peers Archives January 2011 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 Sherpa Bloggers Adam T. I’ve been focusing on how the buyer experience and the sales. Recruit multiple bloggers Effective blogs are updated frequently. Lisa Keller : Great post! Tip #2. MORE >>

Getting Your Small Business Ready for Google+ by Blue Focus Marketing. Mark Burgess explains how small business can build trust and creatively use circles on Google+ (“This insight [that people prefer to share specific information with specific groups of friends or followers] led to the creation of Google+ circles, a major differentiator between Google+ and Facebook.  Until then, the social network may serve as a second-tier channel through which you can build some brand equity and…improve search returns.” It will fundamentally change SEO. ”). MORE >>

With fewer opportunities in most pipelines these days, salesforce management is increasingly focused on executing brilliantly on each and every sales opportunity.  . Today I came across a comment from Adam Tinworth on the reignited debate, in certain UK circles at least, over whether bloggers can be legitimate journalists. One of the main problems existing between these two groups is language. Most business bloggers understand that it is important to create interesting content on a frequent and consistent basis. Channel (72). Focus Group (5). MORE >>

The trick, in mining the flood of conversations, is to separate the abundant noise from the not-so-obvious signals and to analyze the yield in ways that offer marketers actionable intelligence to identify competitive strengths or vulnerabilities, shape messages, identify informal opinion leaders and influencers or suggest the best choice of media channels.  Informal opinion leaders are bloggers, tweeters, videographers, uploaders, commentators, friends or frequent site visitors who direct, distract, side track, explain or enrich the online conversation. and Addictomatic. MORE >>