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When attending events such as Social Media Marketing World, providing relevant information live can have quite a few benefits for your brand. When done right, it can position your company as an industry thought leader and resource, provide your fans a reason to continue engaging with you in the future and allow your employees to get the important facts right alongside you.

Here are a few quick tips for leveraging social media to get the most out of niche events, conferences and conventions. (more…)

Let’s start with a riddle:

If a customer directs a question to your social media account and no one’s around to answer it – does it still make a sound?

Yes. And it makes a big one.

Nielsen’s 2012 State of the Media reports that more than half of consumers now use Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to give feedback, ask questions and register complaints with their favorite (and not-so-favorite) companies.

So if you’re not answering questions and responding to comments about your brand or business – who is?

Truly effective customer service begins before the first question is asked or the first tomato is launched at your brand page. Every business, no matter how unsexy they may seem, needs to own their social media space and have a customer service plan at the ready. If you don’t respond, trust us, someone else will.

If you haven’t worked customer service into your social media strategy, here are some starting points wepicked up from Social Media Marketing World:

1.     Start out by asking “How can I help you?”

You should be thinking about this question all the time – when planning social media posts, when promoting your brand, and especially when responding to customers. If you keep coming back to this question and really consider it across all channels and situations, you’re going to be in a good place. So put it on a Post-It note, write it on your hand, set a calendar alert every 15 minutes – whatever you have to do to keep it top of mind.

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Email is dead. Email is not dead. Maybe it’s on life support? Who knows? Well, no we actually DO know.

It’s alive and well.

Check out this fun statistic: eMarketer expects there to be 216.6 million US email users this year, representing 89% of total internet users. Two out of three people in the US will be email users in 2013.

Seems alive and kicking to us!

We’re not alone in this either. The Social Media team at Moose recently attended Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, and a consistent theme was that email marketing isn’t going anywhere, and you’ll regret it if you don’t step up your efforts. So, a conference featuring some of the most respected social media experts in the world just said that email marketing is vital to your success as a business. Interesting. Let’s dive in. (more…)

Social Media Marketing World 2013 recently wrapped up in San Diego, and the nuggets of useful information we’ve come back with abound!

Take, for example, this super simple, yet highly effective social media marketing tactic from Michael Bepko, Global Online Community Manager for Whole Foods: 

Segment your Tweets.

Great idea, right? But Twitter doesn’t exactly have a targeting system in place. So how is it possible to take one piece of content and make it relevant to the various segments of your social media marketing audience?  (more…)

Chris Brogan, a respected authority on social media strategy, said he didn’t recommend outsourcing social to agencies during Social Media Marketing World this week. (Cue the shouts of disapproval from agencies.)

Chris Brogan at his “You Aren’t Going to Like This: Social Media Isn’t the Answer” session during SMMW13.

I kind of agree with him.

Before you recommend I start revamping my LinkedIn profile, let me explain. Kind of is the operative term.

I also kind of think he’s wrong.

The biggest challenge with agencies, Chris said, is in them having (or not having) the cultural code of the brand. I agree that it’s the most vital asset for a social media agency partnership.

Wait. Did I say agency partnership? Weren’t we talking about outsourcing to a third party?

If you’re setting up to “outsource,” you absolutely won’t get meaningful results. But if you look for a strong partnership, you’ll likely find more success than you could on your own.

Am I just arguing semantics here? Nope – there is a fundamental difference.

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What is it about The Walking Dead that keeps fans coming back week after week? Is it because fans love seeing mankind’s resourceful, persistent survival skills during times of crisis? Or is it because we like to watch Rick and Darryl blast away zombie brains from afar with unprecedented accuracy?

Today, through social TV,  it’s possible for TV networks to answer these questions. They can dig deep into their shows, figure out what captivates audiences, and implement those insights into future programming. And, in turn, marketers can use this information to make their ads, product placements and partnerships more targeted and relevant. (more…)

I was recently quite moved (literally to tears) by Linotype: The Film,  not only because of my personal passion for all things typographic, but because the film did a phenomenal job illustrating how this incredible machine changed the world.

“Linotype: The Film” Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

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For a brief moment today, we imagined What The World Would Be Like Without Photo Rights.

So let’s get the story straight. Instagram originally said over the next three weeks, they were going to shoplift our photo rights.

Initial Thoughts

First of all, if you need to figure out how to monetize, maybe you could ask us or any of 2,000 other agencies for ideas. But shoplifting is pretty easy when you’re a popular kid in school. You figure, who is going to prosecute a kid for stealing a candy bar? Then, you get caught and thrown out of the store. They call your parents. You kind of learn your lesson, do your homework and get an education.

You learn to think of value-driven ideas – because that’s what the world demands.

Unless, you already have millions of users who thought they were posting photos on your site for their friends and family. Let’s get into the photo library business. Great idea. There’s nothing anyone can do – we’ll be rich!!!  We’ll steal their photos. Sell them over again and again. What a riot. Open up the calculator on the iPhone and let’s check our Facebook stock prices. It went up already!

Life is sweet.

Unless you actually care about where your personal or brand photos show up.
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Drambuie^® wanted a larger social media presence, especially on Facebook. So given our experience with brand marketing online, earlier this year they asked us to extend their global campaign—A Taste of the Extraordinary—into the social realm.

To the brainstorm room we went.

Out came ideas—some good, others not so much. We picked one, then decided it didn’t work. We came up with another and decided it did. We revised. Then revised some more. And at long last, we developed a social media promotion that uses both Instagram and Facebook to recruit new Drambuie fans.

At the core is a sweepstakes via this Facebook app that launched a few weeks ago.

It entices ‘creative class’ consumers to Like and interact with Drambuie by offering them something they love—cool Instagram photos—along with something that everyone loves, prizes.

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Certain topics are sure to spark passionate discourse, so we were excited to build a social media strategy around a classic one: Cats or Dogs? Pet owner or not, everyone has an opinion.

This week, we helped launch America’s Pet Debate, presented by Purina and designed to celebrate pet ownership and engage pet owners using social media.

The goal of the campaign is to get people voting and talking – about the campaign and to one another. So with our wide target spread across several social networks, how did we build our social media strategy? With three key things in mind:

1. Make it easy to talk about.

If we want people to talk, let’s give them the tools and guide them at every touchpoint. Browse through America’s Pet Debate site, and every time you engage, you’ll be prompted to share – when you vote, submit a comment on the Meet the Candidates page, take the quiz and even when you check to see which way your state is swaying on the Current Results page.

2. Give people tools for social advocacy.

Whether it’s a Twitter profile picture, Facebook cover photo or simply an image shared on Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest – consumers use social media to define themselves. They want content with badge value, that gets them positive attention from their social network. So we created a gallery of downloads, designed specifically to create social badge value, that allow users to declare themselves as Team Cat, Team Dog or a general love for both.

3. Tailor content to each network.

We use different social networks for different reasons and in different ways. Pinterest is great for discovery, Facebook for connecting with friends, Twitter for keeping up with influencers, Instagram for visual stimulation.

So in developing content for a social media strategy, we should tailor it to the network – and to what consumers expect when they log in to each network.

Our editorial calendar for this campaign is quite a beast, but it allows us to make sure that everything we push out is perfect for its respective network, ladders up to our campaign strategy and objectives and that we surprise and delight consumers who follow us on multiple networks. We don’t want to simply push out the same thing through four different networks – we want to provide them unique, relevant content at every turn. Go ahead and Like us on Facebook, then Follow us on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram to see what we mean.

What do you think is key to an impactful social media strategy? Let us know in the comments below. And don’t forget to weigh in and vote for Team Dog or Team Cat daily until November 9, when we announce the winner of America’s Pet Debate.