Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Even small events can serve to jumpstart some word of mouth for your business. One of our clients is having some local events for their brand and wanted to know what tactics would get people talking. This is a good questions but before we go into specific tactics on how to achieve that there are some questions they need to answer first:

- What’s the event about? What’s going to happen there?

- Why should people care? (otherwise nobody’s going to spread it if they know nothing about you)

- Do we have any material we can support it with like videos or something to generate some interest?

- Anything in particular that’s part of the show that would get people talking?

Once you answer these questions then you can start with the creative, push it out on your blog or any other medium you have a presence on. If you want people who don’t know about you, they need to know who you are before they even give you their information or much less pay to see you.

The key is to ask yourself: Are we answering everyone’s questions?

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Are you creating content that’s useful not just to your audience but also to their peers? Research suggests that the key factor that influences us to share things we find is because we want to be helpful. Yes we’re looking out for our peers first and by being helpful that makes us happy.

To stay ahead of the game you need to be relevant and not static, the game has shifted to the ‘social influence’ space where anonymous inbound links matter less and # of shares, mentions, immediacy matter more.

What are you doing to make sure people share your content?

• Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2010: Flash, Crowdsourcing, Info-Art (MarketingVOX)

• What Makes People Pass Along Your Content?

• Social Media: What’s Next? (American Express OPEN Forum)

• 10 Quick Tips for Building Your Brand Online

• How to create buzzworthy topics (Gaspedal)

• 14 social media lessons we can all learn (Conversation Marketing)

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A new research report released by Business.com states that businesses are utilizing social media tools to find out how other businesses are taking advantage of the same tools. 

Among the highlights:

• 14.4% of respondents say they use 10 or more different social media sites to search for business information.
• 69.1% of respondents say that attending webinars or listening to podcasts is the most useful activity to find business related information.
• 61% of use web traffic as a metric to judge social media success.
• 80% of companies use Facebook as their top social media site, Twitter is at 56%.
• 60.5% of companies use Google search as their preferred tool to monitor online conversations with Google alerts providing them the most business impact.
• 64.4% of companies upload content to YouTube as part of their social media initiatives, by far the most popular. But those using Google Knol and Vimeo report the greatest ability to see an impact on business results.
• 49.4% of companies use Delicious to bookmark content followed closely by Digg yet Yahoo Buzz and StumbleUpon are reported as producing the greatest business impact.

What this means:

This report sheds light on why small businesses have a hard time figuring out how extract business results from these new forms of media, most are following others lead and replicating what works for them; this results in convergent strategies where it’s difficult to measure success.

If you’re a business who’s has not adopted social tools yet and is planning on making the leap, understand that immediacy, connectedness and being relevant are the most important factors when entering this space.

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Imagine that by the end of this post you would have learned a valuable lesson in starting successful word of mouth, that would really make you happy wouldn’t it? Before I give you the secret, first make sure you read our social media optimization 101 guideline. Got it? Good!

THE big secret to starting word of mouth in 3 minutes is…

Ask people to spread your message

That’s it. Easy!

So you’ve created some great content and you want it to spread like wildfire. Help it spread by asking your customers to share it because oftentimes even your best customers don’t know how important word of mouth is to you. Simply asking them if they would mind sharing your stuff with a few of their friends is enough for them to do it.

Reminding your customers to share your stuff actually takes less than 3 minutes to do but then again you already knew that.

Action steps:

1. Create your content.
2. Make sure you’ve made it easy for them to share by optimizing your website with social mechanisms.
3. Let your customers know that you have created some content that might interest them and politely ask them to help spread it.
4. Restart step 1.

You have just learned a valuable lesson in 3 minutes!

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The formula to successful networking: Give to receive. Create relationships. Quality not quantity.

Ask yourself:

If I disappeared tomorrow who would care?

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