5 Marketing Blogs You Should Be Reading

If you’re like us, you subscribe to blogs with the full intention of reading every post but, as your email or RSS reader fills up, you never get around to reading all (if any) of them. If you’re looking to narrow down your reading list for 2010, these are the blogs we always make time to read - and recommend that you should, too.

Seth’s Blog
Marketing and business guru Seth Godin shares his thoughts on marketing, spreading ideas and standing out from the crowd.

MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
A great blog for online marketing resources, marketing articles, online seminars, case studies, conferences and events.

Mequoda Daily
A blog that focuses on online publishing, information marketing and make money online.

Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog
The #1 ecommerce blog in the world, covering SEO, usability, analytics, email, shopping cart abandonment, and social media.

VKI Studios
Internet marketing and website usability blog to help you get more traffic and higher conversation rates.

Friends with Benefits: Social Media Marketing Tip #1

Reviewed from Uncorrected Proof

Friends with Benefits:  A Social Media Marketing Handbook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo is coming out this month and their book publisher, No Starch Press, understands geek entertainment and they sent Boxcar Marketing an advance PDF. Yipee!

No Starch has also given us permission to excerpt a couple of sections of the book. The first one is our favourite lesson for people using social media marketing for business.

Friends with Benefits: Chapter 4
Lesson #7: Don’t Be a Social Media Spammer

Spammer is pretty much the worst aspersion you can cast on a web denizen. In the online world, being called a spammer is like being called creepy, desperate, and corrupt all at once. Marketers rightfully worry about demonstrating “spammy” behavior and often ask us how to avoid looking like a shady online citizen….

This behavior is the kind that will brand your forehead with a big red S:

• You send generic emails to bloggers and podcasters with saluta- tions like "Dear Webmaster."
• You contact bloggers with grand promises of "link exchanges." Bloggers value links but offers of link exchanges have all the appeal and personality of pyramid schemes.
• You post promotions for your own Facebook group (or worse, your product) on the "walls" of other Facebook profiles, pages, and groups.
• You haphazardly respond to blog posts, podcasts, and videos that discuss your competitors and leave promotional messages about your services.
• You don’t consider the topics a social media creator covers, and as a result, you pitch a chick lit novel to the guy with a hockey blog.
• You send press releases out to large lists you bought or culled from the Web without obtaining the recipients& permission.
• You sneakily insert links to your products and services into Wikipedia.
• You offer to buy editorial coverage on a blog. On that note, you should be skeptical of anyone who accepts payment to promote your organization without publicly disclosing that payment.
• You forget to listen first.

Download the Full Chapter, “Netiquette: Miss Manners for the Web” (PDF)

Boxcar Marketing highly recommends Friends with Benefits. It is perfect for seasoned veterans and social media newbies.

Online Video Tips and Tools

Crissy, the Boxcar Marketing intern, has been working on a number of video projects this summer, and we wanted to share our tips and tools with you.

Video on the web is used for much more than entertainment. For businesses, it can be a great way to get your marketing message out — video content is the most commonly shared type of content online. Below is a list of tips and tools on using video for marketing.

Getting Started

Content and sound quality are the most important elements of online video. That said, you do not need expensive equipment or a high production budget. Check out Craigslist.org for used equipment and experiment with free editing software like iMovie and Windows Movie Maker.

In terms of content, decide what kind of video you are going to make. Will it be informative, entertaining, shocking, funny? The more entertaining a video is the more potential it has to go viral. On the other hand, an informative video might be more useful to your audience. Decide on how you want to position your brand. And remember, short, concise and less scripted videos are best.

Posting Your Video

Post your video everywhere! The more places it is, the easier it will be found. Some sites to consider:

blip.tv

YouTube

Flickr

iTunes

Or use a service that will post your video to all of the video sharing sites for you. For example, Visible Measures or Tubemogul.

Optimizing Your Video

Optimizing your video is key if you want people to find it. Using descriptive, straightforward keywords in your title, description, and tags will help your video show up in relevant search results.

Make sure you promote your video! Once you have uploaded it to a video sharing site, use the embed code provided to post your video on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and your blog. The great thing about embedded video is that it can be posted in multiple places, and unlike text, Google does not have a duplicate content penalty.

Analyze

Why make a video if you do not analyze and track its success? Here are some tools to use to see who is watching your video, where they are coming from and what they are finding engaging about it:

YouTube Insights

blip.tv stats

Plus, Visible Measures and Tubemogul provide analytics across multiple video sites.

Resources

How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing by Hubspot. Hubspot hosted an excellent webinar that covered content development, equipment needed, editing and publishing, optimization, and analytics.

How to Make YouTube Videos Look Great by Squidoo. This Squidoo article tells you how to encode, compress or optimize your videos to get them to look their best.

Make Internet TV is a step-by-step guide to recording and publishing online videos. This is a great site. It covers everything: equipment, shooting techniques, video tutorials for using editing software, licensing explanations, publishing options and ways to promote your video.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources by Mashable is excellent. They cover online video how-to sites; online video editors, converters, sharing and hosting sites; vidcasts and vlogging; video mashups; mobile video apps; video search; and online video downloading services.

Video SEO Tips and Techniques in the Reelseo collection includes tips for beginners to advanced users.

Facebook for Business

Using Facebook as a business can be an interesting exercise in anger management. Facebook is a powerful tool, especially for individuals, but it can drive an intern batty as she tries to set up new pages or migrate Groups to Pages. (Yes, Crissy, the Boxcar Marketing intern, has spent a lot of time with our friend Facebook.) Let me share our experience.

Earlier this year Facebook changed the way that businesses can network in this social space. They upgraded the Pages functionality to better house business profiles. Pages are not identical to Personal Profiles, but they do give a business more leverage than a Group.

With a Page, people interested in following your organization can become fans of your Page. On your Page, you can host photos, videos, RSS feeds, and custom applications.

Creating a Page
A Page needs to be administered by a person so start by creating a Personal Profile (for a real person because fake accounts are removed by Facebook). The Personal Profile should be of someone in your company who is going to stick around for awhile. Then follow the links to create a Page. You can change and add administrators to your Page after it is set up.

You will be asked to select what type of Page. Choose wisely because you can not change it afterward. By choosing the type of Page, you are choosing a default set of fields to complete. For example, choosing Band gives you opportunities to bring in a playlist. Choosing Public Figure - Government Official asks for your date in office.

Adding Stuff to Your Page
A Page can have all sorts of tabs, including Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions, Events, YouTube, Notes, Boxes.

Wall is where your status feed aggregates. Info is what you want to tell the world about your organization. Photos are, well, photos. Discussions are discussion forums where you can start a topic and have fans discuss it. Events is an aggregated listing of events you are hosting. YouTube is your YouTube channel. You enter your YouTube details and your videos are automatically pulled into Facebook, which is nice because it eliminates the redundancies of uploading videos to two places. Notes is for mini-blog posts or links to things you like. And Boxes is a crazy place where all sorts of things can be pulled into one spot, like videos, RSS feeds, photos, etc.

Editing Stuff on Your Page
Here is another opportunity to lose your mind. To edit most applications (Discussions, YouTube, Notes), you go to the Wall of your Personal Profile and click the “Edit Page” link on the top left. From here, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the application box to edit and change its settings.

You can move application boxes to your Wall or to your Boxes tab by clicking on the pencil icon next to the Application name. Applications can be either on your Wall or in your Boxes tab, but cannot be in both places at once.

To move applications around in the Boxes tab, just drag them. That is the easiest part of this whole admin experience.

Claim Your Facebook Username
Visit http://www.facebook.com/username to claim a shortcut name to your Page. Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation was temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 that have more than 100 fans can now claim a username.
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

Help Us Get 100 Fans so we can learn how to do more things on Facebook.
Please Become a Fan of Boxcar Marketing.

How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing

HubSpot recently held a webinar on how to use video for your online marketing campaigns. Here are some of their tips.

Content

There’s a content tradeoff. You can either make an informative video with lots of information for the viewer or an entertaining video that catches viewers’ attention and has the potential to go viral.

Short is sweet. Focus on the first ten seconds of your video and try to do something shocking or entertaining to rope people in.

Use an outline, not a full script. You’ll be much more engaging.

Test your video on friends and coworkers and edit it according to their responses. If they don’t find your joke funny, chances are your online audience won’t either.

Optimization

Publish and promote everywhere. You want your video found!

If you upload your video to either Visible Measures or Tubemogul , they’ll upload it to all of the different video sharing sites for you and provide you with analytics, too.

You need to decide if are you going to optimize your video for SEO (by using straight-forward keywords) or for viral (by using enticing keywords). Tip: start with a viral title to make the video popular and then change it to a more keyword-rich title to make use of its long tail potential.

Post your video on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and your blog. Encourage co-workers and friends to post it on their blogs too.

SEO

YouTube

* Use keywords in your title and description. Include a link to your website in the first couple of lines of the description so that viewers see it when the description is collapsed.

* Tags are important. Although they’re not visible on the public video page, they govern what videos your video shows up.

* Encourage people to rate and comment on your video. Controversial content is one way to spark discussion.

iTunes

* Make sure that the title, artist and description are keyword-rich.

* Use an appealing image to stand out on the search page.

* Ask viewers to review your video to increase its popularity.

Analyze

Analytics are crucial! Why make a video if you don’t measure and track its success?

Use YouTube Insights or Blip.tv Stats to see who’s watching your video and what they’re finding engaging about it. You can also use Visible Measures or Tubemogul, to see your analytics across multiple video sites.

For more information watch the full webinar and download the slides.

Looking for related information? Check out Steven Witten’s article Six Degrees of YouTube, a case study of online competitive video dynamics, which looks at how YouTube’s ‘related videos’ list gets built and the effect this list has on a video’s popularity.

5 Myths About Social Media

Boxcar Marketing has been out and about on the speaking circuit lately and the following myths keep presenting themselves. Let’s dispel them, shall we?

Myth #1: Social media is a marketing strategy.

Social media is not a marketing function; it’s an overall high-level business strategy that supports your organization’s goals.

Myth #2: It’s all about the online tools.

Social media is not about sending out electronic press releases or setting up a Facebook page. It’s about how we can use the tools to engage with our community. For example, how can we use electronic press releases to capture the attention of a new audience or how we can use Facebook to encourage social interactions that build loyalty and connections to the company and between community members.

Myth #3: Building online communities requires tight control and management.

Nope. You always have people out there talking about you; it’s called word of mouth. In traditional approaches, we make sure that people have a positive experience with us at all levels, from the person who answers the phone to the customer service to the follow-up afterwards.

The same is true with social media strategies. Relinquishing control does not mean abdicating responsibility; it means that you control the things within your control. You set the stage and the conditions that allow for your organization and community members to thrive. That way, people have good things
to say.

Myth #4: Social media is time consuming.

The key here is practice. The first time you do something it takes time. The first press release you ever wrote, the first job description for a new hire, the first report, whatever it was, you were doing something new and you needed to be slow and methodical in your approach. But as you gained experience, things got faster and easier. The same is true with the web. It’s just practice.

Myth #5: Your audience isn’t online.

The average Canadian spends close to 43 hours per month online. And it isn’t just young people who are spending time online. The latest Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada report (PDF) showed that in May 2007: 29% of age 50+ web users visited a social media site in the last month versus just 8% in September 2006; 72% of 20-29 year olds had visited a social networking website, up from 44% in September 2006.

For more information

Read the Harvard Business Review article Getting Brand Communities Right by Susan Fournier and Lara Lee. The site also includes a great quiz to help you determine if your business is social media ready.

How to Get Marketing Budget from Your Boss

In tough times, it is even tougher to secure your marketing budget because most companies see marketing as an expense rather than an investment.

It is easy for managers to slash marketing budgets when they do not understand how marketing affects the health of their organizations. Your job is to build an understanding of what value marketing brings to the organization and how marketing affects the health of the organization.

How do you do this? You need to understand what type of manager you have.

Types of Managers

1. The German Shepherd.
Intent on business, these managers are direct. They defend their territory and state opinion as fact. They are responsible for the pack but can be impatient, demanding and blunt.
Approach: Be brief, be brilliant, be gone. This type of manager likes to win. You have to present alternatives so that he or she can make the choice. That said, you can guide them by presenting the alternatives clearly and the potential value or gain for each. Visuals and graphs work well for presenting the numbers. Show vs. tell, then get out of the way.

2. The Jack Russell Terrier.
Ready for adventure, these managers are friendly, excitable and animated. Entertainment is the key. They do not focus on details. They are more interested in the friendly chatter than getting down to business.
Approach: Schedule time for chatting and let this manager speak. High energy and being upbeat, even when presenting challenges, is key. This type of manager also likes to be the center of attention so show how your marketing ideas will help achieve popularity and recognition.

3. The Basset Hound.
Mild mannered, these managers like safety and status quo. They appear calm and do not get easily excited. New ideas make these managers uncomfortable. They like to blend into the group rather than stand out.
Approach: Ask specific questions to establish this manager’s true needs, then provide support. For those who prefer to endure, stubbornly sticking to the path of least resistance is the natural choice. You must figure out how to change the path and gently coax along other followers. Make sure you listen carefully and ask specific questions.

4. Border Collie.
Sharp as tacks, these managers focus on the details. They ask questions, study the implications and analyze information to the point of perfection. They can be standoffish.
Approach: Provide the facts and plenty of background detail. Avoid personal issues and feeling intimidated. Be calm and measured in your response to questions. These types of managers need all the information before being able to make a decision.