3 Signs That You Shouldn’t Do a Twitter Q&A

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Dr. Mehmet Oz, host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” just been skewered by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection for promoting bogus weight loss supplements. He’d also been ridiculed on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” in a segment that received over 5.4 million YouTube views. Even worse, every social media marketer had seen the #AskJenny debacle, in which former “The View” host Jenny McCarthy had been mocked for her quacky medical views. To connect with the audience, Dr. Oz’s social media team scheduled a Twitter Q&A with the hashtag #OzsInbox. It didn’t go well. In fact, it became one of Twitter’s most epic fails.

When they’re done well, scheduled at the right time, and handled by an experienced social marketing team, Twitter Q&As can be great for a brand. When they’re handled poorly or scheduled at the wrong time, they turn into public relations disasters. Twitter Q&As aren’t a great way to rebuild positive feelings around a struggling brand. If your organization is facing one of these scenarios, you should skip the Twitter chat. [Read more…]

The Intersection Between Reputation and Brand Marketing

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Editor’s note: This post was written by Kevin, an account director at Online Rep Management. He has been working in internet marketing and public relations for over 8 years. Kevin got his start working online in SEO, link building, and some affiliate marketing. Kevin is most passionate about helping good brands become online entities. Read more on Google+ follow Kevin on Twitter!

The relationship between reputation and brand is so tightly knit, it is difficult to separate them, or know where one ends and the other begins. Like love and marriage, it is difficult to have one without the other. Unlike the chicken and the egg, we are pretty sure which comes first.

brand marketing

Before a company can develop a meaningful brand, it has to garner a positive reputation from a loyal base of consumers. There are a number of factors that go into building a brandable reputation. Here are just a few. [Read more…]

How to Use the Art of Email Marketing to Launch Your Blog & Start Converting

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Email marketing is still a powerful marketing and blog promotion tool despite the changes in the ways we communicate online. Although we’re seeing where social media is rapidly evolving the medium and effectiveness of conversations, email still has a place in reaching responsive audiences and building relationships. The trick to email marketing, and practically every other form of marketing online, is that we have to start respecting the medium, the process and the people we see as our users, readers and potential clients.

email marketing for bloggers

To market your blog successfully you’ll have to get out of the mindset of treating subscribers and readers of your blogs as mere users or statistics and start thinking of every single reader as a valued client with whom you value and are building a relationship. Email marketing is relationship building, not mass marketing like television ads. This attitude flows into all aspects of your blogging business and will reap greater rewards as you invest more in building relationships. It’s just that simple. Yet however simple the concept may be, it still requires patience and a long-term vision since no serious relationship is built overnight. [Read more…]

How To Automate Your Marketing Workflows

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As a marketing professional, you are always looking for ways to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing efforts – and ultimately to drive more sales for your organization. However, marketing has become increasingly complicated over the last decade – there are many more channels to manage simultaneously, and markets are becoming more fragmented and diverse. Many marketing teams struggle to deal with this complexity, in large part because they still rely on manual processes that don’t scale to meet the new reality.

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Marketing automation is designed to address this issue – and to actually let marketing teams capitalize on complexity to maximize their effectiveness. It does this by intelligently automating repetitive marketing tasks, integrating existing marketing systems, and providing comprehensive analytic capabilities that deliver new customer insights. By combining these three aspects, automated workflow software significantly enhances marketing effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately delivers significant competitive advantage and increased sales opportunities. [Read more…]

Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Your Blog

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guerilla marketing

Most modern advertising and marketing strategies are trite, because they’ve been used hundreds–if not thousands–of times before. Consumers have seen the same ads so many times that they’ve now grown accustomed to them. These days, vanilla marketing by itself just isn’t enough; you need to be innovative and think outside the box. That’s exactly where guerrilla marketing comes into play. [Read more…]

Why Marketing Your Blog is Crucial to Its Success

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Because blogging has become more mainstream, it’s not enough anymore for businesses to simply have a blog, publish some posts, and call it a day. Blogging has become its own unique cog in the overall branding and marketing machine, forcing companies and blog owners to additionally market their blog if they want to make it successful.

Marketing your blog and promoting the great content that you are focused on writing can help not only generate more blog traffic, but also get more referrals clicks to other pages of your website, especially if you are regularly linking to them within your blog posts (where appropriate). [Read more…]

Five Tips for Better Content Marketing

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Search engine optimization (SEO)

Content marketing is a crucial part of the success of your website. Without it, you will have to rely on unreliable methods of marketing your website’s content – which only results in your content not being seen by your intended audience.

You need content marketing to promote and develop awareness for your content. Here are five tips that will help you improve the content marketing efforts for any website (whether you had it made or you created it with IM Creator): [Read more…]

Quick Review of CES 2013

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Image Credits: Masterimage3D

CES 2013 stunners

You’re probably sitting there after a long day scrolling through Twitter and Google+ hashtags and stories announcing some of the key items this year’s CES show. Your eyes are either on fire from staring at the screen too long or you can’t focus anymore because there’s just too much cool stuff. Yeah, we feel the same way! So let’s get to the good stuff right away and announce what we think are this year’s CES stunners.

Smartphones

The Sony Xperia Z, Alcatel One Touch Idol Ultra (who names these things?) and Samsung flexible display named “Youm” were all unveiled this year. In particular, the much-awaited flexible display Samsung put forth at the Keynote was jaw-dropping.

Samsung flexible OLED Display

There’s been a lot of hype and rumors since last year’s CES, when the rumors first started about the mega-corp was developing cool 21st century that would save us from cracked screens. At the time, Apple was still taking a lot of heat for its screens being too fragile, so this was perfect timing on Sammy’s part. Fast forward to this week’s CES and we now have a working prototype, in which it has been said a new ecosystem can be created from this concept device. The video below shows us more on this amazing new tech development!

Alcatel One Touch Idol Utlra

Onwards to the real fireworks, and the newest titleholder of “world’s slimmest smartphone”. Alcatel outdid themselves at the show and may be one to watch in the future. So how thin is this device? Alcatel’s official measurements put the One Touch Idol Ultra at a paltry 6.45mm! This is definitely poking into Samsung’s flexible OLED display territory. As far as specs are concerned on this bad boy, it sportsa 1.2 GHz dual-core CPU, a4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display, the standard 1 GB of RAM and an 8.0 MP rear camera.

Sony Xperia Z

Last but not least, is the dust and water-resistant smartphone aptly put into the ongoing Xperia series. The durable display on itsslim 7.9mm body holds its dual superpowers discreetly. The full HD 5 1080 x 1920p “Reality Display” is really the stunner on this handheld wonder, but let’s be honest: most people will go right out and dump it in their toilet to test out its water resistance level. Sony lists these at IP55 and IP57, respectively. Rounding out the specs, a Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core CPU, a 13 megapixel camera and of course, screaming fast 4G LTE make this a solidly built smartphone.

Automobiles

You wouldn’t expect to talk about cars but it is CES after all, and it’s not limited to mobile tech and computing. This year we saw Volvo, Toyota, and Audi put their best foot forward. And best foot it was! I think they may have put both forward in order to make a giant leap into the future of how we visualize and implement our vehicles into daily life.

Volvo Sensus Connected Touch

First up is Volvo and their “inlaid iPad” dubbed Sensus Connected Touch. While many have scoffed at the idea of having a touchscreen in their vehicle (it’s nothing new, people have been modding their vehicles for quite some time), the concept displayed by Volvo is (sorry, Transformers franchise) more than meets the eye. The following video shows more info, and pay close attention to all the bells and whistles that can be found in this highly-connected piece of equipment!

Toyota Autonomous Robot Car

Remember that cool scene in the last Terminator movie when the motorcycles were chasing after Christian Bale? Well, now that’s a reality and it’s being brought to you by none other than Toyota. The company has done its absolute best to wipe the slate clean between them and consumers since their disastrous brake scandal. But let’s do away with that morbid news and get to the meat.

2010 Autonomous Audi TTS

On much the same news, comes Audi with their autonomous research facility’s beautiful piece of road art. Something to note with this story is thatNevada granted Audi the first automaker permit and thus, has allowed them to operate autonomous vehicles on public roads! Move over Jetsons!

Source Credits:http://www.audiusanews.com

http://travelgadgets.me/post/40178188948/sony-xperia-z

http://www.binlogs.com/9267/samsung-flexible-oled-display-youm/

http://www.theverge.com/products/one-touch-idol-ultra/6533

What to do With Your Website Before it’s Ready to Launch

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If you want to build excitement, traffic and an audience around your new website or online product launch then your marketing efforts should start from the moment you register the domain name, if not before. In many cases, parked domains are simply a waste of internet real estate and do nothing to help you build your brand or start building a customer base.

There are other more worthwhile but low-effort methods that can be utilised while you work on your site or product behind the scenes and will help you hit the ground running when you are ready for the launch. Don’t leave your domain name doing nothing, or sending traffic to your web host or domain registrar, set it up so that it can at least bring you some benefit before you are ready to unleash the real thing. A simple, well designed temporary page informing visitors briefly what you will be offering them is a vital tool to help to build the buzz. [Read more…]

Use Social Media – Effectively

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With social media, everyone wants to know that what they are saying is having an impact on other people. Getting traffic that responds to your posts is extremely exciting, and keeping them coming back is even better. Here are some simple tips you can use to increase your social media traffic and success.

Be Real

It is not necessary to put on a front and pretend to be something you are not. Online, sooner or later, someone who knows the real you will blow your cover, and the response will be devastating. Besides, it’s also easier to keep up with the right personality if there are no pretenses. People can tell when you are being real or not. [Read more…]