Webinars are online seminars or presentations used to provide information about any subject your company feels your potential customers might be interested in. They can be interactive or not.  One big advantage of webinars is they presented live and then placed in archives for others to view later.

I personally have used webinars extensively for training, usually when we launch product upgrade we take the opportunity to conduct a webinar on how to the new features. We also conduct periodic webinars just to stay connected with our user base. The response to our webinars varies depending on the topic, ranging from only a few participants to fifty or more. Based on the number of registrants and attendees we have had at our webinars demonstrates that most of our users are comfortable with the technology.

During the course of the webinar, we get the opportunity to ask questions of our audience. We also record all our webinars (minus the audience interaction) and made it available on our website for people to view at their convenience. Given the positive response to the webinar and the positive feedback we have received, we believe that our webinars will increase our subscriber “stickiness.”

In addition, offering instructional content on your website can significantly increase the likelihood of visitors “returning another time to learn something more, and ultimately make a purchase.” According to Ken Zwerdling (CEO of Foreign Translations)  “Some visitors just want to learn more about the service and the industry before they make the decision to [make a purchase].” Stephanie Chandler, author of From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur, agrees, saying that by adding informational content to your company’s website you have greater power to attract traffic from search engines. Chandler has built her business around the power of marketing with web content. webinars can be an important part of the instructional content you offer on your site.

While training is the most common use for webinars, they can also be used to reach your target audience and help you increase sales of services or products.  Some Internet marketers use them to help teach potential customers about the products they are selling.  Most webinar tools have a registration feature which allows you to identify prospects who register and then see if they actually attend the event and for how long.  This can give you a pretty good feeling as to how interested a prospect is in the products you are selling.

Many Internet users are more willing to view a webinar about a subject than to just read about it.  This allows Internet marketers can to use them as teasers or bait to help convert prospects.  Webinars gives you a portal to provide information in a way that helps you build branding, image, and customer loyalty.

There are a wide variety of webinar tools available online and I have tried several of them.  When choosing a webinar tool things to look for include the number of concurrent visitors the tool allows, polling capabilities, ability to invinte participants, require registration, track attendance and record the webinar.  If you are interested in exploring how a webinar tool might be used for your organization, you might want to look at DimDim. They offer a webinar tool that is free for up to 20 participants.  While the tool lacks some of the features of some of the full feature commercial tools, it is more than adequate for webinars for a small number of attendees.

I have found webinars to be a great way to connect with customers and potential customers and to build a library of content that contributes to the credibility of my company.


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References:

Free Coaching on How to Market Using Webinars http://www.squidoo.com/marketingwithwebinars
A Case for using Webinars: http://www.ctinnovations.com/blog/?p=355
Drive Sales with Tutorials http://bestwebtutor.com/wordpress/?p=383

Labels: online marketing, social media, website tips

Twitter is an excellent tool for reaching out and connecting with people, whether it be friends, employees, customers or potential customers.  When entrepreneurs consider using Twitter in their company they first need to develop a Twitter strategy. That is, they need to know what purpose Twitter is going to serve within their organization.  Understanding the strategy will help you know how many resources you will need to dedicate to maintaining relationships on Twitter.

There are a number of ways a firm can use Twitter:

1) Using Twitter to help boost website traffic

This is one of the key marketing uses for Twitter.  Entrepreneurs can use Twitter to introduce new products, press releases or special promotions on Twitter.  If you send tweets that demonstrate real value to your followers they can re-tweet your posts, which can create significant traffic surges that can be tracked in real time. If you use a URL shortener to post your URLs on Twitter, it becomes easy to follow exactly how many Twitterers followed your Twitter link to your site.


Although brands take many different approaches to driving traffic with Twitter, one entrepreneurial venture "The Organic Dish" uses Twitter to post organic recipes, promote farmers markets and to announce new meal offerings for their ready to cook organic meal company.

2) Using Twitter to improve search rankings

One of the side effects of boosting site traffic is that it can increase the inbound links from blogs and other high quality sites which can significantly improve a site's performance on the engines. According to "Chief Marketer," marketers should think of Twitter as "an accelerated link machine; as more and more inbound links accumulate, the credibility of the marketers' site rises in step in the eyes of the search engines."

3) Using Twitter to sell seasonal merchandise and excess inventory?

You may not have thought of Twitter as a direct sales channel, but Twitter is one way to get promotions on out of season products in front of more people.  This can help companies move old models and other inventory that needs to go.  Some of the brands, retailers and e-tailers currently using Twitter to sell older inventory include:

• Kohlsdotcom: promotes Kohls.com Deals of the Day, contests and sweepstakes, and more
• OldNavyOfficial: promotes sales, offers free shipping and other special promotions, etc.
• BROfficial: promotes sales and other deals for Banana Republic
• MoviesUnlimited: promotes 12-hour specials and DVD preorders for the e-tailer

4) Using Twitter to improve customer relationship management efforts


One of the big benefits of Twitters is that it can allow you to engage with your customers or potential customers.  You can ask customers questions on new products, proposed improvements or upgrades or to get beta testers for your products.  It is an ideal tool for getting real time feedback from you customers and its value in this arena cannot be understated!

Twitter can be an amazing tool to improve your company's visibility online and to improve your interaction with customers and potential customers. However, to achieve the full benefits of Twitter companies need to use it for more than distributing static news or chatter. To gain the full benefits of Twitter you need to participate in the community, provide value and engage your followers. 

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References


http://chiefmarketer.com/disciplines/online/0504-five-twitter-questions/

Labels: online marketing, twitter

There is a great deal of research that has been done both in marketing and in information systems that shows that your reputation online can have a dramatic impact on the willingness of potential customers to d business with you and the prices you can charge for your goods or services (Ba and Pavlou 2002, Lee et. al. 2000, Standifird 2001, Standifird 2002).  Whether or not you decide to formally launch a social media campaign to promote your company or your brand it is important for you to monitor what people are saying about you online.  So you have an opportunity to contribute to the conversations that are occurring.

Entrepreneurs usually are trying to increase the visibility of their company or products.  Depending on how new you company is, there may be few if any people discussing or you online. Before you begin any social media marketing campaign you need to begin by tracking the conversations that are occurring around your products and services.  This will allow you to assess any changes that occur as a result of your marketing efforts.

One way to contribute to and help shape the dialog that occurs about your company is to use tools that allow you to monitor what is being said about about you online and track who is saying it.

Step 1: Sign-up for Alerts

A good place to begin is to sign up for a feed reader like Google reader or Bloglines.  Feed readers aggregate syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

Once you have a feed reader you can sign up for Google Alerts, RSS updates Google sends to you when they find new web pages that include the search terms that you specify.  The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. You can set alerts on your company or product name, topic terms, or even alerts about your competitors.  Google will then will notify you of stories, as they happen, so you won't miss it when someone is talking about things that are important to you online.

If you have a blog, then you will also want to claim your blog on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. Once you register, Technorati tracks blog reactions (blogs that link to yours). Technorati allows you to subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.

Step 2: Search for Social Mentions

There are a number of places where your company can be mentioned that will not appear in the Google or Technorati alerting feeds. This includes people using your name in comments on blog posts, in discussion boards,  bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. There are a number of tools that can help you search for and track these social mentions:

• Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments that allows you to find, follow, and share comments from across the web.
  
• Social Mention, Serph and Keotag are social media search engines that searches a variety of social media sources such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your company, product (or competitors) across social media sources, like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter etc.
• boardtracker.com, Boardreader and Big Boards allow you to get instant alerts from discussion board threads citing your name.
•  Twitter search, Twilert and TweetBeep are tools that you can use locate your name, or other topics in Twitter messages.
• If you have a lot of activity around your name you might want to use, Filtrbox, which only delivers the most relevant, credible mentions of things you need to track. Its "FiltrRank" technology scores content based on three dimensions: contextual relevance, popularity and feedback.

Most of these services allow you can subscribe to your results by either RSS or email (or both).

Using these tools you can track the amount and nature of activity surrounding your name.  If the social mentions are positive you can take steps to highlight the positive.  If the social mentions are negative you can take steps (promptly) to address any problems that have arisen.

Step 3: Track your Contributions

As you jump into social media you should develop a mechanism for tracking all of your company's contributions to the online social sphere.  This can be challenging if you are making contributions to a variety of social network sites or if more than one person is your company is actively contributing. There are tools available for you to monitor your social media contributions allowing you to ensure that contributions are consistent with your messaging strategy.

One tool that is ideally suited to monitoring your companies social media contributions is FriendFeed, a social aggregator. Friend Feed allows you to aggregate all of your social accounts, (e.g. Delicious, Twitter, Your blog, Flickr, and YouTube) into a single easier to manage feed.  FriendFeed allows you to conduct searches on your company throughout all social networks at once. It also allows you to analyze comments that people make on them.

Other tools you can use to monitor your activity on the web includes:

• coComment is another tool that will help you manage your comments across the web.
• Yacktrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and Wordpress blogs.
• You can also use Commentful and co.mments to track your social comments on the web.

Step 4: Develop your Monitoring Plan

After you’ve selected which sources you want to monitor and the tools you want to use to manage your social media campaign management you need to create a plan for for monitoring all of the sources you have identified.  Your plan should include:

• A schedule for how often you will to check your monitoring tools.
• Who will be responsible for monitoring and updating each site or tool.
  

Your schedule will depend on the volume and types of comments you receive. When you start, monitoring each source once a day or week will generally be enough, but as your activity level increases you will probably need to monitor more often.  This allows you to respond to people that are discussing you, network with people who are talking about topics of interest, thank people who have complimented you.

Following these four steps will allow you to stay on top of your e-Image.  Contributing to and monitoring a variety of social media sources will allow you to manage your social network reputation and allow you to better project the image you want to have online.

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• Ba, S., and Pavlou, P. A. "Evidence of the effect of Trust Building Technology in Electronic Markets: Price Premiums and Buyer Behavior," MIS Quarterly, (26:3), 2002, 243-268.
• Lee, Z., Im, I., and Lee, S. J. "The Effect of Negative Buyer Feedback on Prices in Internet Auction Markets," in Proc. of the Twenty-first International Conference on Information Systems, Brisbane, Australia, 2000, 286-287.
• Schawbel, D. "Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation," Mashable: Social MediaGuide, http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/
• Standifird, S. S., "Reputation and e-commerce: eBay auctions and the asymmetrical impact of positive and negative ratings." Journal of Management, (27:3), 2001, 279-295.
• Standifird, S. S. "C2C marketplaces and the Importance of Reputation Type," Electronic Markets, (12:1), 2002, 58-62.

Labels: online marketing, social media

You have looked at the data (or read my last post) and you know you need to be out there, using social media to improve your e-image and to interact with your potential customers or investors.

The question is:
"What should you be doing?" 

The answer is not simple. There are many things you can do with social media but the trick is choosing what makes the most sense for you and your start-up company. Some of the options are:

• Blogs are ideal if you are in a complex environment and you have lots of information and ideas you can share with your customers.
• Wikis are a good choice for publishing user guides, best practices or other documents where your customers can contribute to.
• Forums are useful for complex product or service domains where users have lots of questions and having a knowledge base of questions and answers to those questions is useful.
• Social networking Web sites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter) are useful for connecting directly with your customers and creating a dialog with them about the things they like and don't like about your products or services. They are also very useful for launching specials and promotions.

Before you start

Before you adopt social media in your business it is important that you understand how these sites can work in your specific situation. You need to find out how social media is being used in your industry and among business partners and competitors (if no one in your industry is using social media yet then look at related industries).

Start Small

Once you have a feeling for how other people are using social media create a social media profile on the sites that are popular in your industry and/or in related industries. Once you create your profile it is generally wisest to begin contributing in small ways. For example, instead of creating your own blog, begin by commenting on posts and answering questions on existing blogs that are popular in your industry.

Avoid establishing your own blog, wiki, forum or social network site until you feel you understand the expectations the community has for such a site and you have the time to monitor and update the site on a regular basis.

Remember, social media is about contributing to and conversing with a community and that require a commitment. If you regularly contribution to online conversations you can develop establish an online audience over time. If you do not dedicate time to your online presence your e-image can suffer and ultimately cost customers. Nothing looks worse than a corporate blog, wiki or forum that has not been updated recently. I have seen sites that have a blog that has not been updated in years. This looks much worse than not having a blog at all (If you start a blog, wiki or forum and find you do not have time to maintain it - take it down).

Listen Actively


Even if  you are not ready to actively create a blog or a wiki you still need to search for your company/product name on social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to see what people are saying about you.  You will need to be prepared to respond to comments you receive online.

When responding to comments about your company or product, keep your message positive and let them know you value their input and will use it to improve. Always provide full-disclosure that you are the one representing the brand. Ask people what they think about your product. Remember, when operating in a social media environment you are there to listen and engage, not sell.

Long term Benefits

Social marketing and networking can provide a number of benefits to your company - if you have the time to invest in the social media process. It can:

• increase customer loyalty
• enhance branding awareness.
• allow you to gather instant feedback on your products
• improve sales of new products
• provide evangelists that sell your products to others without even being asked.

One of the things to remember as you create your social media presence, social media is about conversations and information not selling. Be sure what ever you put out there is of value. If it is, people will pay attention to it.

Labels: online marketing, social media