I have had a certain product break on me four times in the past three months. Each time I didn’t complain, just filled out the warranty, sent the product in and got a new one. Now the fourth time the product broke, I decided to take to social media because, quite frankly, I felt people should know about this and along with that, I really did want to see how they would respond if I posted negatively on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I started by posting a long message on the brand’s Facebook wall, explaining all of the brand’s faults and how ridiculous of a situation I had been put through with their product.  I posted this around 9:00 A.M. with hopes that they would respond quickly (negatively or positively) so I could either make a Facebook scene or in fact escalate this situation to someone at the company who could help me quickly. After posting on their Facebook wall, I took to Twitter and posted a couple of tweets on how bad their product is and the predicament I was in with the product breaking four times on me. I made sure to use @ mentions and keep a period in front so everyone who doesn’t follow both the brand and I could see it.

The following is how the brand handled the situation and what they did wrong/right:

The Good:

The brand crafted a great Facebook response, being extremely apologetic, actually stating the failure rate of the product (only 4.6 out of 100 these products fail at all, but yet I had 4 break in three months) and directing me to email them instead of continuing the conversation on Facebook (smart tactic).
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If you follow our Facebook page, you may have noticed that early last week, we quietly marked the 10-year anniversary of envisionit media, inc. We’ll be celebrating properly as the year goes on (so be sure to keep up with us here and on Facebook and Twitter for updates). Meanwhile, I thought I’d take a look back at a few notable differences between the digital marketing landscape a decade ago and today.

It wouldn’t be a very quick read if I included every single difference, so these are just my faves. Enjoy the walk down memory lane and provide your own memories in the comments!

OMG, what did we do without Facebook?
That’s right…10 years ago, Facebook didn’t. even. exist. Gasp! Social media was barely even a phrase. Yes, the idea of social media has been alive for some time—think instant messenger and message boards. But the marketing world’s favorite buzzword of the last few years didn’t quite yet have today’s popularity and meaning back in 2002.

And how quickly the space has grown! In 2002, Friendster was introduced. Myspace followed in 2003. Flickr and Digg hit in 2004, and that same year the college scene was introduced to The Facebook. Twitter was born in 2006. StumbleUpon, FourSquare, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest…all these social networks later, and companies now commonly have dedicated social media marketing roles and entire departments.

Phone is ringin’…
I happened to graduate from college in December 2001 (which is why I know to follow up this section’s subtitle with “…oh my god.” Name the reference in the comments if you know it!) and got my first cell phone a few months later in 2002. It was the standard Nokia phone that everyone else had. It made calls, it received calls, that was about it. Some fancy people had PDAs at the time, but it would be a few years before Blackberrys found popularity and exactly 5 years until the first iPhone was introduced. And now? There’s an app for that! And QR codes, geo-fencing, mobile-friendly websites, mobile SEO…and the word on the street for a few years now has been that the future is mobile marketing.
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Pinterest is the fastest ever growing social media website. It was the fastest site ever to surpass the 10 million user mark. Of those users, 80% are women and 55% of those women are aged 25-44. Pinterest users are spending on average 14+ minutes a day and 98 minutes a month on the site, which is only lower than Facebook and Tumblr (ComScore). These are the numbers.

Does your brand’s target audience fit into the above mentioned demographic? If it does, you should definitely consider opening a Pinterest account. Women are flocking to Pinterest and using it to create recipe books, inspiration boards, plan trips, search for clothes, plan their weddings, and find and share fitness tips.

Getting Your Brand On Pinterest
When setting up your brand on Pinterest, you will want to make it personalized. Create your own inspirational pin boards that don’t include your products, but can go along with your theme.  Show the consumers that you’re more than just a brand and that you get inspiration from elsewhere.  Pinterest is not about self promotion, it is about sharing what you love or are interested in.

Now, you’re a business, so its important to present your products on Pinterest in a light that users will repin. Use creative photos of your products, recipes, documents, etc. Don’t just use stock images that are boring, Pinterest is meant to help in the creative process so Be Creative! You will want to consistently be posting (we recommend 50% brand, 50% community outreach). Don’t just post once a week, post every day. “Like” other people’s pins; it’s a community, so be active. The more you post quality items on Pinterest, the more likely your items will be repinned.
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If you have a website that requires users to register or login to take action, it’s time to consider implementing a social login option. That is, the ability to login to a website via your existing Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or other account.  A recent social identity study reveals a few compelling stats supporting this:

• 90% of consumers will leave a website if they forget their user name and password
• 86% are bothered by being asked to create a new account on a website, and most will then leave the site or not return
• 41% of users would prefer social login over having to create a new account (35%) or even using a guest account (24%) (the same question in a study 1 year prior returned the reverse results in terms of order of preference)

What’s more, 78% of social login fans share site content with their social network. So not only does the social login option increase the likelihood that visitors will interact with your site and prevent them from leaving, it can also help encourage your customers to promote your site.

Think about every opportunity you might have for this, even in regards to content that doesn’t exist yet. Can people leave comments or write reviews on your website, and if not, can you find a way to integrate that kind of feature? Giving users opportunities to interact with your site and engage with your brand is important itself, and social login would be the cherry on top to help get them to participate.

And can visitors purchase products from your site? If they see an option to login through, say, Facebook, eliminating their need to even think about a password, they’ll be more likely to jump into their account and buy. Beyond that, once they’re logged in, you have opportunities to allow them to easily share what they purchase or what they want with their social network. Tack on an incentive to them to share with friends for even better response.
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With their new “Search Plus Your World” feature, Google’s search results are undergoing a transformation that will drastically change the way search results appear to users.  The feature is now live on the Google Network, and will be fully rolled out to all users that are logged in to Google and searching in the English language.

What does the “Search Plus Your World” feature do?

The new “Search Plus Your world” combines Public, Personal, Social (Google+ only), and Private search all into one algorithm. Public results are just regular Google searches, while the new Personal feature compiles results based both on your past search behavior and social connections. The feature will also feed in relevant content that his been shared within your circles on Google+.

Here’s an image provided by Google that shows an example of the Personal Results feature. (Note: if you select the globe icon on the right it will hide personal results, and when the person icon is selected, personal results will be turned on.)

The left arrow above points to the section that states there are 50 personal results out of the 419,000 found for the search. Some of these 50 personal results will be blended into the first page of your search results.

Personal Results are compiled from these existing areas:

• Regular Web Listings
• Regular Web Listings  (boosted because of social behavior and social connections)
• Public & Private Google+ posts, photos, and Google Picasa Photos

In the image below (again provided by Google) we see more of the results for a search for “Chikoo,” the name of a Google developer’s dog. Chikoo is also the name of a fruit, and before the “Search Plus Your World” feature was implemented nothing related to his dog would have ever shown up in the search results. But with the new feature…
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New kinds of social media are popping up like wildfire, but which ones are catching the eyes of consumers?

We all know the social media big timers—Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—but a new wave of alternative social media sites are worth looking into. Some have been around a while, but they can still help your business’ visibility and discoverability.
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• YouTube has been around since 2005 as a video sharing website. Recently, companies have been using this online tool to promote their services and advertise themselves. YouTube videos work because they are easily accessible and can be shared easily. Not to mention they help with Google Optimization.

• StumbleUpon was created to let users “stumble” through sites related to their interests. All companies have to do to become a part of StumbleUpon is submit their website and associated categories. From here, whenever a person clicks “stumble,” their website has a chance to pop up on the site. On StumbleUpon, a link to a company’s blog or specific product pages would be most effective.

• Pinterest (pictured above) is a different kind of social media site. A mix between StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook, users can see images other users have “pinned,” or uploaded. You can “re-pin” an image someone else has already pinned onto your own boards. Users create boards and categorize them however they want, such as fitness, food, crafts, or weddings. Business can get into it, too. A bakery could utilize this site by uploading pictures of their wedding cakes and linking the pin on their website. Just one re-pin can reach hundreds of people. Uses of this site can be limitless to a company.

Last week I ran a little social media experiment… non-scientific of course. I tweeted and posted on Facebook that for every twitter Retweet (RT) or Facebook Like/Share I got on a specific post I would donate $1.00 to my Movember campaign.

I didn’t really have any goals besides donating some money “humblebrag” and seeing if I could get 100 RTs & 100 Facebook “Likes” in a day, and seeing if it in fact worked.

Below are my findings:
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•  Surprisingly, it was much harder to get Facebook “Likes” than to get RTs on twitter
• Going into this, I thought I would easily get to 100 Facebook “Likes” but that was not the case at all. With the new Facebook feed, there is so much more news being spread and posts get lost in the clutter much quicker if people are not actually sharing the post. It is important for something to be shared and not just “liked” if you don’t want the post to be lost in the clutter
• For any brand to show up consistently on Facebook they will need to either be constantly posting status updates, (spammy and annoying) or pay for advertisements on Facebook
• There is also the option of asking your friends to repost/share your status updates, not just like them, but again, that can come off as spammy
• twitter RTs were much easier to come by. I only have 370 followers (don’t judge) but most people were more than willing to give a RT for a good cause

Social media has become a huge part of every company’s marketing mix, whether you are a local business or a nationwide brand. It is important to have a branded Facebook page and a branded Twitter handle to communicate with your consumers directly. Many companies are utilizing Facebook to its maximum potential, but are you using Twitter to its full potential as well?

According to this article by Mashable, Twitter has over 100 million monthly active users, 50% of whom are signing in every day. That is a HUGE audience. But sometimes just pushing your Facebook posts to your Twitter account doesn’t cut it. So let me share some tips to help you maximize your success in the Twitterverse.

1. Utilize free Twitter tools

There are a lot of free tools that can help you utilize Twitter to its maximum potential. My two favorite are Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. These tools not only provide easy management of multiple accounts or brands, but will also greatly help with the other tips proved below.

2. Set up relevant live searches

When using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck you have the ability to set up live streams of searches using whatever terms you desire.  As an example, lets say you are a hotel in the Chicagoland area. You can set up a search for “Chicago Hotels” in your Tweetdeck account. You will then have a live stream of all Twitter users tweeting about Chicago hotels, hotels in Chicago, etc. So if someone tweets, “What is the best hotel to stay at in Chicago?” you can quickly reach out to him or her directly with a response in a matter of seconds.
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Last week we shared news of the upcoming release of Facebook Timeline—a major update to the site that promises to summarize your entire life since birth. Instead of the old layout that stacks your profile updates, burying old but important news, the redesign staggers your Facebook activity in more of a scrapbook style, encouraging users to explore and share momentous occasions of their life. It’s a major change and one that has caused much uproar on Facebook–as all Facebook changes tend to do. Many users are threatening to close their Facebook accounts or–worse, yet (sarcasm noted?)–to defect to Google+.

Being marketers, our immediate questions here at envisionit media had more to do with the impact on business and brand pages (the specifics of which are yet to be released by Facebook). But before we can thoroughly explore those possibilities, I thought it best to experience Facebook Timeline for myself and figure out just how many Facebook users we might be losing.

The pure aesthetic changes are enough to draw you right in–you can now choose a strong main image that appears at the top of the page, behind your profile picture. This is called the “cover” and I already see myself swapping that out a lot based on my mood, recent events or trips I’m excited about, important occasions, or just to add some humor to my page. I think I’ll now also keep my profile picture pretty consistent–that is my personal brand, after all.
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