Texting Campaigns for Business

December 4th, 2008

Thinking about starting a mobile marketing campaign for your company? The success of SMS texting campaigns are evident, and with proper management, can be a very useful tool in measuring ROI.

The benefits of mobile marketing lie in its ability to reach your customer immediately, send quick bites of information to keep a company top-of-mind, and offer exclusive deals or promotions to keep customers engaged. In August, over 2.9 million people received Obama’s text message announcing his VP candidate, as you can see in the article Hearts-a-Twitter over Obama. TAO, a premiere nightclub in Las Vegas, has a subscriber base of 2,000 within 3 weeks of beginning their texting campaign and earned $6170 through the first promotion.

Coupons. Promotions. Interactive games. Free downloads. There are a variety of ways to connect with your customers through mobile marketing, but the key is offering them something of value. You don’t want customers to feel inundated with useless message, rather, you want them to feel connected to your brand and look forward to what they’ll receive next. Here are some key steps to creating a texting campaign:

1. Define Campaign and Set Objectives - First, you have to make sure that your campaign is relevant, has a call to action, and your objectives are clearly defined. A successful campaign can not be effective and can not be measured without a goal and focus.
2. Create Campaign - This is where you will entice people to sign up for the campaign, decide what to say (word count restrictions, promotional ideas, sending video or photos), and the carrier or method you will use to distribute the message.
3. Test on Various Platforms - After your campaign has been designed, test on several mobile platforms. Remember, not all cell phones can see video and read all symbols sent through messages. Design your campaign for the highest level of readability and understandability so your users will respond to the message.
4. Implement and Measure - Now you’re ready to send out your campaign and see the results. Checking open rates, offering special codes used in promotions or surveying location visitors are some of the many ways to measure your campaign.

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Social Media Phone—New Wave in Texting Campaigns?

December 2nd, 2008

According to Nielsen Mobile Ratings, there are currently around 259 million wireless devices and mobile data subscribers in the US. What does that mean for your business? I would say it’s time to look into mobile marketing and texting campaigns as a way to reach your target audience and provide more interaction between your consumer and your brand.

An article featuring Jon Fortt, a senior writer with Fortune and “Big Tech” blogger, shows him saying, “The rumor is that Motorola is working on a phone geared to social media. So, I think we’re going to see more people using social media on mobile devices and across platforms,” says Fortt. “That opens new pitfalls and opportunities for communicators. For example, Twitter suggests we’re moving to shorter snippets of information. That means you’ll see an increased premium placed on communicating tersely. I also think you’ll see an increased viral nature of messaging.” Read More…

A social media phone? If you’re not in the business of social media and haven’t been researching or utilizing SMS texting campaigns, you wouldn’t think this would be a necessary device. But, consider sending a movie in an SMS campaign. This is exactly what we’ve been working on at JPRA. Because there are a number of different cellular devices with different capabilities (text only, Internet subscriptions, viewing capabilities), our interactive designer had to test the SMS video on several platforms to ensure our entire audience would get the most out of the message. This doesn’t mean that an SMS campaign won’t be successful without the social media phone, it just means more compatibility for cool features.

Always keep your customers in mind, and the privacy laws surrounding mobile phones, and make sure to keep it fun!

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Why Blog?

November 21st, 2008

I have been reading Paul Gillin’s new book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing”. Great book for anyone wanting know what other marketers are doing with social media, and to learn some success stories and tips. My favorite secret so far- start with the business goal, not the tools.

Out of all the social media tools available, a blog is one of the most adoptable that can help you achieve a number of goals you have in mind. One of those goals may be to increase search engine optimization for your Web site.

Search engine crawlers love updated content. For many company Web sites, their content is not updated regularly for the search engines to keep viewing it as relevant, therefore your site can go further and further down the rankings for your keywords. A blog can help remedy that situation.

Check out this post from Lee Odden titled SEO Benefits from Blogs.

He gives eight reasons why blogs help SEO. Here are the first five.

1. Fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
2. Active community - Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.
3. Crawlable URLs - Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
4. Inbound link magnet - One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.
5. Structured content - Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.

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A Social Education

November 11th, 2008

A week ago I presented to a group of students about social media as a form of strategic communication at KC Ad Club’s annual career day. I asked the students to raise their hand if they knew you could build a career off social media, I was surprised that few did. Maybe they were afraid to answer back, or maybe they really didn’t know, but it made me wonder how much these future grads are learning about social media in their journalism classes. I realized that while we marketers are trying to figure out Web 2.0, teachers are probably struggling with how to teach Web 2.0.

I don’t blame them. Traditional public relations is changing. Suddenly you have to learn how to pitch to a reporter and a blogger; how to write a press release and a social media press release.

Job descriptions are changing as well. What now reads,” Excellent written and verbal communications skills, plus knowledge of new media is a plus.” Soon may read, “Excellent written and verbal communications skills, plus experience pitching to bloggers, leveraging Twitter for brand interaction, and superior understanding of search engine optimization.”

Web 2.0 is a fast changing world. How do you keep up? It’s hard, but check out this post on Mashable from back in July. It gives 35 examples of what corporations like Starbucks and Nike are doing with social media right now.

After you read that…just jump in!

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Identifying Key Online Influencers Webinar

November 7th, 2008

I invite you to attend the B2B Power Exchange Webinar: Identifying Key Online Influencers

• Date: Friday, Nov 21
• Time: 11:00 AM-12:00 PM Pacific
• Location: Online
• RSVP at Valerie Jennings–Identifying Key Online Influencers

Description: Join Valerie Jennings, CEO and president of Jennings Public Relations and Advertising as she speaks about her expertise in social media. She will communicate how to promote green initiatives through social media strategies, showing how companies are taking their brand online and the importance of communicating with online audiences such as blogs and news sites to grow your business. Learn about the art of online storytelling, how identifying online audiences will help develop organic SEO, and the impact of using promotional video. View results from a social media relations campaign that engaged top bloggers within the sustainability blogosphere along with architects. These outcomes will have a substantial impact in how you engage social media relations in the future.

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