Author Archives: russellondigital

Recruitment Of Social Media Followers

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My last post explained how, as an agency, you can set up social media channels for your client. This post refers to the recruitment of fans and followers for those channels.

By now you will have a campaign strategy, you know where your target audience can be found online and you’ve activated channels to reach them. Now you want to get people following your client. There will be plenty of potential followers but you should begin by seeking out the most high-quality ones.These can be defined as thought leaders within the client’s sector who are active in social media channels and have a sizeable following already.

I’ve categorised them into four groups:

  • key bloggers
  • Twitter influencers
  • Facebook Group moderators
  • website and forum owners

I’ll explain how to find them, contact them and give advice on recruiting them below. Continue reading →

Setting Up And Using Social Media Channels

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Expanding on my last post which concerned the development of a coherent strategy for social media campaigns, this post will address the setting up and use of social media channels.

It is not my intention to discuss technical issues, instead I will explain how the channels can be used tactically as part of the overall strategy. It is written from the view of a specialist digital or PR agency who will be providing social media marketing services for their client. Continue reading →

Creating A Social Media Strategy

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My last post covered the effective planning of a social media campaign. This next phase of the campaign sees the results of the research being used to inform a social media strategy.

Without a strategy untargeted messages will be posted in channels where the intended audience might not be active. It ensures that there is a common tone of voice used across all the social networks pertinent to the campaign, and that any content posted is relevant. Finally, it determines the results that will measure whether the campaign has been a success or not.

The key stages of strategy development are: monitoring, theme development, channel selection, content planning, setting KPIs and defining the engagement policy. These stages are described below.

Continue reading →

Planning A Social Media Campaign

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Social media continues to sweep through the marketing departments of businesses large and small. Eager marketers are commissioning digital and PR agencies to build Facebook apps, Twitter pages and blogs, and then populating them with a seemingly random range of comments and promotional messages that so often fail to have the impact expected.

If you are developing a social media campaign for your client it is crucial that it is well planned before a single status message, tweet or video is uploaded. This ensures that the stakeholders’ expectations are managed and that the scope of the project doesn’t creep beyond its original scale and budget.

The campaign planning stages are described below. Continue reading →

Using Web Widgets For Brand Building

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Also known as a badge, app or gadget, a web widget is a small standalone application that is typically created in DHTML, JavaScript or Flash and installed on a webpage by a site owner. Although the widget displays on the page, it resides on its developer’s web server, being referenced when the page loads.

Examples of simple widgets are stock tickers, clocks and calendars. But widgets can be far more complex, using the various rich media functions of JavaScript and Flash to perform as mini applications in their own right.

In social media, people use widgets to enhance their personal pages and add them to blogs, profiles and community pages.

Because the functionality and design are completely controlled by their owners, widgets can be branded and contain embedded links that click through to specific web pages. And being free of charge, easily installed by pasting a few lines of code into a page, and lightweight, widgets offer an opportunity for brands to create something that can be shared.

Branded widgets should reflect the business that built them. The Expedia widget, for example, acts as a search tool that will take users to holiday and hotel offers on the main Expedia website. The Apple widget displays product reviews and downloads.

By developing a useful, engaging widget you create a mechanism for your audience to promote your business at a relatively low cost. Potentially a widget could spread virally across the web, being passed from user to user, and the more websites your widget is on the more people are seeing your brand without ever visiting your own site.

An Introduction To Digital Planning

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What is digital planning? Well it depends on who you speak to, there isn’t a standard answer. Different agencies approach digital planning in different ways and their planners would describe their roles in dissimilar terms as this presentation from Heather LeFevre demonstrates.

Below I’ve listed what I think are the 9 core aspects of digital planning, but first let’s set the scene by looking at traditional advertising account planning. You’ll notice that digital planning sometimes compares to traditional planning but is often quite different. Continue reading →

How Financial Services Can Use Social Media

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As we are all aware, social media has radically altered the way businesses can market to their customer base. Some brands like Pringles and Skittles have been able to create a fan base that happily interacts with their various social media activities, but these tend to be in the FMCG sector where entertaining, shareable campaigns are more easily accepted by their customers. What about more “serious” sectors, how can they use social media to reach out to an audience?

This post presents findings I’ve discovered specifically about the issues facing financial services organisations with regard to social media marketing and offers some  recommendations for how they can improve their activity. Continue reading →

8 Ways You Can Use Virtual Worlds For Business

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I live in Birmingham whose famous sons include Ozzy Osbourne, Joseph Priestly, Edward Burne-Jones and J.R.R. Tolkein. Tolkein of course was famous for his tales of Middle Earth, that fantasy land populated by trolls, elves and dwarves. That got me thinking about virtual worlds and their place in business.

Generally virtual worlds aren’t particularly popular for business. If marketing managers are aware of them, they tend to regard them as games or gimmicks. According to research carried out by Forrester in 2009, only 11% of companies are using virtual worlds in any kind of business activity.

However there are examples of virtual worlds being used seriously for marketing. Computer networking firm Cisco used Second Life, probably the most well known virtual world, to save over $100,000 when they launched a new server.

what is a virtual world?

A virtual world is a three-dimensional, web-based simulation of the real world (though usually with a few sci-fi elements, such as teleporting thrown in). Its population is made up of graphic depictions of its users, called avatars (the Sanksrit term for an incarnate god!). Avatars aren’t necessarily true likenesses of the individuals they represent; your avatar could be a man, woman, creature or object.

Although a virtual world might look like a game, it’s not. You don’t compete against other players and there is no particular goal that would make you a winner. The purpose of the virtual world is to interact with other users and form relationships as you would in real life.

So how exactly can companies use virtual worlds to promote their products and services to customers? Read on to see my top 8 business uses for virtual worlds. Continue reading →

27 Questions For Website Requirements

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A key part of the website development process is the initial stage of of requirements gathering from the client. This is where a web development agency will ask the various questions to find out exactly what the client wants or expects from a new website.

But what questions should the agency be asking? Below I’ve listed 27 that could be put to a client. Continue reading →

An Introduction To Mobile Marketing

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People’s use of the mobile web is normally dictated by specific needs at that moment. For example, you may be visiting an unfamiliar city and want to find a pizzeria. This means that marketers are able to reach people at the exact time that they want a particular products or service, anywhere at any time of the day. As such mobile commerce (m-commerce) and location-based advertising are up and coming marketing techniques.

The Smartphone Intelligence Survey 2010 by Karter Media’s Compete found that one-third of smartphone users who searched for local; businesses via mobile ended up visiting or calling the location. A smartphone can be defined as a mobile phone that has advanced functionality such as a camera and is able to access the web, e.g. an iPhone or Blackberry. Continue reading →