4 Internet Marketing Trends For 2011

information highway

As we’re approaching the end of the 2010 there are numerous developments with businesses using social media. I had predicted that brands will need to figure out how social fits into their overall brand strategy by identifying where the leverage is with social media and how to manage it.

Online communities are now everywhere there is access and common objectives. Even social networks are interconnected themselves pushing and pulling content across various channels.

For business owners, bloggers and marketers, we have to realize that the landscape is changing and will continue to shift towards attentive reach, not frequency.

Instead of trying to reach broad targets of demographic groups, investing in paid media we find valuable organic content becoming more powerful, ranking higher by search engines and shared by passionate communities.

Need more facts to back up the growth of social media? According to Harris Interactive:

9 out of 10 (87%) online adults use social media
Highest percentage (22%) uses social media less than 1 hour per week
Highest percentage of 18-34 yr-olds (17%) uses social media 6-10 hours per week

social media usage study by Harris

It’s indicative that the evolution of social media is not just with the tools. The real “leading indicators” will be how social media gets utilized in the real world, not how marketers want it to be used.

And because we’re living in an over-communicated society with competing and conflicting information, true engagement in this on-demand world will be the biggest challenge moving forward.

I’m not just talking about getting people’s attention in marketing; I’m referring to real meaningful conversations that open up the communication channel that leads to authentic actions.

There is so much noise and deception across all media channels that it only makes sense for most people to ignore them.

Here are 4 internet marketing trends that will be maturing in the coming year:

1) The Return of Direct Marketing

The meaning of your communication is the responses you get especially on the social web where people can simply close a window, ignore a tweet or click away to other attention grabbing links.

Everyone’s got a blog, a website, Facebook page, Twitter account or Youtube Channel. So how do you stand out in a sea of sameness?

As it turns out direct response marketing is still the most effective way to test your marketing campaigns. The difference with social media is that you need to be measuring the right metrics.

It’s essentially the same concept as great salesmanship. Great marketing is great one on one sales focusing on finding out what customers want, their pain, urgency, desire and needs.

Done right you will get insights about your customers that tells you not just what they clicked on but from where, why and how. Remember, greater marketers don’t make assumptions!

Once you have meaningful data, it’s easier to craft your direct response campaign that converts better because you’ll have a list of “high quality” leads that are more likely to buy.

Without qualified leads, you’re basically playing the guessing game, driving in the dark and often a waste of time and money.

Concentrate on appealing and selling to the top 20% of the prospects that are more likely to convert. And if you can integrate your email marketing efforts with social media, you’ll gain further insights on your customer’s media habits, which can be used to optimize your next campaign.

2) The Raise of Social Metrics

Since majority of your prospective customers will not convert immediately upon getting your communication, it’s important to follow-up with email and social media because not only will you know when someone opened the email and what they’ve clicked on; you’ll also learn their social habits and sphere of influence.

The goal is to find out your customer’s “from” and “to” path to your web properties. It could be your online store, a product(s) page, your opt-in page (landing page), a sign-up to webinar or simply a Facebook page.

Ask yourself these questions:

Where are my source of traffic? How much does it cost me? (time, money and resources)
What are the demographics (age, location, habits etc…) of my traffic? Are they on social networks?
What does my customers want? Do I have the same customers online and offline?
How much time does it take for my customers to go from the original source of traffic to my web properties? And what can I do to get them to take the action I want that aligns with what they want?
What social media metrics can bring clarity to the habits of my prospective customers?

There are some nice free tools out there that will provide you with social data to get you started.

One of my favorite way to view my engagement performance is using Hootsuite’s statistics with Google Analytics and email marketing data. This allows me to view the engagement performance across social media from blog articles to emails.

For example, in the past 12 months, I generated 16,000+ clicks from my Twitter account which allows me to see what sort of topic my followers are interested in.

twitter.com/designdamage

I can then tailor my blog content to target further engagement and sharing. The same can be applied to email and this is particularly useful if you have an ecommerce site that allows you to track sales conversions.

The key here is to link metrics to actionable options that you generate for them. That’s why you want people to visit your web properties because you will have control of the environment. Everything is a test in marketing.

3) Focus Shifts from Tactical to Strategic

From the mix of clients and prospects I’ve talked with this year, most of them fall into one of the three buckets: those still experimenting with social marketing, those using social media as an add-on tool with existing marketing tactics and those integrating social as part of their efforts to be more customer-centric.

In the coming year I see more businesses moving towards wanting to be more social embracing what Jeremiah Owyang described as the “hub and spoke” social business model.

The challenge will be how to strategize, streamline, automate, budget, and measure social media and social marketing. Simply put, the one-size-fits-all volume marketing will no longer be effective.

You want more consistent, predictable campaign that can be efficiently replicated instead of one-off campaigns that requires lots of resources and attention to operate.

So how can you achieve that?

The best way is to conduct split testing across integrated campaigns. You must become gradually efficient at implementing and optimizing your campaigns focusing on frequency and delivery of real-time value.

It also requires the big picture marketing strategy, NOT just tactics. At the end it is about getting the highest return on the value you create for your customers. Start thinking about how you can earn engagement that leads to conversation that leads to revenue.

4) Video Marketing Becomes Mainstream

Are you doing any videos? Do you know that a YouTube channel is the equivalent of a Facebook profile? Do you know that online video, yes video can help with your SEO?

Let’s take a look at some data here for you to think about.

At the 2010 Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo, Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR revealed that:

Americans watch more videos a month on YouTube than they conduct searches on Google
A video is 50 times more likely to get a first-page Google ranking than a text page

If those finding aren’t stunning, coming from an SEO perspective check out Pew Internet Research’s recent study indicating that “7 in 10 adult internet users (69%) have used the internet to watch or download video. That represents 52% of all adults in the United States.”

Something to keep in mind is that while online video is exploding, other media channels are slowing down or shrinking!

According to a recent Edison Research’s study indicates that “during an average day, Americans age 12-24 spend two hours and 52 minutes on the internet, making the web the media format American young adults spend the most time consuming. Television closely follows with a daily average of two hours and 47 minutes.”

In addition, as opposed to TV ads, online videos are trackable and can be viewed repeatedly attracting the “long-tail” viewers while allowing you to measure the exact impact of the video and participate around it in the comments section or on blogs.

The bottom line is that although video (Youtube) marketing isn’t anything new, it’s gaining more momentum now because the cost of video production are dramatically reduced today than it was a few years ago.

You can now purchase high definition cameras (such as the Flip HD) for under $150 which creates amazing looking videos. Even the new iPhone4 has HD videos that enable everyone to become a video producer at all times.

Keep in mind that you should consider video marketing tactic to support your overall marketing campaign not the other way around if it doesn’t fit into your strategy. Success video marketing strategy focuses on attracting the right audience with a topic or theme that’s video-worthy and can be compelling!

The take away: We’re in the middle of a media evolution where technology has fundamentally changed the way we consume media and interact with one another. It’s not about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google, iPhone or iPad; it never has been.

It’s about how these tools and platforms support what you want to achieve with your business.

Social is just a label, the real challenge is figuring out how to deliver optimal customer experience that builds meaningful relationships between you and your customers.

Am I missing anything here? Please leave your comments and questions, I’m interested to hear how you’re using internet to market your business, products or services.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salesmanship

3 Brand Marketing Trends That Will Continue

by Eric Tsai

3 brand marketing trends

When you hear something enough times, it may be a fad. But when you start to see email spam about it, you know it’s a trend.

That’s the case with marketing trends such as email marketing and social media.

The problem with trends is that it’s usually a lagging indicator which means to seize the opportunity you may need to be an early adopters to reap the rewards.

If adopting new strategy and implementing fresh tactics sounds too risky, just take a look at the troubled newspaper and magazine companies and you’ll realize what I mean.

Similar to technology innovation, brand strategy is taking on an increasingly strategic role focusing not just on the bottom line but the ability to produce desirable financial outcomes. It’s no surprise that the most innovative brands also fail more frequently, it’s the nature of the tried-and-true culture.

However, it takes discipline, research, analysis and creativity to find the right fit that works for your organization. Whether you’re promoting your personal brand or your corporate brand, here are the 3 brand marketing trends to look for in 2010:

1.Brands Must Become More Social Online

It’s no secret that B2B or B2C customers have been talking about your industry and your brand. Now with social media it’s simply going to be “on the record” somewhere over the internet, searchable and conversable.

If you can deal with customers in person, why couldn’t you deal with them online?

Engagement with your audience creates brand awareness, increase brand loyalty and the opportunity to get feedback that can help to improve your product and services. Social engagement encourages crowdsourcing, use it wisely it can energize both you and your audience.

Provide transparency in what you do and demonstrate authenticity in what you say are the keys to building your online “street cred.” Organizations must look at the bigger picture and realize the emerging trend of social business branding and how it will impact all aspect of the company from internal collaboration to external engagement.

Becoming more social for brands means establishing a collaborative infrastructure within the organization to support the core brand strategy. There is no doubt that consumer wants to engage through social media so if brands don’t get into it, consumers will leave.

Ideas for action: Learn the tools of the trade in social media and (please!) put someone that cares about your brand to the task.

Research and identify where you customers are at talking about you, listen and monitor before you jump in. Analyze the conversation around any product, topics, or category and identify any detractors and advocates to take actions.

More importantly learn to communicate well online, respond on time, be clear and to the point. Provide value when interacting with your audience, focus on helping not selling and always deliver relevant and effective communications.

In addition, make sure you have a policy in place so you have a focused, consistent and cohesive approach in reacting to the situation regardless of which platform you’re using. The bottom line is that social media engagement without governance is a recipe for disaster.

It’s possible that your customers may not be on an open social network but on several discussion boards (forums/BBS), a private professional community, or even a popular blog where comments serve as dialogues. speak to your customers directly to identify where they get their information, use a survey and provide rewards if needed.

Myths to consider: We can’t quantify the ROI (return on investment), so let’s just not measure them. First of all, there are ways to measure all the marketing activities whether they’re meaningful to your organization is another story (yes you want the meaningful ones!).

The important thing is to cultivate accountability in your actions so you get results that can give you the insight to make real informed decisions.

My recommendation is to rank your marketing priorities that are most likely to pay off or generate the impact your want first. If your strategy is to aim for awareness and exposure, then put reach and volume first instead of experience and frequency.

Keep in mind that you need to be able to quantity to a certain degree so you don’t drain your marketing resource and budget.

2.Shift in Value Perception Creates Opportunities for Brands

Generic brands are nothing new especially in the grocery store where the house brands are marketed and sold side by side with the leading brands.

The economy has shifted the perception of value fundamentally into a do-more-with-less and value-for-money mode.

According to the latest IRI Times & Trends Report: Game-Changing Economy Taking Private Label to New Heights, “private label unit share has grown 1.2 points to 22.8% and dollar share has grown 0.7 points to 17.6% across all outlets in the past 12 months.” Simply put, private label brands are gaining momentum across all tiers of product categories from premium tier to value tier because they have the advantage to compete on quality as well as price.

This represents a significant opportunity for less known brands (startups, SMBs, personal brands) to compete for new businesses while leading brands still has their eyes on cutting costs (overheads, infrastructure) and reorganizing operations.

In addition with the explosion of social media, unknown brand can go viral instantly followed by awareness because brands no longer control the buying space or the conversation, it only needs credibility to explode.

Ideas for action: This is the time to take your brand to another level especially with more cost effective tools and technologies, why not take a hard look at your current setup for operations, sales and marketing?

Reallocate your investments and prioritize your marketing, branding or product development strategies.

Many out-of-your-budget marketing avenues have dropped in price dramatically, check your local advertising channels you may be in for a surprise on how cheap it is now to run radio, print and even TV ads.

It’s a good time to build your email marketing campaign, run promotion events or even redo your old website so it’s more social media friendly.

You can even try partnering with someone locally to share the cost or co-brand some offerings together. Another idea is to create a new brand allowing you to expand into other categories or verticals utilizing the resources you already have.

Brand extension can help secure new revenues and reinforce brand strength without compromising your current brand equities.

This is the time to drive appeal and awareness to build recognition. Use today’s digital communication platforms to collect meaningful customer data, conduct surveys and optimize your digital presence via social networks.

Reevaluate your brand strategy, be innovative with your products and services, create a culture that reward your people and update your performance metrics.

Myths to consider: We don’t have the time, money or resources for marketing and nobody is buying!

If you don’t have a plan to convert data to actionable insight, a process to collectively review the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, how do you know what you’re doing works?

If you don’t invest in marketing or advertising, how are you going to differentiate the unique meaning of your brand? Without differentiation you will loose pricing power and competitiveness.

If your brand isn’t even in the run for consideration, how will your customers know that you exist? And people are spending, just selectively in a timely matter. According to the American Express Spending & Saving Tracker, “amid their (consumers) cautiousness we are seeing some areas where people are willing to increase spending.”

There is a shift in how businesses and consumers are expressing their priorities, but that doesn’t mean you should be reactive, in fact I would argue that being proactive now will benefit your ROI in the long haul.

3. Community Building is Now a Priority

Moving forward, brands will have to focus on fostering their own community to own the communication distribution network.

Building a community is about connecting and sharing experiences, I’ve outlined this previously specifically in social networks, which still applies to other platform as well.

The fact is that the adoption of new communication platform (ie. email, radio) has led to a new wave of user experience in which the context (ie. direct mail, website) and the message (ie. ads, PR) must stay relevant.

If the community is trusted by the members, they will extend the trust through word-of-mouth that could mean more opportunities for brands to increase buying frequency using content or conversation marketing tactics.

Keep in mind that you should get involved in the right channel and passively direct customers to your community. Effective engagement can also lead to permission-based marketing. According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by ExactTarget, “One-half of consumers said unsolicited messages were unacceptable even from companies they did business with regularly. That was up from about one-quarter in 2008.” When your audience allows you to contact them, you essentially have a direct line to access a targeted customer base.

Ideas for action: For low barrier to entry options, look into building a community using one of these: Facebook fan page, Twitter account, Google group, LinkedIn group, Yahoo groups; or create your own social network (with blog, discussion forums etc.), Ning, KickApps, ThePort, SharePoint, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Posterous, Moveable Type, SocialText, SixApart, and Pringo just to name a few.

If you’re tech or internet savvy, you can use a combination of them but I suggest to focus on becoming versed in 1-2 first then expand to others. Personally, I’m using a combination of a WordPress blog (you’re reading it now) and Twitter (@designdamage).

You can also use video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo to help funnel traffic to your community. Another import tip is to leverage RSS feeds to push your message from one-to-many networks.

It’s easy for someone to discover if there’s any participation in your community or not so if you’re going to have a community, you need to be there for your audience.

Dedicate a set amount of time to regularly check the activities in your community, answer questions, drive conversations and connect with members. People have short attention span especially on the internet, so make sure you work on your message (goes to number 1 above) and keep your audience interested.

The goal is to mobilize brand advocates to drive word-of-mouth for greater engagement.

Myths to consider: We’ll just hire an expert and let them do the work like how we outsource web design and SEO.

Although we’re at the age of outsource-anything today and get it done tomorrow, it’s hardly a sustainable long-term strategy especially when it’s about your brand’s core value and mission.

Too often we forget that people are at the center of any holistic effort to improve business performance and accountability.

Outsource to gurus may get things done, but you need to take the time and effort to work with them not to mention they’re hard to find, afford and keep. I’ve clean up some mess for clients before where the outsourced expert created more problems than what they were hired to solve.

This is why so many brands fail to update their websites regularly or refresh their SEO campaigns. Take the time to educate yourself some of the trends will benefit you in the long run, or get your team involve and split the workload across multiple heads.

The takeaway: The evolving marketing and media ecosystem is putting pressure on brands to innovate and evolve, or risk becoming extinct.

These trends will be here to stay and is essential for brands to be successful moving forward.

Have you made the transition yet to accommodate these trends? What are you doing to make the necessary changes to your brand strategy?

I will be reviewing the trends in digital marketing, specifically social business branding next, stay tuned.

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A Social Media Marketing Handbook

by Eric Tsai

In an effort to keep up with the rate of change in the marketing landscape, it’s important to understand the tools available to drive results. Social media is the fastest growing tactic according to a survey by virtual events provider Unisfair, “Marketers’ top priorities for 2010 will be customer acquisition and retention and the most common tactics marketers plant to increase was social media, selected by three-quarters of marketers polled, followed by search (51%) and e-mail (49%).”

It’s indicative as the internet gets more social, the speed at which information is shared through platforms like Twitter and Facebook will continue to expand.

There is no argument that social media can benefit a brand but the problem is most companies are operating with a limited supply of resources. And with TMI (too much information) flowing around the internet you can easily lost yourself in a sea of information resulting in analysis paralysis.

fiends_w_benefits_book In order to utilize the time on hand, it’s important to maintain focus on what’s relevant and wrap your head around a resource that walks you through the social media maze. Rarely is there a silver bullet that can solve all the marketing challenges so the key is to research and learn as much as you need before you jump in. However, research can be the source of wasted time so it’s better to approach experts within their respective disciplines or pick up a book like Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook, by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.

I had the opportunity to read a preview copy so I’m going to go straight to the highlights from the book:

– Chapters 1-2 provide an excellent overview on the history of social media and how it has evolved today. I believe this is important for marketers especially those that are looking to transition to the web2.0 platform. Without knowledge of the social landscape as a whole, it’s difficult to decide what you should use and why. Furthermore it paints a picture on the opportunities that exist on the social web and a step by step guide to prepare your blog and leverage RSS.

– Chapters 3-6 focus on the strategy behind building a community and networking with the right bloggers as well as communication tactics. I consider these chapters the “meat” of the book, where most marketers failed to understand the meaning behind using these tools, Friends with Benefits nailed it. In addition, it’s got use cases from the perspective of business, product and measurement to illustrate the impact of each tactics. If you’re operating without reliable metrics and measurement, you’re essentially operating blindly in social media. Although chapter 6 does a good job on performance tracking, it could use more financial models to further the topic of social media ROI (return on investment). If you are using social media but aren’t sure about the tactics, strategies, and practices to get them right, there are some good case studies on what to do and what not to do.

– Chapters 7-8 are guides to deal with scenarios from pre-launch to post-launch of social media campaigns. They’re good resources for damage control in social media marketing and explain the risk implications during crisis. Particularly the “Rules for Making Social Media Work for You in a Crisis” provides 6 valuable resolutions even for experienced marketers to quickly put out fires and can serve as reference to develop corporate social media policies.

– Chapters 9-12 goes into details on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube (and other video marketing tools), and Twitter. These sections are essential case studies to the leading social media platform which is a good beginner’s guide. As for people already using those tools frequently, it’s just common sense nothing you shouldn’t already know.

The take away: This is not a Twitter or Facebook for dummies, or how to setup your social media account. What’s different between this book and other social media guides is that it tends to focus on the outcome rather than just the features and benefits.

It’s a resourceful book for those wanting to hop on the social media marketing train to learn this new viral platform and to leverage word-of-mouth tactics. You will find plenty of answers to why and how as well as what’s in it for you. For experienced marketers looking to keep up on their own industries as well as learn the intricate details of social media, I recommend adding this book to your reading list.

For your information, this book is scheduled to be published in next month (November) and you can pre-order the book now from No Starch Press.

3 Ways to Capitalize on the Destruction of Traditional Media and Embrace Social Media

by Eric Tsai

If you’re part of the social media movement, you’re witnessing the annihilation of traditional media.

From newspapers to cable TV, everything is converging onto the internet resulting in a more accessible, cost-effective and integrated media.

Let’s look at some statistics courtesy of Sillicon Alley Insider:

Newspaper

– “Print ad sales fell 30% year-over-year in Q1, led by a 42% year-over-year drop in classified ad sales.”

– “Newspaper classified revenues peaked above $16 billion in 2005, only to plummet to an estimated $5 billion or so in 2009.”

Cable TV

– “A Bernstein survey says 35% of Web video watchers might dump their cable TV provider in favor of online video within 5 years.”

Internet

– “Some 63% of adult Americans had broadband Internet at home in April, up from 55% last May, according to the Pew Internet & American Life project.”

– “By the end of 2008, 20% of U.S. households had unplugged their landline phones and gone exclusively wireless, say surveys by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. That’s a huge increase from early 2005, when only about 7% of U.S. households were wireless-only.”

The Bigger Picture

Although the current recession has contributed to the decline of newspaper subscriptions and the increase in people viewing online videos; the truth of the matter is we’re no longer accessing or consuming information the same way.

This translates to a less effective advertising channel for brands and the bulk of the advertising dollars will be spent where consumers are spending their time – the web.

Furthermore, the convergence of technology has weakened the foundation of traditional media authorities especially those that didn’t have an immediate online strategy.

Even those with web1.0 strategy, the rapid expansion into web2.0 has left some without a social media strategy.

One thing is clear – internet will continue to grow as the cost of broadband continues to drop.

This means more people will have faster internet and faster internet takes us a step closer to the real-time web.

What does this mean to you?

It means instant access to data across the web with a massive coordination effort from social media.

Mass Amateurisation of Brands through Social Media

The rise of social media tools such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, and many other social networking sites has accelerated the spread of simplified media technologies, making it easy for anyone to access, participate, and share information.

Social media in particular is leading the way on what web commentator Clay Shirky called “the mass-amateurisation of everything.”

It is now possible for individuals to choose from a wide variety of communication arsenals outside of the mainstream commercial system to reach the mass audience.

As a result of this ubiquity of social media, individually created media content that originated on the internet has started to infect mass media.

This not only challenges the traditional media authorities, but it also created dynamic conversations across the globe.

Take the latest Iran incident as an example, Twitter was the fastest medium to report what had happened as it was happening before any other traditional media could get to it.

It enabled people all over the world to rapidly react to this piece of news and participate in support and interact with the people in Iran.

Take social bookmark sites like Digg, and Delicious for example, users are encouraged to “vote” for the top content they want to appear for maximum exposure.

These services aggregates content across the web to determine what content is popular making it easy to filter for individuals.

It’s like real-time TV/radio rating and you can simply choose from a list of categories within your interest.

In addition, there is now an element of choice and coordination to establish a new content authority.

You no longer have limitations on what’s available from newspaper or what’s on TV; you have millions of content to choose from or you can create your own.

This applies to blogs as well because you only have so much time to consume information, reading from one source means not reading from another.

As a result, blogs are taking readers away from authority sites and turning them into loyal subscribers.

If you’re reading this post, either you’re a new reader or a regular subscriber to my RSS or newsletter.

3 Ways to Capitalize on Social Media

In many ways, social media is still at the “technology trigger” aspect of the hype cycle. If you can capitalize on it, you will benefit by capitalizing on the destruction of traditional media.

Here are 3 ways to capitalize on this opportunity:

1. Expose your personality – Social media is a one-to-many interaction medium, it’s the perfect platform to personify your brand and build a fan base.

Demonstrate your expertise is important but showing your personality can be the difference between choosing to engage with you versus others. This will ultimately convert visitors to fans, transform viewers to participants.

Give your audience a reason to engage by revealing your emotions and even political stance will help you to stand out, be a person not a company and have fun.

Remember, it’s impossible to be liked by everyone and you won’t be anyway, the key is to create synergy with those that like you in order to foster trust.

A great example is the CEO of Zappos who updates his every move via Twitter with what he does and how he interacts with his employees, creating a personable, likeable, transparent identity that everyone can relate to.

2. Drive engagement and visibility – One of the disadvantages of traditional media is the limitation of engagement opportunities.

This is different in social media. You can create your own opportunity to be “high touch” with your audience by sending update notifications, creating a poll, asking to join your group, conducting an offline event, or promoting a cause.

Combine engagement with marketing through conversation will reduce resistance to you brand’s message.

As a result, your fans will become your best evangelists. However, there is a fine line between a prolifically active brand and an annoy spammer.

The key is to become a good listener and allow conversations to come to you before reacting swiftly.

If you do it right, you will succeed in coordinating a massive word-of-mouth campaign, a sharing frenzy across all social media platform that increases your brand loyalty.

Get it wrong, you will need to put out the fire with reputation management strategies.

I recommend having different social media accounts to provide a focused-orientated engagement strategy.

Dell is the best example for this as the company has more than 30 Twitter accounts that they use to communicate to very specific audiences.

Ford also got more than 7 Twitter channels to handle customer service and reputation management.

3. Leverage multimedia and mobile platforms – As I’ve mentioned before, all media has converged onto the internet so why not use all of them to maximize the experience.

You can easily create your own podcast now, load it up to iTune or deliver it in mp3 format.

For images, you can use Yahoo’s Flickr, Google’s Picasa, or Twitpic to share it on Twitter.

By far the most powerful multimedia content is the use of videos through YouTube or Viemo.

Although still limited by network and bandwidth, there are a few “live” video streaming social media tool that’s making headways specifically UStream.tv, Blip.tv and Justin.tv.

Not only do people respond different via a variety of media formats enabling a broader reach, there is an increasing demand for location-based interaction as well.

Thanks for iPhone and BlackBerry, mobile web content delivery is now an important consideration of a brand’s social media marketing strategy.

The cost of mobile broadband will continue to drop enabling mobile rich-media content to be produced and distributed anywhere.

The exciting part about mobile content is the ability to target location based users then engages them with relevant content.

Are you capitalizing on the rapid growth of Social Media?

Or do you still believe in traditional media?

Social Media 101: Choosing the Right Tools

by Eric Tsai

I went over the high-level overview on social media in the article “What is Social Media and Why Should I use it,” now let’s look at some of the popular social media tools and how they work.

The approach in building a social media profile is the same for businesses and individuals.

In both cases, the desire outcome is to create new opportunities and connect with other relevant profiles to create a valuable network.

When I say opportunities, it doesn’t always have to do with making money, it can simply be finding a new people with the same interest as you or potential joint venture partnerships.

Types of Social Media

Before you dive into all the social media websites, you need to understand the different types of social media and their functions.

Once you have a basic understanding, it’ll be easier to realize its networking power.

I won’t address every social media platform but in general there are three major categories you can build your social media profile in:

Communication

Blogs and micro-blogging: This is usually web content updated regularly and can be written text, videos and graphics.

It usually provides commentary or news on a specific topic that allows people to interact with the content provider.

Example: Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, LiveJournal, TypePad, Posterous, Tumblr

Social networking: An online community focuses on connecting and exploring people who share similar interests and/or activities.

It has specific means to connect people with each other such as classmates, colleagues, interest groups, events, or find people randomly from their profile of interests.

Example: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Hi5, Meetup

Multimedia

Photo, video and audio sharing: Multimedia sharing is made popular but Flickr and YouTube which provide a unique platform for people to distribute multimedia content across the internet.

Users can easily comment and rate on videos watched, images viewed, or music heard.

Example: YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Skype, Last.fm, Pandora, Tubemogul

Collaboration

Wikis: A wiki is a website that allows for easy creation and editing of linked content.

Similar to the concept of an encyclopedia, wikis have a wealth of specific information and are often used to create collaborative websites to provide intranet and knowledgebase systems.

Example: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wetpaint, Wikileaks

Social bookmarking / social news: These are tools for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet in the form of tagging, the process by which many users add name tags in the form of keywords to shared content.

People can rate, comment, and share bookmarks easily with others with similar interest.

Think of it as a “popularity contest” for links on the internet ranking them based on how many times it has been bookmarked and its rating.

The same applies to social news, websites let users submit and vote on news stories or links to determine its ranking and popularity.

Example: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, Digg, Reddit

Typically multimedia and collaboration tools are utilized as an enhancement to the communication tools. People share videos, podcasts, photos and bookmarks they like to further personalize their brand to others.

The Power Of The Network

I’ve created some visuals below to better illustrate the effects of social networking.

Imagine each “level” is its own community where everyone knew each other.

In this case, level-1 community has two people willing to promote your brand.

They could be your family, friends, business partners, vendors or affiliates.

Notice that not everyone in level-2 participated in sharing your information to the next level.

At level 6, that may be someone very interested in your product, services or your personal brand.

As long as a community has people connected to people in another community, it’s just as easy for that level-6 person to reach you.

The possibility to connect is endless. All the networking happens on the internet making the connection painlessly fast.

Are you convinced yet?

Ready to do some networking?

Keep reading designdamage — next we’ll get into the step by step setup and how to build your profiles.

Good Design: Part 3 – Marketing & Positioning

by Eric Tsai

The last element of good design is to maximize the design by selling it – distribute it in the market, execute on marketing.

Picture this: you have a product idea and spent a great deal of time laying down the solid design framework for this innovative product, you think it’ll be a huge hit. And finally you developed a production sample and it’s even better than you had imagined! How would you translate that into success? Can you build a path to optimize the user experience? Do you have the roadmap to revenue?

Integrate Ideas into Strategies

Great marketing doesn’t make the product great, but a great product usually have marketing built into it already. It’s not about feature or benefits. This is a highly overlooked area for many creators and designers today, not having a playbook of strategies from start to finish. The best way to start developing your game plan is to imagine your ideal situation, your desired outcome then work backwards into the design.

marketing

For example, you came up with a new type of shoes that can help runners run longer and faster, then you should start your design framework by addressing the needs of your targeted runners. Perhaps those shoes solve some technical problems or have certain style advantages, they should all be part of the initial research so the end product could easily sell itself.

Think of how your want your users to view your product, better yet what reaction would you want them to have? Who, where, why and how are just as important questions to ask.

Who is it for?
Where would they use it?
Why would they use it? Want it or need it?
How does it work? How do they experience the product before committing to it?

The more specific market segment(s) you target, the more value you will bring to those customers. If you can formulate those outcomes and keep them in mind before you start and address them during your process you will most likely have an easier time marketing the product.

Positioning and Messaging

Communication design is about translating the concept and selling the idea. This is also one of the more difficult task for majority of the designers especially those focusing on aesthetics. This aspect of design requires a lot more creative juices on the business side and it does not have to be pretty, it just has to be simple, concise and to the point.

There are many approaches in developing the right messaging however; many well crafted messages can sound professional but mundane. It could be nicely written and formatted by some marketing agency with all kinds of overrated phrases like “innovative, unmatched, or amazing,” but it won’t receive the attention it deserves. In fact, the more you overpraise, the less unique you are. Ironically what works are the cheesy, low-cost, infomercial marketing pitch that does the trick.

fsimageresizeaspx The low-end positioning may not add much brand equity to the product, but the message usually is loud and clear not to mention easy to remember. The objective is simple, reveal the message and show what’s inside, what you are really selling, no tricks of gimmicks because they only work short-term.

High-end positioning is all about sustaining your brand equity over time and usually it takes a lot of resources to maintain the product or services at a high level. Think of all the luxury brands from Rolex to Bentley, from Chanel to Armani, all had to endure time and competition. You are paying for character, history, quality and image.

In the long run it’s about incorporating the framework and user experience of the design to the end-user. Everyone wants to sell good design, you can make money with good design or you can look good doing it, it’s market perception.

Leverage Technology and Networking

In today’s market, the design arena has evolved into a highly competitive landscape forcing designers and creators to utilize every possible resource to maximize the exposure and sales of good design. The digital world has transformed the way that brands communicate with their audiences. Interactivity and engagement are more important than ever. Marketers are using web2.0 tools such as blogs and Twitter and social network platforms such as Facebook, Youtube and Myspace to reach out to as many audience as possible.

There are plenty of resources on the internet that can educate you on the power of social networking, but it is still only a tool. If you want to maxmize your next design idea, you must have a solid framework with go-to-market strategies that includes the right message ready to communicate to your customers. This will allow you to have a higher probability of gaining brand recongition, and through recognition you control the destiny of your design or ideas.