YouTube has grown up – a tool for customer engagement

By Mark Helfen

==================================================

All the cute videos of puppies and babies are still on YouTube. Lady Gaga is still there too - in fact YouTube now is included in the Billboard top 100 music tracks. Hundreds of hours of video get uploaded every minute according to Google statistics, a mix of the weird, the personal, and the important.

But YouTube has also become a way to get customer and market engagement, for you, your brand, or your business. Both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing can benefit.

The audience is there, the analytical tools are there, and now you need to be there.

Or so says Matt Ballek, speaker at the Monday, October 14 SVForum Marketing and Social Media SIG meeting. The meeting will be at our usual time and place – 6:30 at the Citrix Startup Accelerator (map). Ballek is Director of Strategic Distribution for Magnet Media, and will be speaking on the topic Measuring Success and Engagement on YouTube. You can check out his YouTube channel here.

There are lots of people spending lots of time watching YouTube. Over 1 billion unique visitors show up every month and watch over 6 billion hours of video. Or as Google puts it, “that's almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year.” YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network.

Ballek points out that YouTube is now a major search engine, second only to Google’s web search. Watching his YouTube channel shows Ballek’s expertise in optimizing search results, analogous SEO for Google web search results. Similar to the web search, Google uses their own analytics to judge how much value and engagement their users place on a YouTube video and uses the results to decide search placement.

In addition to search optimization, he will talk about how to design and plan your YouTube marketing, and how to use the “excellent analytic tools” that Google provides to measure your results.

Like elsewhere, content is king. “You can’t optimize unengaging videos.”

Google measures video engagement by how long viewers watch them, how often people click through to a web page, and how often they subscribe and return. High engagement gets higher search engine placement. Because the video is actually on Google’s servers, crowdsourcing based on actual viewing can be factored in.

It’s cheap to start – your smartphone has the capability to produce a useful video, and the cost keeps decreasing. You don’t need high (and expensive) production values to engage customers. What you do need is to provide information that they find interesting or useful, and worth the time. And show up on a regular basis. One idea is to set up a schedule of status updates, so that then your business makes a major announcement your customers are already connected. You can also use YouTube’s search statistics to get an idea of what people are looking for, to give you suggestions for content.

Google+ may also be part of your YouTube engagement solution. Ballek describes Google+ as “the biggest social network you didn’t know you were already using.” Like other Google services, Google+ is getting ever more closely integrated with YouTube. It can help assure more meaningful conversations, and manage customer engagement.


Be sure and sign up at the Marketing and Social Media Meetup site:

 

===


Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.
He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

=============

The Science of Thought Leadership

By Mark Helfen

The words “thought leadership” may be overused, even cliché.

But Mitchell Levy has elevated the idea to a science as the first Thought Leadership Architect. In short, he is a thought leader on thought leadership.  Creating thought leaders in your business can help advance its marketing goals, increase ROI, and help compete effectively in a crowded market. Levy has the tools and strategy to help you become one.

Levy will be the speaker at the next SVForum Marketing and Social Media SIG meeting, Monday, September 9 speaking on Learn How to Turn Yourself from Expert to Thought Leader/Guru! The meeting will begin at 6:30 at our regular location, the Citrix Startup Accelerator, 4555 Great America Parkway 3rd Floor, Santa Clara. He commits that everyone who attends will gain at least on “aha moment” on promoting their business, or them self.

Mitchel is CEO of both ThinkAha, a consulting firm focused on thought leadership, and Happy About, a book publisher. The two activities are related, since publishing a book is one of the tools that he promotes to be recognized as a thought leader.

According to Levy, before your prospect ever contacts you, they have put 60 to 80 percent of their effort into internet research. There are a huge number of messages out there; a thought leader draws attention in a crowded space. They become the “go-to guy” (or girl) for reliable information, and show your business as the source of expertise.

His consulting focus is creating thought leaders larger businesses. Employees are going to be on-line anyway. With some training, they can become “activated” to be evangelists for the business. In addition to promoting your brand, you can use the thought leadership of some part of your key people to promote the company. The combined efforts of several employees will have a greater effect than just brand promotion.

Of course, not everyone can take this role. Only a selected subset of all your people might be thought leaders. But it’s also a valuable role to power other people to get recognized as experts.

Levy has several tools in his kit to get this done. Writing books, video, and blogging are three ideas. He is a big fan of LinkedIn (his profile is here: www.linkedin.com/in/mitchelllevy.) Also Google+ seems to be a rising force. 

You may not be part of a large organization, but he commits that everyone will get an “aha moment” during the evening, and come away with two or three ideas to put to use, either for themself or their business. If you want an early preview of his thinking, download a free copy of his ebooks on his web site, mitchelllevy.com.

In our conversation, Levy had an interesting take. “The thought leaders of tomorrow are curators of the data we are browsing today.” Come by on Monday and hear more.

Be sure and sign up at the Marketing and Social Media Meetup site:

===


Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

=============

By itself, mobile technology isn’t all that interesting...

By Mark Helfen

=============

By itself, mobile technology isn’t all that interesting.

But take data from applications, big data analytics, IT, the cloud, and social networks, and cross all the silo boundaries. Then mix with the unique capabilities of mobile devices - geographic knowledge and “at hand” immediacy – and you can delight customers and give employees the tools of efficiency.

In other words, you can create a right time experience.

Or so says Maribel Lopez, speaker at next Monday’s meeting of the SVForum Marketing and Social Media SIG. Her presentation is titled Right Experience, Right Results: Improve Profits, Engagement w/Mobile & Big Data.

We will be at our now usual place, the Citrix Startup Accelerator, at 6:30.

Lopez is Principal and Founder of Lopez Research and describes her role as an industry analyst. Her work is helping enterprises understand what technology changes mean for them, and providing guidance on deploying the changes and transforming their operations.

While she covers using technology to improve marketing, Lopez also has an operational focus on how the company’s internal function can be improved.  She has the interesting view that you should “treat employees as customers,” so that new technology not only can improve the customer experience, but also improve the employee experience. The objective is always to increase efficiency and profits.

To look at mobile just as advertising is too limiting, not to mention that people will quickly tire of having ads on their phone. But by using all of the available data and context and making mobile interaction a right time experience, and you can delight customers.

As an example, a mobile app could know from your Google mail account that you have a flight leaving at a specific time, know your current location, check the traffic patterns on the route you usually use, know how long it takes to get through airport security at the time you will arrive, and remind you exactly when it’s time to leave for the airport.

Using location based real time information combined with data from multiple sources, the mobile device provides compelling, appropriate and relevant information – a right time experience.

That doesn’t exist, yet.

Another idea is to improve company operations. If your business uses Salesforce.com, by using the phones GPS location automatically show the appropriate Salesforce information by connecting to the cloud when the rep walks into the customer office. This makes the rep’s job easier and more efficient. After the rep leaves, ask for a call report.

The idea is that mobile technology has the potential of delivering “the holy grail” of insight, but only when the technology boundaries are crossed to get a right time experience.

So come by Monday, and learn how you use right time experience to delight customers, delight your own employees, and maybe delight your business bottom line.

Security requires all to pre-register. Please do it on Meetup here. Thanks

 


===


Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

=============

Your relationship with your customers may be the one competitive advantage that can’t be copied.

By Mark Helfen

=============

Your relationship with your customers may be the one competitive advantage that can’t be copied.

Or so says Linda Sharp, CEO of Religence, a “customer-focused performance management consulting firm specializing in Customer Relationship Intelligence” according to the company web site.

Sharp will be the speaker at the upcoming SVForum Marketing and Social Media SIG meeting, on June 10. The meeting will be held at our now regular location, the Citrix Startup Accelerator (map here.) The meeting is titled “The Money is in Retention. Start There. Harvest GOLD in the BIG Data Blizzard,” but after my conversation, I could shortcut that to “a better understanding of your customer relationships leads to more profits from you customers.”  As usual, meeting starts at 6:30.

Sharps method is to make measurement of customer relationships as close to a science as possible, creating a metric called “Relationship Value.” The atomic unit of the relationship is an interaction between you and your customer. An interaction can move the relationship forward or backward, but you will have no idea where things stand unless the information is tracked.

Tracking, managing, and improving your customer relationship value requires a person who has this as their primary responsibility, and Sharp recommends making relationship management a separate function and assigning someone the job – a customer relationship manager. This person makes tracking relationships a deliberate and proactive responsibility. 

The task is made easier by widespread adoption of social media, along with more traditional internet connections like email. Where customer interactions were once ephemeral, possibly not recorded at all, they now form a “blizzard” of stored information, just needing that relationship manager and big data techniques to analyze and characterize all of the now collected digital data.

“The behavior of profitable customers is very different than the behavior of customers who aren’t,” said Sharp. But unless you start measuring the interactions, it’s hard to separate out the two. You may not get a precise numerical answer, but even a relative measurement can be enough. And just asking the right question can affect the value of your customer to you.

The outcome is a better understanding of your customer relationship. Analyzing interaction data can help identify patterns of behavior. Some patterns can indicate a customer that is interested in a close relationship. A different pattern can be an early warning of problems in the relationship.

Sharp has an interesting view of how relationship management, and tracking relationship value, affects marketing getting their “rightful place at the management table”: In analyzing the competitive advantages of a business, control of resources is managed by finance. The businesses economy of scale is owned by operations. Technology advantage is owned by Information Technology. But if marketing owns the customer relationship – a competitive advantage that can’t be copied – they take a full seat at the table.

So come by Monday, and learn how customer relationship data can increase your customer retention and profitability. 





Please sign up at:

===


Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

=============

Email is still the “linchpin” of your marketing strategy.

By Mark Helfen

=============

Email is still the “linchpin” of your marketing strategy.

Or so says Elyse Tager, West Coast Regional Development Director at
Constant Contact. Tager will be the speaker at the May 13 SVForum Marketing and Social Media SIG meeting. (Remember we are now at a new location -  Citrix Startup Accelerator at 4555 Great America Parkway.)

A key part of Tager’s business development role is delivering educational seminars – specifically helping entrepreneurs and small businesses develop an effective marketing program. Given the limited time and money available, efficiency and effectiveness with a limited budget is key.

Her thinking seems well plugged in to this small business reality. Constant Contact focuses on small and mid-sized companies, including non-profits. Enterprise sized companies aren’t their target.

“It’s no surprise, most small businesses don’t know how to market,” said Tager. People who are dentists, lawyers (or software developers) “didn’t wake up in the morning to be marketers.” They spend their time on their specialty, the thing that makes their business successful, and need tools to help develop a marketing program. 

If the basics of marketing aren’t difficult enough, new communication channels keep appearing. Some may be useful, some not. A marketer needs to “keep their radar open” to see how the environment is changing, while building an effective program.

Tager’s presentation will give a top level review of the growing number of options. From her perspective, mobile is “here yesterday” and should already be part of your marketing mix. Video, Pinterest, Instagram could all be useful. At the same time, you shouldn’t be “seduced” by all of the “crazy stuff” that is appearing.

“Were not all wearing Google Glasses.” Yet.

The old style of marketing – sending out messages to your customers, needs to be replaced. The new social tools need to engage customers and prospects in a two-way conversation.

Tager views email as the core of an engagement strategy – the linchpin. Combined with social tools, it forms a loop that “exponentially increases your reach and engagement.”  Social tools like Facebook are a way of attracting people, but email is under your control, and allows you to control communications. All of this counts on creating content that is compelling and interesting to your current and future customers.

So come by Monday, learn how your small business can develop and effective marketing program within your limits of time and money.

BTW, if you occasionally slip and refer to Constant Contact (the cloud based marketing company) as Constant Comment (the flavored tea) as I did once in my interview, you will be forgiven. Tager said this has happened to her a few times…

===


Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

=============


Sign up on: