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Tweet Cheat Sheet: An Introduction to Twitter for Social Business

Posted by Emma Hardman on June 4, 2012

Twitter has become a must in social business in recent years. Its importance in marketing, sales, and basic relationship maintenance has grown and it is now typical for twitter handles to be included in email signatures and on business cards. This routine adaptation has resulted in a growing number of twitter users of all ages. For late bloomers too embarrassed to ask coworkers, friends or family for help in getting started we have compiled this quick cheat sheet so that you will be tweeting with the best of them in no time! Read more…

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Top 5 Myths about Business and Social Media

Posted by Jackie Kmetz on December 6, 2011

Here are some of the top myths that continue to perpetuate when it comes to businesses getting involved with social media:

If you build it, they will come. It worked for Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams but it doesn’t happen that way in the real world. Building your brand in social media requires consistent promotion and engaging content that brings value to your target audience. Just putting up a Facebook page or creating a Twitter handle isn’t going to bring fans or followers. The key is to provide quality content frequently to your followers, then more will come.

My company must be on every social network. There are thousands of social sites out there but not every one of them is right for your business and matches your target audience. A better approach is to focus your energies on sites you deem most important because of the type of content, activities or audience it attracts and as you have the time and resources to add more do so. Social media is about quality interactions not quantity of posts so choose where you direct your efforts carefully. Read more…

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Social Media as an Experiment

Posted by Vicki Blair on July 25, 2011

Why an Experiment?

From my perspective, life is one big experiment. We are all just trying to get the formula right. In our personal lives the formula we seek may revolve around achieving happiness, security, love, acceptance, appreciation, or power – whatever we think we need to be successful at life. With social media, we’re also trying to discover the perfect formula to help us meet various marketing objectives, such as increasing revenues for the company or reducing the sales cycle. In business as in life, the perfect formula isn’t always obvious and can often take years to master.

Social Media Experimentation

When it comes to social media as a component of your marketing plan, you’ll read and hear a variety of ways you could or should be using this medium for business. But the practice of using social media for marketing objectives is still relatively new and the answers aren’t always clear. In my experience, there aren’t cookie cutter approaches to making it work either. Whether you are the ‘Social Media Czar’ for a large marketing department or you are the Marketing department, if you want to determine how social media can be incorporated into your company’s marketing plan then it’s time to don the lab coat and head for the beaker station – you’ve got some experimenting to do!

Read more…

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Lessons Yoga Can Teach Us for Practicing Social Media

Posted by Vicki Blair on May 18, 2011

While doing a little spring cleaning, I noticed the cover of a Yoga at Home (2010, Yoga Journal special publication). One of the featured sections advertised on the cover was “power up your practice” and the bullet points implied that one could “build strength, gain flexibility, and take it to the next level.”

Forgive me if this comes across as a bit esoteric, but I couldn’t resist thinking of the wise nuggets from yoga that are incredibly applicable to the business of social media!

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Information Design for Conversation Architecture

Posted by Eric Forst on May 13, 2011

“If you display information the right way, anyone can be an analyst,” said Edward Tufte, the renowned information designer. “Anybody can be an investigator.”

At Visible Technologies, we’ve always been a big fan of Tufte’s work and in addition to putting a lot of thought into how we display information about social media, we’ve also put a lot of thought into the type of information that should be displayed and how that information should be collected, processed and enriched. What this means for marketers is that you now have a unique opportunity to quickly gain insights from consumer and business conversations and to turn those insights and analysis into programs, products and campaigns that can drive real business results.

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Quick Tips on Estimating Social Media Volumes

Posted by Vicki Blair on March 22, 2011

Vicki provides some quick tips in this 2 minute video on using the advanced Google Blog and Twitter search functions for estimating how much social media content you can expect to find on your brand, products, or a general topic of interest. Watch the video by clicking the yellow link below:

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Location, Location, Location-Based Services and Other Hot SXSW Trends

Posted by Jennifer Rodriguez on March 17, 2011

The Interactive portion of SXSW recently came to a close. Here are some of the hot trends that we and others saw emerging:

Location Based Services

LocalMind – lets users ask questions of people checked in near them. In a post on his favorite new app at SXSW, uber-blogger Robert Scoble said of LocalMind, “It’s like Quora and Foursquare got together and had a baby.” A quite adept description. You can watch a video on how LocalMind works on his blog, the Scobleizer.
SCVNGR – the location-based game for mobile phones builds a game around existing reality.
Four-Square – while not a new application there was still a lot of talk about the latest 3.0 version and successfully leveraging it at SXSW.

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Highlighting the Key Tips to Unlocking Social Media Success

Posted by Jennifer Rodriguez on February 28, 2011

For those of you interested in hearing more about our latest video and the tips to unlocking social media success we thought we would share the highlights. By following these golden rules of social media, companies will be well positioned for innovation and success.

1. Success requires being a social company at enterprise scale.

Social media as an ad hoc test, or departmental implementation, is not where big value results. Social media success requires being a social company at enterprise scale. Its true power lies in the ability to help you improve the performance of every customer touch. By committing to work together across departments you will improve short term and long term results.

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Boost Your Success! Use a Social Media Checklist

Posted by Vicki Blair on February 10, 2011

Anyone who knows me knows I’m all about process and procedures and implementing tidy ways of getting stuff done efficiently and effectively (yes, some even call me ‘particular’!). After seeing Stephen Colbert interview Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right, I was hooked.

At Visible I lead our Account Management team and we have 20 key processes within 4 major categories for handling accounts from the onboarding through renewal phases. Numerous tasks have to be coordinated – each one critical to ensuring that we are delivering successful client account management for the life of a client’s project. What are the tasks you face associated with designing, implementing, and maintaining a successful social media program? What sometimes goes wrong?

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Powerful Social Media Searches 101

Posted by Vicki Blair on November 18, 2010

So you want to find out how people are talking about your widget, but when you do a search on “Widget”, you are overwhelmed by the junky, voluminous, useless results on the screen! I’ve been fortunate at Visible Technologies to gain a great deal of knowledge in the task of building awesome social media search queries (and I actually have fun putting together a great search string).

This article should help to demystify the process of building effective online searches and hopefully instill a bit of adventure in you. I promise that finding relevant social media content does not have to feel like diving headfirst into a haystack made of nothing but needles (ouch!) just to find the one needle you need.