Ella Bee Social Media & PR » social media marketing » Ella Bee Social Media & PR

What’s the ROI of Social Media?

Ella Bee PR — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:03:54 +0000

I work with a vast variety of businesses and sports and entertainment individuals. No matter what angle they approach social media marketing and public relations, their bottom line is always to make more money. While I have stated before and I will say it again, public relations does not equal sales, I will argue that social media sets you up for success.

A lot of my clients come to me because they need help establishing their online presence or they are trying to figure out how to make social media work for their business and brand. The great thing about the services we offer is that we are able to combine social media practices with traditional PR strategies.

I was always taught by my mother that it takes money to make money, most people say that you have to pay to play…well, not anymore.

In social media it is simple, you have to PLAY to PLAY. Companies are making millions by spending next to nothing but are taking the time to engage in social media marketing for their goals.

Need more convincing? Take a WATCH:

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You Can Do It Too: Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter

Ella Bee PR — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:02:16 +0000

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER- New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.

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Which Comes First, the PR or the Advertising?

Ella Bee PR — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:17:29 +0000

You want to get your company and your brand out there. You want people to know who you are and you want consumers to be influenced through some channel or medium to buy from you and only you. When it comes to directing your spending dollars, you may get stuck wondering, where should we start, with PR or advertising?

This great article from PR Squared provides some thinking points:

In the new era [of media], ADVERTISING COMES LAST.

Advertising comes AFTER the corporation has created an ecosystem for its owned media channels (e.g., a blog, a Twitter handle, a Facebook Fan Page).

Advertising comes AFTER the corporation has an established rapport with its fan base, bloggers, and traditional media contacts.

Advertising comes AFTER relationships.

Tellingly, the “Challenges” regarding Paid Media — “clutter, declining response rates and poor credibility” are all ameliorated if the brand takes the Awareness Scale approach in which Social Media feeds both PR and Advertising, both of which then serve to catalyze fresh brand conversations, amongst people who are predisposed to do so.

With consumer and media relationships in place, the advertisements are not rebuffed but are embraced and carried forward by online enthusiasts. Sayonara, “clutter.” So long, “declining response rates.” Bon voyage, “poor credibility.”

I’ll admit — if I were running an Advertising Agency, I’d be nonplussed by the breezy way in which a Forrester Research analyst essentially downgraded my industry from “foundational” to, let’s face it, a secondary role. But we all have our challenges to face, eh? This one’s not insurmountable!

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Social Media Revolution Instead of a New Year’s Resolution

Ella Bee PR — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:38:03 +0000

While everyone is talking about their new year’s resolution, I’m continuously working on ways to help companies and businesses understand the social media revolution.

Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

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Twitter Applications for Business and Marketing

Ella Bee PR — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 04:16:29 +0000

Here are your weekly updates of Twitter applications to consider using for your marketing needs. The theme for these Twitter applications are to show similarities in the latest Twitter tools to things you may already use or be familiar with.

Tweet Beep | It’s Like Google Alerts
If you love Google Alerts, you’ll love TweetBeep! Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com).

This is great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions, finding job/networking opportunities, keeping up on your favorite hobby, and more.

Group Tweet | It’s Like Your Company’s Internal Communications
GroupTweet turns a standard Twitter account into a group communication hub where members can post updates to everyone in the group using direct messages. When the group account receives a direct message from a group member, GroupTweet converts it into a tweet that all followers can see.

Twitter Grader | It’s Like High School All Over Again
Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community. It takes just a few seconds to generate your free report.

Just Tweet It | Find People Just Like You
Just Tweet It was created to make it easier for people using the popular micro-blogging service Twitter to find other “Tweeters” with similar interests.

Twitter Fone | Just like your phone’s voice command
TwitterFone is free service that lets you updat e your Twitter feed using your voice from any mobile or cell phone. You call it, speak your tweet, and hang up. A short while later, your tweet will be posted on Twitter. TwitterFone is great for when you’re on the go – in the car, on a train, or running between meetings – and don’t have WiFi or time to log on to the internet.You can also listen to your Twitter stream, and while you’re listening, you can record a reply or send a direct message – cool huh!

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Social Media Checklist for Marketers

Ella Bee PR — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:34:00 +0000

By Kathy Cabrera

Planning your B2B social media program is only the first step in a long process. Once you have clearly defined your social media objectives, there are a few other steps that can put you on the right footing for success. Here is a simple social media checklist for B2B marketers you can use to get things started in the right direction:

* Gain internal support from the top-down. Social media must be embraced at all levels of your organization. This is important for approving an on-going budget and to ensure long-term sustainability of social media programs. In addition, executive participation is often a key requirement for many social media activities.

* View social media participation as an extension of your brand. Many of the same considerations given to content on your company website should be extended to content you publish via social media channels.

* Know your audience. Before deciding on a specific social media program, learn about what types of social media sites your target audiences already frequent, or what social media tools they use.

* Become an active contributor. Social media engagement is based on user-generated content and regular communication with audiences. Establishing schedules for publishing or producing content can help you stay consistent.

* Get help. External help is available to support a range of social media initiatives, from strategic planning and consulting to professional content production. Many PR and marketing agencies offer social media expertise. Businesses new to social media may require the assistance of these resources to strategically plan and execute initiatives.

* Create an honest, welcome dialog. Time and again, successful adopters use social media to establish a two-way exchange of information and perspectives. Avoid the temptation to use social media as an advertising channel, and work to ensure your communications are never considered spam. Social media must be thought of as a shift from autocratic thinking and one-to-many communications to a participatory environment. Social media is not about selling and talking at your audience. It is about sharing and engaging with them.

Social media is where the future of PR and marketing is headed. By exploring now, you can be a step ahead of the crowd and gain a tremendous competitive advantage. Have fun, be creative and participate!

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Use Social Media for Petitions

Ella Bee PR — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:38:00 +0000

Whether it is for a grassroots campaign or a presidential campaign, social media networking can help you get the point across while gathering support. With online sharing, it makes it even easier to reach larger demographics and markets. Online petitions are easy and convenient.

In the first hour of this petition, there were 60 signatures with very little promotion. That means one signature per minute. WOW, that’s fast.

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