Does your business have a social media strategy in place? What is it?

To increase customer retention? Increase sales? Decrease lead acquisition costs?

Increase visibility?

I read a statistic today and I’ll try to find the link but it is important for you to know that only 50% of companies have an actual social media strategy or social media plan in place. And even LESS are measuring the results or ROI of their social marketing campaigns.  Why? Because there is so much customization involved to develop and determine the proper key performance indicators, backwards engineer the campaign, and then establish the tools & tactics needed. Believe me when I say it- social media campaigns are extremely complex & customized around each clients business model and we LOVE a challenge. Something we love even more is when clients get results like winning the San Diego’s best green product installer contest or selling all their tickets for their fundraising event. Simply put, when your clients see results in social media and can measure ROI, they finally see the true value in social media that it can bring to their organization:

1. decreased online advertising expenditure

2. increased customer retention & satisfaction

3. much higher conversion rates than paid advertising

because of the trust factor (through facebook & twitter communities)

4. much cheaper lead acquisition compared to paid online advertising

What type of ROI have you demonstrated for your clients using social media?  Are you a business using social media yet? What have been your results?  I’d love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Justin “Results” French

1. Fails to Reach the Proper Target Audience
2. Generate Targeted Traffic
3. Have A Proper SEO Foundation
4. Have A Blog
5. Have An Integrated Social Media Marketing Plan

Yes, it’s there, it’s pretty, but is anyone looking at it? Is it bringing you new business? Is it generating leads? What is your conversion rate? Whats is your ROI on your monthly online marketing budget? Are you paying for online marketing software every month and seeing a return on this investment? Is it exposing you to a new market? Building your brand? Are you monitoring your personal or company reputation?

“Your website is only a billboard. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa.”

Contact us today and see how a social media marketing campaign can drive targeted traffic to your website while increasing click through, conversion, and decreases online adversing expenditure.

With internet marketing, you make your marketing dollars work more effectively online by establishing a CONSTANT presence on many sites. Over time, your customers will either do business with you or purchase from you when they are ready.  We help your website pop up on search engines; you should have blogs on your website with updated content meant specifically for your prospect. Suddenly you’re a trusted source for information on your products/ services.  You have a Twitter feed that keeps the consumer updated throughout the day on news and events pertaining to THEM and their specific interest- reminding them that YOU are their dependable source. 

Ultimately everything comes down to the bottom line – drive revenue, lower traditional marketing costs by using Internet Marketing to generate traffic to your website, measure your ROI, and have a sustainable online marketing system that becomes more powerful over time. 

So it’s time.  Time to make that website work for you, time to embrace the future of social marketing with a company like Social Media San Diego that has the integrity, credibility, and track record of results to help build your online brand and improve your companies performance in all areas. Time to get online. Time to get it done right!

Social Networking San Diego will get you there- We offer the Fast Track 

social media marketing seems to still dominate conversations these days. Companies testing, companies measuring, companies even bringing in outside help like social media consultants. One thing is certain though, through all the hype, noise, and water cooler talk- there are some companies who take action and some sitting on the sidelines still waiting to get into the game.

Let’s take the top three benefits of social media that we have seen on why companies are embracing this new marketing channel:

1. Your business is looking to cut costs on traditional advertising and use internet marketing and social media marketing as a cost effective substitute. This not only cuts down on costs, but allows you to be more targeted with your messaging. You can effectively extract your audience according to the proper demographic and geographic market you are going after.

2. Your company is looking for sustained growth or long-term growth with social media as compared to advertising. If your business is considering social media and you’re looking for long-term growth & sustainability then social media should be part of your strategy. Social Media allows scalability, growth over time, and by consistently engaging with your target audience you build trust. You constantly educate your prospects and customers giving them valuable information. When you do this overtime, you develop greater trust with your audience and build your brand equity much stronger. This also helps shorten the sales cycle and touches your audience through various points across the value chain.

3. You can develop an influential relationship with a key influencer who has a large trust relationship built with their audience. Once you have their trust, you can possibly ask them to help you get out a message to your target audience. If you care about social media and go about it the right way, you will be able to leverage those relationships. But one word of advice- if that person does you a favor, don’t forget to do a favor for them when asked. It’s always 50-50.

4.Bonus: Because Lebron James is on twitter now and that’s proof enough of why you’re business/ personal brand should be on there too! Don’t believe me- watch this inspiring video on his brand and being “Real”

Lebron’s story is truly motivating and inspiring.  I think of Lebron as a humble leader on and off the court and he has much less of an ego than Kobe- but I digress…

Sent from my iPad

Justin “Results” French

p.s. Sharing is caring and re-tweeting is always appreciated

Okay for today’s blog post I’m actually recording this live on my iPad and the program I’m using is dragon naturally speaking. If I have a few issues with the grammar I’ll go through and fix it myself manually but I want to talk about today’s topic and discuss the difference between SEO and Social Media and you should know by now the two go hand-in-hand unless your living on Mars.

Let me explain why SEO is more beneficial for a product driven business model. When it comes to other business models that are more service-based businesses compared with events, it’s very difficult to do SEO for non-product driven websites based on my experience in the social media trenches. Being in this field for almost 3 years now, if you’re looking for quick rankings or a way to get quick traffic, quick visibility, quick brand recognition, then social media is that the best route to go. You will see over time you will start to rank for certain keywords based on social media tactics and relevant postings that you are doing. I had stumbled upon this in my early years just running some tests and putting out great content while doing basic keyword research. I was actually being ranked for some very competitive keywords which was cool! What’s even more interesting is that 1.5 years ago before Google and twitter signed an agreement, I started to notice my twitter messages ranking in Google search results on page 1 real time. This occurred from my twitter account because as we know twitter is a micro-blog so that was even more interesting.

So I guess the take away for today’s topic is when it comes to social media versus SEO, social media is actually going to be beating SEO for product & service driven businesses that’s my prediction in the not so distant future. Id like to hear your feedback in the comments section if you somewhat agree or disagree we can debate all day and Id be more than happy to. So thank you again for coming to the social networking San Diego blog. Please sign up for a newsletter on the right-hand side or download our free e-book if you have not already. Also there’s an ebook that I wrote for $9.95 for the best 10 you will ever spend as far as an informational social media guide for small business. This is Justin “Results” French signing off. Will see you guys tomorrow. Thank you

Are you a social media consultant? Are you involved in a social media mastermind group? Well if you are not, I wanted to share with you a question I get asked a lot lately. I wanted to explain why I feel social media for business is BOTH an art AND a science.

1. Social media is an art because you have to be both strategic, creative, and somewhat tech savvy. I’m not saying you have to be a programmer, BUT you have to know how to be human in a digital world and utilize the online tools. This can be very difficult for some, and require some teaching, which is why I passionately teach at Mira Costa College a Social Media and Internet marketing course that has been rising in popularity. It’s called Introduction to Marketing Your Business Online and you can find out more info by clicking here: social media workshop

2. Social media is a science because it ties very closely in with sociology (which was one of my favorite subjects in my lower division) and studies the human behavior in groups. Hence the rise of social networking, social media, and other human behavioral technologies that continues to advance. Social media requires people to be REAL and if you are not, others will know. The 5 realest people I know in social media are GaryVee, Chris Brogan, Scott Stratten, Brian Solis, and Tony Hsieh of Zappos.

So what do you think? Is social media an art OR a science? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts. Enjoy the world Cup!

Justin “Results” French

Are you a social media matchmaker? Just wanted to give a speical shout-out to all those I am connected with on twitter, facebook, linked-in, etc. Things have been busy in the social media mastermind for business trenches so keep up the good fight! Stay tuned for more exciting news to come from the journey!

Justin

First- Congratulations to Beverly Macy and Rodney Rumford on their 1 year milestone for providing exceptional Social Media For Business conferences, workshops, and educational forums. The last one I went to was at Harvard and this was probably one of the best conferences I had been to. I am looking forward to what the 1 year anniversary will bring. Here is a link to the event. http://www.gravitysummit.com/ I will be tweeting live to give you the best 140 character highlights of the event so follow me on twitter here if you want: @JustinRFrench

Also, Enjoy this quick video I made (shout our to Chris Brogan for the Hotel Room idea) where I try to stay on topic with 3 main points: Hustle, Helpfulness, and Heart. Also, I ask, what are you doing to make sure you are being extra helpful to clients and colleagues these days? In times like these, we must be going above and beyond (one of my favorite groups by the way) in being extra helpful in providing quality customer serve. Just talking about it isn’t good enough anymore. (Thank Zappos for being the model example of this)

Enjoy

JustinRFrench

Gotta love that catchy headline right? Ok so yesterday when I logged into my personal Gmail account (I have about 30 Gmail accounts by the way all for a different business purpose because you know I’m all about business and occasionally having fun) and I happen to see a landing page come up introducing me to Google Buzz. I watched a quick video, got versed on it, and began exploring. After you watch the video I would advise you to play around with it a little bit. Do you think Twitter may be worried? My personal opinion is just like Linked-in, Facebook and Twitter. Google buzz will be just another means of me communicating to another online community of those I am connected with. (it just happens to be my contacts in my Gmail account and on my phone- the G1 Android). Buy one here and I’ll teach you how to set up a special proprietary workflow system I have created to streamline email and increase productivity

As the lines become more and more blurry between my professional life and personal life, I started out having two separate accounts but quickly realized how non time efficient this was. I am slowing trying to migrate to just 1 user account per social network, but we will see where that takes me. Right now I am more into twitter and Linked-In (obviously) but it depends on my goals.

What are you thoughts on the new Google Buzz? Should Twitter be afraid? I don’t think so, not for now anyway, BUT who knows what will happen in the next year. The world of social media and social networking for business changes every day. It is so hard to keep up BUT if this is your passion, you never consider it work. Its part of your life. It consumes you. You are addicted. But there are many other worse things you could be addicted to so until then, go get your Buzz on with Google and Tweet it up on Twitter. Cheers,

Justin R French

Social Media and SEO go hand in hand now. Because of the real time nature of the web, Google is now ranking tweets, video, and other social media conversations because of the increase in user generated content. Even early last year when I was experimenting with SEO tactics and twitter, I began seeing various twitter accounts ranked for certain keyword phrases. Here is a video I did that explains this principal in more detail:

Do you have some examples of Google ranking your social media activities real time? Let us know- Cheers

P.S. Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints on a well deserved Super Bowl win yesterday!

Are you involved in social media?  Are you in Marketing?  If you are, you have probably heard the term brand association.  Brand association is a growing trend in social media.  Many people are starting to capitalize on this while growing their social influence or social capital.  Yes even twitter has a grading system and measures your influence.  Because of this, personal branding is becoming a necessity in todays digital economy and I wanted to share with you my take on the topic.

First, when I think of personal branding, I refer to personal branding expert for generation Y  Dan Schawbel (click his name for link to his Blog) who I had the pleasure to meet at Gravity Summit last year in Boston.   Here is the blog post With a video I did interviewing Dan on online branding tips for small business: http://bit.ly/2jYUl Celebrities and other influential people in the online and offline world leverage brand association and capitalize on this everyday.

Now more than ever thanks to social media, we will continue to see this trend gain more popularity with big brand names endorsing people who build up their social capital, social influence, and trust with their audience.  Why should you pay attention to this?  Because thanks to social media, this levels the playing field and creates new opportunities that did not exist before social media.  Now just average people can possibly take advantage of this new opportunity to use social media to associate themselves with brands they are passionate about and capitalize thanks to their brand evangelism.   Affiliate programs do a lot of this too.  Thanks to our personal stories and testimonials (being transparent of course) the smart companies and brands will start reaching out to key influencer’s active in social media and social networking.  This is continually happening and this trend will continue growing so get involved, IF you don’t mind being transparent of course.

Here is my video that explains brand association in more detail.  I am interested in hearing from you-  what are your brand associations? Hint- follow products and services you are passionate about.  If you are not involved now with social media and associating yourself with products and services you are passionate about, then I suggest you start.  Do you see anything wrong with social media and brand association?  Have you been able to capitalize on this yet? I’m interested in hearing your stories.

If you are from Infiniti and intertsted in speaking more about the endorsement- I can be reached via email at snsdjf@gmail.com

Happy Branding!