Tag: twitter

A Primer Part 2: Social Inbound Marketing

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A Primer Part 1: What is Social Media

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Leveraging social media to generate sales

Social Media has long been seen as a new channel that could be leveraged to generate sales and increase market awareness of brands.  Now the results achieved by the earlier adopter companies are starting to show up.  As reported by Reuters,  Dell announced sales of more than $3MM yesterday.

“Dell said on Thursday it has raked in more than $3 million (1.8 million pounds) from Twitter followers who clicked through its posts to its Web sites to make purchases. The company, which has posted to Twitter about two years and tracks the sales with proprietary software, made more than $1 million in the past 6 months.”

This is one of several recently reported e-commerce successes and once again highlights the growth and increasing importance of social media for businesses.  Other well known companies include Whole Foods Market, Woot.com, Zappos.com, JetBlue Airways.

Social Media and Sports- a Winning team

Image via Wikipedia

The idea of leveraging social media in sports has been around for a while now, as teams and individuals use various platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to engage with fans. Its a great combination for both as social media thrives on sources that provide engaging content, and sports teams build and succeed financially on engaging fans. The direct nature and immediacy of twitter has made it a particular favorite for athletes to use, and with significant success. Athletes such as Danica Patrick are now being paid to twitter (in this case by Tissot), and others such as Shaquille O’Neal, Lance Armstrong, Mark Sanchez, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, and Dwight Howard are all attracting large numbers of subscribers.

Sports Illustrated ran a piece recently highlighting the growing importance of social media in the industry and the widening use of Twitter by the leagues

“The tool is scoring for the pro leagues too. All the majors — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR — shoot their followers useful information like scores, schedules, and highlight clips” Mainstream indeed.

For those facing the challenge if getting started in Social Media, here are a few of the key reasons why you, your team, or your sponsors should invest the time to get involved, and build a strategy to stay involved.

1. Your fans want to be in touch with you. These systems allow you to engage and provide customer service that is personal, and yet also manageable.
2. Fans like to have news from a vareity of sources, but some news is best coming direct from you. You have authority and only sometimes choice of when to issues the news. Use those advantages.
3. Sponsors keep many athlets and sports running. They give based on what they get. Social media gives you a chance to bring them in to conversation, thank them and send your fans their way.
4. Your fans are a great source of ideas and solutions. They are thrilled to be involved so, so asking questions is a great way to engage and costs little.
5. They are talking about you already. Some good, some bad. Either way, you can only influence the outcome if you are in the conversation
6. Its not just a scoreboard, you can put rich content and bring in people that might not like your “official sites”.
7. You can always send people back to the official sites. It will bring in new fans and add to traffic, rarely does more contejnt of interest reduce your influence.
8. Finally, you can actually see what is happening. Official sites will appeal to a part of your fan base, but not all. By engaging in social media conversations, you get in on a broader and much bigger set of conversations. By engaging social media business intelligence services, you can hear and see what is being said and use this feedback to assess you success relative to targets.

Its important to also get involved before you need to. If you have been an influential part of the community by creating great content and commenting on other peoples ideas and issues, highlighting ideas, events, dealing with issues or celebrating, it is not self serving as a simple marketing piece, and is infinately more effective.

Twitter vs Gamer networks for high speed news updates

No sooner had I finished reading a blog article about the transitions occuring in the way people get their news (see “where is everyone“), than I had a real live test study present itself. Last night we had a small earthquake and I jumped onto Twittersearch to see what the magnitude was.  Silence.  No action or posts. Next I turned to google and was directed to a local TV news channel blog post with a question from the anchor on what listeners had felt, and where.  The real eye-opener was the next link though to NeoGAF, a gamer’s forum.  These guys were on it in seconds and closed out with 50 posts in 15 minutes.  The reports came in with phone area codes and short updates.  Gamers are now more real-time, localized and real-world than twitterers?

acknowledgements: Thomas Baekdal

Sports Twittering

With the rapid advancement of Twitter into mainstream marketing toolboxes, many professional sports teams and leagues have now added one or more Twitter accounts.  These accounts can be vastly powerful in their reach, and Epic States has engaged in several projects recently to leverage this messaging service to deliver results aligned with corporate strategies.  For more information contact us at info@epicstates.com