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Heart-warming. The moment a little girl saw her father after 18 months apart.
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If you could only had one social media option to support your business goals which one would you choose? Chances are you said Facebook without a second thought. As the 800 pound gorilla of social media, it should be a no-brainer but is it really the best for your business? Roughly half of the respondents named Facebook as the most important social media platform in Social Media Examiner’s 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed a cross section of businesses using social media in their marketing mix. As Syncapse research revealed, Facebook drives revenues. Besides, there’s something to be said for a large audience of engaged users. Actionable Marketing Advice: Create a Facebook presence and be active there. What’s interesting about Social Media Examiner’s data is how the other social media venues measure up….
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…Over the past few months I’ve spoken to two authors who’d signed with the same, well-reputed PR firm for a book launch campaign, paid a considerable amount of money and then…nothing. Barely a review or author interview to show for the firm’s initial promises and excitement. (Needless to say, this makes my blood boil. It’s deeply unfair to the authors who placed their trust in this firm, it’s disrespectful of authors in general – taking advantage of their earnest hope and vulnerability – and it’s an insult to all the devoted, hard-working publicists out there who go above and beyond to generate results. It also brings to light something that absolutely has to change: Many – possibly most? – authors simply have no idea what they should look for when hiring a PR firm. Nor do they know what’s “normal” or what they should expect from this relationship. So here’s my laundry list of must-haves in determining whether the firm you hire to publicize your book is up to par, and in understanding whether it’s doing (or will do) what it should for you…
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How content marketing is the new SEO…. Less than a year ago links were everything to the SEO industry. Whether it was guest blogging or content marketing, the sole aim of many agencies revolved purely around sourcing and acquiring links. The answer is simple. By combining knowledge on entities, associations, co-occurrence and authorship, you can build a strategy that actually solves a problem or satisfies a need for your target audience. By doing this you will increase traffic and naturally generate links. Like Hannah Smith mentioned at this year’s LinkLove conference, if you do stuff that gets links, rather than doing it for links, you are much more likely to succeed. And to save you the hassle of pooling all this together, I’ve done it for you. You’re welcome….
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Social media can be one of the most successful channels for B2B lead generation, but many companies still jump into a social network to have a presence for presence sake. If your company is on a social network, there must be a purpose behind being there. For B2B marketers, that purpose is most likely creating demand that will drive leads and sales. Depending on your marketplace, a focus on social demand generation could require being on just a few or a number of social media sites. Either way, you’ll have to go in with a plan to make sure each of those networks produces results. Here are six important ways your company can build a social media machine that generates leads while having some fun…
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Nowadays, many businesses are using Twitter as a tool for connecting with their customers, building traffic to their sites and expanding their businesses. Here are some tips which will help you succeed in your Twitter marketing plan….
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You can’t escape having a content style guide for very long. While it’s easy to share standards between one or two content marketers, it’s very hard to scale without a system in place. If your organization is among the 45% of companies with plans to expand their budget for content marketing and inbound practices in 2013, there’s no better time than the present to start brainstorming a style guide for blogging: For hundreds of years, publishing organizations and media have used style guides to define standards in-house, and quickly get new writers up to speed. Don’t think of it as a tool to train your writers on how to use grammar and spelling, but instead as the experts of Intelligent Editing put it, “to provide [guidance] for instances when many possibilities exist.” Your company’s content marketing is your online voice, and a consistent tone will ensure you’re able to achieve memorable branding. Whether you’re planning to scale from one to two dedicated content creators, or you’re starting to utilize freelance copywriting services, a content style guide can help your whole inbound marketing team write in the same voice…
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The Customer Journey to Online Purchase: an interactive infographic that explores typical customer behavior to improve marketing programs. These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs….
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By understanding the customer journey across media, devices and platforms, marketers can better optimize search and social marketing performance…. On the one hand, there’s a temptation to spend a lot of time and resources developing “the perfect” strategy. On the other hand, you could also just start cranking out content and see what sticks. Neither of those approaches really work well in a practical way. What does work? There’s one thing that can help answer many of the concerns marketers have about content and that also helps you cut to the chase for practical implementation: Understanding the customer journey. Google Think Insights has a great post with tools to help marketers better understand how different content and channels affects customers during the buying cycle or customer journey to online purchase. Check it out and then come back….
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SEO used to be about tuning a website for optimal consumption by spiders. Today’s SEO is about earning recognition, social spread, and backlinks. Here are practical activities that need to be done every month to achieve real SEO results. Google has just rolled out Penguin 2.0, a large algorithmic update promising to go “deeper” than the 2012 Penguin release, which put a hurting on websites with number of manipulative links in their profile. This prospect creates fear for many small businesses who depend on search engine optimization (SEO) for their livelihoods. But there is also a sense of confusion as the line often shifts and the message from Google contradictory. Here’s how to sort out Panda, Penguin, and Manual Actions…
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Semantic search is changing everything. From the way traditional marketing is done to the way social media connections are now forged, the web is forcing us to create more transparent, honest connections than ever before. In the digital marketing world the words “game changer” rank right alongside “awesome” in terms of overuse. Yet, when it comes to semantic search nothing less can adequately prepare the marketer for the seismic change that’s coming. The reason for this lies more in the way digital marketing has operated to date and less on how search works. Interestingly it is the practices of the former that are forcing changes in the latter. Put a bit more simply, if your online digital marketing strategy is based upon the creation of content that is keyword stuffed, contained tightly within a website and relying solely upon the usual link spamming to help search engines discover it, you are setting yourself up to fail. The reason lies in the way search now grades websites. In the semantic web the content contained in a website, regardless of uniqueness, quality or ‘cleverness’ will fail to do much in search if it does not also engage its intended online audience. In Google’s semantic world ‘sentiment mining’ (what is being said about you), engagement (how your content is received), citation (where your website and brand are mentioned) and interaction (how your website is linked to) form the four pillars upon which your new marketing needs to be based on. The good news is that gaming search and creating ‘shortcuts’ in marketing is now so effort-intensive that it makes no real economic search any more, so you may as well do the right thing and create a digital presence that delivers real value to the online visitor, is completely engaging and works hard to clarify the character and identity of your business. …
See on socialmediatoday.com

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In response to my post defining social selling, I realized that I needed to take a step back and define “What is a social business?” There is a lot of talk about the social business and too often it involves a discussion of social tools and channels. In this article I’ll offer my own definition as well as plenty of links to other resources you can check out for more ideas on how to help your organization transform into a social business. A social business is not a business that sends a lot of Tweets or has a ton of Facebook FB -2.01% likes. A social business is one that realizes that it operates in a more transparent and social world. And so it makes customers and employees equally as important as its shareholders and profits. tools and channels….
See on forbes.com