SigmaWay Blog

An article by Sofie De Beule, community manager of Engagor, conveys that the majority of mobile consumers use their devices to broadcast their location by checking in on Foursquare, posting a photo on Facebook from dinner with friends or getting directions. Thus location-based social data has become the new currency to engage and build stronger relationships with consumers. Therefore, location-based marketing - targeting people with advertising, based on their location - is essential for businesses to partake in. To keep the mobile-savvy consumer engaged longer, one-to-one connection and delivering the right content through a personalized message based on their personal, localized data is essential. As the connected consumer continues to rely on their mobile device to determine where they will go and how they will spend their money, companies need to embrace location-based marketing.

To know more visit http://socialmediatoday.com/sofie-de-beule/2399336/why-location-based-social-data-new-currency 

Will this be the year in which retailers add SMS texting to their customer support channels? Plenty of consumers have discarded SMS in favor of WhatsApp. Thirty one percent of mobile phone owners prefer to text rather than talk. Texting bypasses the annoyance of wading through multiple menus and directives to enter account numbers or other personal information to route a call.

 To gather more information, follow the article link by Lydia Dishman, veteran business journalist.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lydiadishman/2014/05/02/is-texting-the-next-solution-for-retailers-to-field-customer-complaints/

What many social and marketing professionals fail to acknowledge is the reality of what can be called the coherent customer. As lines in between marketing and IT merge, the consumer has a huge head start in their daily lives. While device adaptation is a fairly blunt tool to gauge new coherent customer, studying consumer trends increasingly points to not only cohesive elements but to stratification as well. Marketing needs to play a bigger role in harnessing all that data and determining how to use it to drive customers through the purchasing life cycle.

To know more read the article by Phil Butler, editor-in-chief of Everything PR, follow http://socialmediatoday.com/philbutler/2368211/new-marketing-paradigm-coherent-customer-satisfaction

An article by Ted Shelton, Vice president of Cognizant Business Consulting, talks about the substantial changes coming to every industry - how work is done, who does the work, and how value is derived from the work by all of the stakeholders - employees, companies, and their customers. Most companies have one or more CRM systems - often more than one as a separate CRM initiative may have been pursued for sales vs. service or even for multiple different sales and service channels (even when serving the same customer). The goal is to get a rich multi-dimensional understanding of your customer, and to have that information available to all departments of your company that engage with customers.

To know more follow http://socialmediatoday.com/tedshelton/2387741/crm-and-customer-code-halo

An article by Pam Dyer, Marketing manager at SolutionsIQ, conveys that hashtags can be powerful tools that drive brand recognition, increase reach, build community, create buzz, and positively impact customer loyalty. They are ways to track topics on Twitter and other social media platforms. Anyone sharing content can add one to their messages and posts, thus helping people to quickly find information on that same topic. It's easy to join in a hashtag conversation by clicking on one of your own tweets or those of others. You can track hashtags to see which ones resonate most with your audience. Hashtags on Instagram can help to maximize your reach and create a network of influential brand followers.  When users click on a hashtag in Google+, the search results page (SERP) includes the original hashtag as well as posts with similar tags and keywords.

For more information visit http://socialmediatoday.com/pamdyer/2381691/using-hashtags-social-media-marketing

B2B marketers are recognizing the benefit of engaging with audiences via social networks. By creating an online persona for your brand, you're humanizing it. To succeed in social strategy, B2B companies need to adopt the mindset of engaging as an individual first and business second. This personal tone will make your brand more approachable. For success in social strategy, you have to customize your brand image on your company profile, share videos, and upload presentations using LinkedIn and Twitter. The social site revealed that more than 30 percent of Twitter users search for B2B brands online, compared to 12 percent of average internet users.

To know more about the article by Boone Baill, Seasoned marketing and communications professional, follow http://socialmediatoday.com/bonniebailly/2383241/social-secrets-softer-side-b2b-marketing 

Analytics makes it easy for you to track how many conversions you are getting from your social profiles by using Google Analytics. Once you have installed Google Analytics, you need to collect data, but if you are like most of your clients who have built a large audience, you will have data points on your reports that are actionable and very insightful. Google has a great support center that answers most questions that are related to trouble shooting analytics and it is a great learning resource.

 To know more read the article by Sergio Aicardi, CEO of Miami SEO Company, from http://socialmediatoday.com/sergio-aicardi/2358246/tracking-social-media-success-google-analytics

Search Engine Optimization is an effective tool in internet marketing which helps to understand how search engines take user queries in the form of keywords and turn them into search engine result pages. The algorithms in the search engines are geared more towards understanding and appreciating the importance of social signals.  Shares, likes, posts, comments and followers will expand your business not only in the branding aspect of your business, but search engines as well.

To gather more insights visit the article by Joe Chierotti, lead strategist and VP of Search Engine Optimization in InternetReputation.com, follow http://socialmediatoday.com/joe-chierotti/2367216/advanced-seo-techniques-importance-social-media 

An article by Chris Syme, owner of CKSyme Media Group, talks about how monitoring social media can help in preventing crisis. She also mentioned that the first step in crisis communication planning is learning to listen. She spoke about some key conversations that one should monitor while listening and also discussed about how to monitor those conversations.

To know about effective listening strategies in details follow http://socialmediatoday.com/chrissyme/2362621/how-monitor-social-media-prevent-crisis

An article by Tom Treanor, founder of Right Mix Marketing, conveys that it is important to maintain a balance between all social media accounts to know the strengths of each social networking site which can give your business organization an interesting mix and help you to reach your target audience. Everybody knows about the popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn but there are plenty of others which are slightly less famous but can form an essential ingredient in social media strategy. Thus, from your Facebook page people should be able to go to your Instagram account or your Pinterest page and so on. He also mentioned that one of the biggest strengths of Google plus is that it gives you opportunities to link up with all your other social profiles. It also becomes important for your website to have all your social media profile buttons displayed prominently. Your social media profile has to be driven by the right kind of images and videos. Thus, leveraging the right kind of social media tools can indeed become a huge productivity enhancer for your business organization.

To know more follow http://www.business2community.com/social-media/businesses-can-optimize-social-media-profiles-0844522#!EjbHw

A new feature is built into Facebook's mobile app that allows you to see which of your friends are close by and even share your exact location with others. The new feature uses the geo location technology in your smart phone to determine when you are close to one of your Facebook friends. When activated, the feature will send periodic notifications to friends who are nearby. Users who did not activate Nearby Friends won't be affected in any way, and will not share with or receive any location information from others on the platform.

To know more about the use of this new feature visit the article by Kurt Wagner, Social media reporter for Mashable, http://mashable.com/2014/04/17/facebook-nearby-friends/

An article by Jaylee Miguel, Lead Community Manager for social media management agency Emoderation, conveys that the beauty industry is often overlooked when we think about the ways how social media has grown and how brands have adapted. Just like beauty counters at a department store, social media can be a great place for consumers to interact with beauty brands. Brands are now investing more money in digital-led campaigns not only to improve their social media presence but also to achieve a higher ROI in areas that TV failed to deliver.  It is essential for brands to understand their strategy, through the line campaign that works in conjunction with its advertising and marketing by using social media as a platform to push content.

To know more visit http://socialmediatoday.com/jaylee-miguel/2354996/beauty-brands-and-social-media

An article by Jaylee Miguel, lead community manager of Emoderation, talks about different new features of twitter like timeline changes, mobile updates etc. Now the key question is how brands can use Twitter's new features to their advantage? To answer this, she mentioned that brands can use the video sharing tool to communicate with competition winners in a creative way, thus raising awareness of new campaigns by tagging others. But she also spoke about how free tagging feature can create spam.

To know more about follow http://socialmediatoday.com/jaylee-miguel/2341916/how-brands-can-make-most-out-twitters-new-features

David Waterman, expert in search engine optimization, talks about how marketers can take advantage of social media to spy on their customers and target audience to gather better insights. He also discussed about the five different steps to be followed for enhancing the process.

To know more about the steps follow http://marketingland.com/social-media-perfect-tool-spying-customers-76595

An article by Devin Redmond, Co-founder and CEO of Nexgate, talks about how social media spam can damage a brand name and how it affects social media marketing ROI. He also spoke about different steps that social media marketers can adopt to stop social spam and mitigate loss.

For more information visit http://socialmediatoday.com/1865971/state-social-media-spam-social-media-spam-rise

A recent research by Fast Company revealed that 93% of marketers use social media to promote their business.  It is the number one daily activity among Americans. Social media sites, email providers and the Google are eating up the largest chunk of the time spent over the internet. Social media is reaching beyond our traditional perception; it’s getting bigger and bigger with time. From a marketer’s Point of view, if you are not marketing on it, you are likely missing a large chunk of your target consumers. As a product of the Mark Zuckerberg generation, it is easy to understand why people are so obsessed with social media. For marketers, the potential to grow their business via these networks is endless. The following base strategies will help you take control of your social channels and give them a much needed facelift.

·         Create a game plan & stick to it.

·         Treat each channel as an individual entity.

·         Go above & beyond in Customer Service.

·         Embrace any kind of mishaps.

·         Track & talk.

·         Stay active on Google+.

To read more, see Margot da Cunha’s blog by visiting the following link address:

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/01/09/social-media-marketing-strategies

An article written by Mike Bailey, owner of Grey Kite Resources, talks about how social media can play an important role in becoming an advocate for the organisation you work for. He mentioned that when employees share anything with their social networks, they reach 20 times more people than a typical brand sharing with the same number of followers. He also discussed about different guidelines to be followed for employee advocacy.

To know in details read the article on http://socialmediatoday.com/Beyond_Engagement/unleashing-power-employee-advocacy

Research firm Gartner has predicted that half of the large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks by 2016, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today. It also noted that 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership. A report on “unified communication and collaboration” (UCC), by another research firm, Frost & Sullivan, pointed out that employees have become accustomed in recent years to simple and user-friendly interfaces of free online communications tools, such as Gmail and Facebook, which allow them to collaborate in only a few clicks.

To know more about this talk-of-the-town topic, read Author Al Bredenberg’s article by visiting the following link:

http://www.thomasnet.com/journals/techtrends/articles/companies-want-to-get-social-in-their-enterprise-collaboration

By engaging more people in conversations/discussions related to company offerings via social media, organizations are creating brand awareness among mass. Today, creating hype for a soon to be launched product is easy & convenient with the help of social media, as it saves promotional cost as well as it helps in understanding consumer sentiment beforehand. By indulging in various social media conversations, people are actually acting like brand ambassadors & reviewers. Though chances of negative publicity cannot be ruled out entirely, still with a good structured online marketing strategy, immense benefits can be achieved. Few notable real time online advertising strategies deserve to be mentioned, such as following conversations and then joining them, saying no to discipline, getting legal permissions to use material, ensuring that the brand is never silent on social media, moving on when content gets stale, never ignoring negative feedback etc.

To read more, visit wall street journal article link given below:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303801304579407284034257414?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303801304579407284034257414.html