Eric Schwartzman

How to master social media engagement is a question asked widely by businesses and consumers.

Does your corporation or business know how market on Facebook or how to tweet and how to retweet compelling shares? 

Are you writing the best Facebook wall posts?

Do you know how to use Twitter for business?

Do you find yourself asking the question why use new tools when you’re still getting the hang of Facebook and Twitter? And how on earth do you please managers and clients who want to control the message and earn the trust of the online community at the same time? 

Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan), best-selling author and renowned blogger, discusses how to author and share social media content from a business perspective and his experience as a thought leader in the rapidly changing world of digital marketing. 

With social media on the top of business minds everywhere, many are confused by how to share engagingly.

Chris discusses why public relations professionals need to show their bosses that it’s better to be authentic and why the best Facebook wall posts could be those that reference your competitor instead of yourself. 

How to share social media is becoming even more prominent in our lives and it’s time for people and businesses to start embracing and engaging with others, says Chris.

With new social networking channels arising, people find themselves asking questions like, why use Google+ when I already have Twitter and Facebook accounts? This podcast skims the surface of that question, and goes deeper into the concept of how to share social media content. 

Chris Brogan is President of Human Business Works; Co-Founder of PodCamp; New York Time’s Best-Selling author of Trust Agents and is this year’s keynote presenter at the PRSA International Conference in Orlando this October. 

Mastering Social Media Engagement: 

2:11 Trust agents are the voices or faces of businesses, but they aren’t at the CEO level, Brogan explains and shares an example of how this is happening at Google. The trust agent knows how to share twitter messages and posts and stays engaged on social networking sites. A lot of companies are using the social networking websites for business networking and to help humanize their brands. 

4:21 We have to learn we’re never right all of the time online and must show our managers and clients that one of the parts of how to share social media content correctly is using the Three A’s: Acknowledge, Apologize and Act. In PR, professionals are sometimes compelled by managers to try and spin a silver lining around even the worst news, but that isn’t working anymore. On social networks like Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, people talk whether you like it or not, says Brogan.   

6:04 How to share social media as an organization authentically, understanding what legally what you can and cannot be said, acknowledging without endorsing negative status updates, wall posts, tweets, RTs, comments, likes and shares. 

7:02 When sharing via social media, is there a danger of being too available? It is important for PR professionals to social media train their clients to tweet and share on Facebook effectively?  Some people are avoiding their “handlers” and taking care of it themselves, like Kanye West who demonstrated how to share Twitter posts that reflect you in a better light. 

8:00 The role of a PR professional is to educate clients or managers on how to handle things themselves by giving them social media training. There is a risk of people or companies being overexposed and it’s important to be able to explain the pluses and minuses to the client or manager and be able to handle the situation if that does happen. 

8:50 What makes the best Facebook wall post? Joe Ciarallo (@joeciarallo) of Buddy Media discussed a study his company did on what makes an effective wall post and found that promotional language is usually the kiss of death. Brogan agrees with Ciarallo’s statement by saying that always promoting your own brand is not necessarily the best option. When in doubt use the 12 to 1 rule, promote other people’s or companies things 12 times more than your own, this is the best way to build and earn relationships. 

9:19 Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason) of CitiBank has said that you can earn the right to sell once people know you. Because today is such an opt-in world with Facebook and Twitter, and all of the social networking sites, you have to earn the right by building relationships first. 

9:58 The best Facebook wall posts or the best twitter posts are sometimes those where you recommend your competitor because your product isn’t the right product. When a company or person can do that it’s a huge opportunity to win the trust of the community and become an influencer. 

10:45 What if your company is so large that there isn’t a lot of choice on the consumer side, does social media even matter? What if the company is essentially too big to fail? You have to take a different approach on how to post tweets or how to share Facebook wall posts in general. You don’t necessarily need to build relationships but you can use it to build future credibility and get positive press. Brogan points out Comcast as an example of this. 

14:25 In social media, it’s not just about how to share new media content but who you are sharing it with. The problem of one-way intimacy arises for people who are successful on social media sites. You may follow someone on Twitter but they may not follow you back. It’s hard for people to keep up with everyone but there are some celebrities who find the time to get back to people, which in turn gives them a big payoff and helps improve their credibility online. 

17:18 How to share social media without oversharing can be a problem.  Exclusivity increases desirability.  Many people don’t know what is ok to share and what isn’t. A lot of it depends on your business. If you work for a financial company or pharmaceutical company for instance, you have to work with your legal team to know exactly you can and can’t divulge.  That happens by accelerating digital literacy by setting boundaries. 

18:44 The most value in sharing comes in customization. If you give away as much as possible you will get the longer win. PR people should start...

Photo by Tyson Goodridge.

Are black hat SEO specialists getting better at outsmarting Google? And is Google Local Search particularly susceptible to gaming?

Earlier this year, JCPenney and Overstock.com had to be manually demoted by Google because they were paying for inbound links to inflate their rankings artificially.

Last month, a Chinese start-up that uses illicit SEO tactics to outrank several major consumer brands for keywords like “summer dresses” secured a 15 million dollar investment from Sequoia Capital.

Credit card provider Capital One piggybacks off an online car dealership’s display ad widget to rank number one for the phrase “auto loans.” Most recently, lead gen companies have gotten so good at gaming local search that it’s become exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for local locksmiths to get found by customers.

Instead, the lead gen companies, or affiliate marketers, intercept the leads and sell them to the highest bidder, driving up the service cost. Online search expert Doug Pierce, available via LinkedIn, Twitter or email, who is the co-founder of Digital Due Diligence, which helps investors evaluate online business models, talks about the shady schemes of black hat SEOs, and whether or not they’ll ever get Google search of its usefulness.

Black Hat SEO Topics Discussed

How national lead gen companies outrank local companies in Google Local Search.

How lead gen sites use NAPs -- name, address, and phone number -- to curry favor.

Was including Local Search in its current state in Universal Search Results a bad idea?

Inside the unseemly Chinese Internet web of inbound link purchasing networks.

How to use ALT tags to give inbound links from JPEGs SEO relevancy.

Did JC Penny know what it was doing, or was management digitally illiterate?

Since this podcast was recorded, Google significantly changed the Goolge Local search algorithm.

Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

The best shares aren’t random.  There is a method behind the madness.  

Prior to their acquisition by Salesforce.com, I spoke to Buddy Media director of communications Joe Ciarallo (@joeciarallo) about why some Facebook wall posts get likes and comments, while others get none?  

When is the best time to post on social media, how often should you post and are there certain words that generate a higher response rate?  

What’s the science of procuring engagement on the world’s largest social network?  

In this exclusive interview with Joe, we explore what makes a great Facebook wall post. 

Listen to this podcast with Buddy Media director of communications Joe Ciarallo (@joeciarallo) and find out how to create effective Facebook wall posts based on a research study his company did on viral content marketing shares of 200 name brands over a 2-week period.

Joe also talks about how to optimize your status updates for Facebook’s Edgerank so fans see it their newsfeed.   Topics discussed:

Optimum Facebook post character lengthBenefits and drawbacks of URL shorteners and the problem with long URLsWords that appeared most in top “liked” and “commented” sharesWhich words appeared most frequently in ineffective engagement in FacebookThe impact of “likes”, “comments”, affinity and time on Facebook EdgerankingsWhy NOT to ask “why” in your Facebook wall postsPurchase intent and recommendation likelihood of Facebook Fans vs. Twitter FollowersWhat’s the ROI of a Facebook fan?Niche marketing, B2B marketing and brand building on FacebookShel Holtz’s recent interview of Brian Solis

For more on how to make a Facebook post go viral, check out this interview with Chris Brogan.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Is there a way to reduce call center costs while improving the quality of customer experience?

n this episode, former Forrester Analyst Natalie Petouhoff (@DrNatalie) discusses her ROI model for social customer service and the recent videos she produced for Salesforce.com on building the business case for integrating social into customer service.

Can social customer service protect brands against perceived and systemic product failures?

In markets dominated by companies that are too big to fail, do customer opinions matter?

Dr. Nat also discusses he method of calculating the ROI of social customer service interactions, the value of direct and indirect call deflection and why companies should align with their super users to lower their call center costs while improving customer experience quality.

Google Analytics is a digital marketing reporting and measurement platform that can show the ROI of your online and offline marketing efforts, as long as you know how to use it.  

Welcome to the second half part of our two part series on Google Analytics with Justin Cutroni, Director, Education at Google

From paid search, to display advertising, to social media, to email, marketers are working in a variety of different channels.  

In this episode, we discuss how to use your web analytics to get actionable business intelligence beyond just the last page visited before the conversion.

We also discuss segmenting direct traffic by geographic region to correlate offline marketing with web traffic.

Analyzing conversions based on referring domains, filtering reports in real time using Advanced Segmentation to identify which segments are performing best.

Using the “Visits with Conversions” and “Visits with Transactions” default Advanced Segments to see the effectiveness of your web content.

Looking beyond last click attribution modeling with the Google Analytics v5 multi channel funnels, now in limited beta release, to see what combination of channels work best together and understand every touch point on the path to conversion

Campaign tracking or link tracking to identify traffic from individual tweets and Facebook status updates.

Justin’s appearance on “Beyond Web Analytics 44” podcast hosted by Adam Greco and Rudi Shumpert, the significance of the release of Google Analytics v5, custom dashboards and custom reports, event tracking on page interactions and advanced visualizations with word clouds.

That’s the direction he says web analytics is moving. Justin has written two books on web analytics:

Google Analytics published by O’Reilly, June 2010. This book is for the advanced GA user. It dives into many advanced topics, like custom variables, that Performance Marketing does not cover. This book is all about GA.

Performance Marketing with Google Analytics, Wiley 2010. This book was written for those just getting started with web analytics and Google analytics. It’s for the beginner that needs to understand how to do a basic setup of GA and how to do basic analysis.

And his firm Cardinal Path is certified by Google to teach a series of workshop in using Google Analytics called Seminars for Success.

Want to launch a custom mobile app to build excitement before and accelerate connections at your next event? Nervous about having to develop it from scratch?  

If you've already read my blog post on HOW TO: Social Media Market B2B Events -- which gives a punch list of things you can do to promote real world B2B events in online social spheres -- this podcast is a deep-dive on designing and deploying mobile apps for use at live events.  

In this podcast, new biz dev guy Pankaj Prasad (@therealpankaj) from DoubleDutch, which has built mobile apps for TED, Cisco Events and HP Events, shares best practices for creating branded mobile apps for live events. DoubleDutch has skinnable geolocation apps for mobile devices that bring the functionality of Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare in a closed community, to the mobile device.

The Double Dutch mobile app (pictured left) includes a portfolio of micro apps that can be branded and combined on the mobile desktop.  

It can be used to provide event attendees with the ability to social network with other event attendees in an exclusive environment without spamming or alienating their Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

Mobile apps give event organizers a way to port their paper schedule or conference program to a mobile device so that attendees can search it by time of day, proximity, keyword or track and automatically add sessions to their iCal or Google Calendar.

The activity feed in the Double Dutch mobile app can segmented to meet the needs of a particular event, so people can network around different topics, and this is important because the company believes that people are more responsive to focused feeds than broad ones, which is why they typically check email, Facebook and Twitter in that order from their mobile devices.  

The better an activity stream can give you social information from people from your community that are around you at that time, the more useful it is, which is why they built feed segmentation into their app.

The Double Dutch app provides event organizers will a web dashboard that they can use to publish and edit the information in the app on the fly.

Cisco uses DoubleDutch to power their Cisco Events app, which iPhone users can download and play with.

Photo by Neil Soni on Unsplash

Google Analytics can give you real business insight into the effectiveness of your content creative, if you know what you’re looking for.  

Welcome to our podcast series on Google Analytics with Justin Cutroni (@JustinCutroni), Director of Education at Google.  

In part one of our two part series, Justin talks about his favorite reports for measuring business outcomes (All Traffic Sources).

AdWords Campaigns and (Funnel Visualization reports)

Digging deeper with Advanced Segmentation

Drawing strategic and tactical business insights from web analytics

Using page views per visit, session length and return visits to measure the effectiveness on content marketing campaigns that are designed to inform rather than convert

Frequency & Recency and Engagement reports under the “Behavior” tab

Justin prefers the term Digital Intelligence to web analytics, because he believes we need to focus on drawing actionable business intelligence from web data.

That’s the direction he says web analytics is moving. Justin has written two books on web analytics:

Google Analytics published by O’Rielly, June 2010. This book is for the advanced GA user. It dives into many advanced topics, like custom variables, that Performance Marketing does not cover. This book is all about GA.

Performance Marketing with Google Analytics, Wiley 2010. This book was written for those just getting started with web analytics and Google analytics. It’s for the beginner that needs to understand how to do a basic setup of GA and how to do basic analysis.

Part Two of our series on Google Analytics with Justin Cutroni is now available too. Subscribe now and don’t miss it.

Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies today remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.  

How else do explain Burson-Marsteller's email smear campaign against Google for Facebook, a famous British soccer player's lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics, or JC Penny and Overstock.com's decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings.

Chalk it up to digital illiteracy.  

In this episode, PR professionals from Martin Waymire Advocacy Communications in Central Michigan discuss overcoming digital illiteracy in the workplace:

Roger Martin, APR, Partner (@advocateman)Andrea Ness, Director of graphic and new media services (@andrea_ness)Rose Tantraphol (“PH” is silent – TAN-tra-pole), Senior account executive (@rose101)

Most people go to a few social media conferences and learn just enough to be dangerous.  But the fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions.

What's required is practical training and applied knowledge.   This episode is about what it takes to build digital illiteracy in your company, with your managers and your clients as well.

Andrea and Rose are both alumni of my Social Media Boot Camp, a workshop that provides hands-on training to transfer applied knowledge for social marketing.  

Photo by Carlos Deleon on Unsplash

When’s the best time to Facebook?  When’s the best time to tweet? If you're a digital marketing agency pro, you've probably wondered about it more than once. Until now, very little research has been conducted to answer that question.

In this podcast on the Science of Timing Facebook status update tweets, social media scientist Dan Zarrella discusses his research on the best times to Facebook and tweet, using two years of quantitative research as a guide.

Dan, the author of The Social Media Marketing Book, studies social media behavior from a data-backed position, enabling him to teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices.   Dan's research covers when to tweet, when to Facebook, when to email, and when to blog.

This podcast covers when to Tweet and when to blog.

Initially, we had planned a second episode on when to email and when to blog, but the interview quality was inaudible. Unfortunately, despite a few too many attempts, we could not get Dan to agree to rerecord part two.  

I believe the audio problem stemmed from the recording via Skype Out to a VoIP landline in a room with extensive background noise. 

The resulting audio was thin, with the level going in and out, so if you're a podcaster, one more thing to consider when recording interviews over the phone. 

Avoid VoIP landlines. Cell phones are better. 

Even after significant filtering attempts, part two of this podcast was unusable.  

This episode was recorded under the same circumstances and the audio -- which was filtered as well --  is less than stellar. Still, the information is valuable, and I hope you enjoy it.

Discussion Topics:

The Unicorns and Rainbow’s Myth.

Best time of day and day of the week to tweet for retweets and click-throughs

Whether or users with @replies get more retweets and click-throughs

Optimal number of tweets per day

How many self-promotional vs. selfless tweets per day is the right mix

Dan’s tool for when you get the most retweets

How many Facebook status updates per day is too many

When Facebook status updates are most likely to get “liked”

What days of the week and what time of day are the best times to Facebook

Do Facebook status updates with links, photos, and videos increase engagement?

Photo by Malvestida Magazine on Unsplash

This is an audio transcript of a keynote presentation by Paul Gillin and I, presented by the Society for New Communications Research at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference in New York City.  

It was delivered just after our book, Social Marketing to the Business Customer was released.

With spending projected to grow at 21% a year through 2013, business-to-business social media communications is the place to be.  

In this keynote, you'll hear how to model winning B2B social campaigns, convince skeptics of social marketing's value, map out a well-defined business strategy, choose metrics that matter, optimize your visibility to search engines and take advantage of the latest social search category.

Speakers: Paul Gillin, senior fellow, SNCR, and Eric Schwartzman, fellow, SNCR, are co-authors of the first book devoted exclusively to B2B social media, " Social Marketing to the Business Customer."

Gillin is author of "The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing."