Here’s a great spoof with lots of great lessons for customer relationships. Or, maybe it’s all about Apple customers. They do seem to share a common devotion to the brand. I know Apple users who won’t think this is so funny (laughing at oneself is a learned skill), and users who will think “yeah, so what’s you’re point?” Gotta love the diversity.
Instead of making email obsolete, the extensive use of social media has made email an even more valuable channel. Social media gives marketers another option for engaging with their communities and reduces “email fatigue.” Leveraging social media also allows marketers to personalize the conversation and make it more targeted.
Below are six essential tactics marketers can use to integrate social media and email to improve their overall marketing results.
1. Use a Social Sign-on. Use a social sign-on on your forms to capture your prospects’ email address to increase email subscription rates. Make it effortless for your visitors by allowing them to opt in via social networks with a click of a button.
2. Add Email Opt-in Offers to Updates. Add a direct call-to-action for prospects to sign up for your email newsletter in your mix of regularly tweeted content. Below are a few ideas to build your email list using Twitter:
3. Include Social Network Icons in Emails. Adding social network icons to your emails and allowing subscribers to share content will increase virility and will also maximize your reach per email. Include them in the header or footer to ensure they are bold and visible. By making your email content easily sharable, you can reach a new audience by tapping into your email subscribers’ network. The more people who share your email, the more opportunity for other people to read your message and become subscribers.
4. Coordinate Marketing Channels for Integrated Marketing Campaigns. Engage with your community across email and social channels. When you add new opt-in subscribers from social media, follow up by sending them an email. Make sure you have tracking and analytics in place to help you understand in what channels your audience prefers to engage with your company/brand.
5. Add an Email Opt-in Form on Your Facebook Page. According to a Silverpop study, only 10 percent of brands currently use Facebook to increase email subscribers. 
This is a clear, low-hanging opportunity to turn your Facebook fans into new subscribers. You can either create a Facebook app with a form or simply create a Facebook post with a call to action to subscribe to your email newsletter.
6. Send Dedicated Emails. Directly ask your subscribers to follow your brand on Twitter, “Like” your brand on Facebook or follow your company on LinkedIn. Be sure to describe the benefit they will get from taking the next step of connecting with you on that social network.
While many marketers use both social media and email in their marketing campaigns, most companies are missing out on the benefits of integrating the two channels. With integration between your social media and email efforts, you can achieve even greater results.
Jennifer Wong is a digital marketing specialist at Seattle-based B-to-B inbound marketing software provider Optify. Reach her at jennifer@optify.net.
Healthy Is As Healthy DoesIt is possible to draw parallels between the green movement and what is happening in health today. Both are human problems that have grown to be global crises through our actions and inactions. Both have their advocates and their nay-sayers. Both ask all of us to take personal responsibility for doing everything we can to fix the problem. And, perhaps most importantly in this context, both have a huge impact on brands and how they are expected to behave. Today, people want the brands that they buy or associate with to demonstrate that they share the same standards and beliefs. And it is much more than a product story. Subaru, a car brand cherished by outdoor types, created the first auto assembly plant in the U.S. to achieve zero-landfill status. Rather than invent another greener car, it showed that its corporation stands for, and is prepared to invest in, protecting the environment. This is a great demonstration of what Jon Iwata, senior vice president, Marketing and Communications at IBM, calls “corporate character.” And understanding that how you act as a company creates brand relevance, which is much more valuable than simply buying awareness. Proof of Character People are looking for similar character from health brands. Some car manufacturers talk about passive and active safety. Passive safety covers the features that protect you if you get in an accident, while active safety is everything designed to stop you getting into an accident. Health brands could adopt this thinking to create experiences that encompass passive and active health — helping people when they are sick and helping them stay well. A successful example of doing both is the “Get on Track” program. Novartis created it as part of the organization’s commitment to helping people with hypertension — regardless of which drug they are taking. When you have high blood pressure, your doctor tells you to change your diet, start exercising and take your medicine. And guess what? You get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing. Get on Track used the thinking behind economic nudge theory to change this. The program creates lots of tiny healthy nudges that add up to a real difference — not just for the patient, but also for Novartis’ character. Being active means thinking different. In an effort to find the thousands of new bone marrow donors needed every year, every packet of “Help, I’ve Cut Myself” adhesive bandages now contains a swab and an envelope. Send a drop of blood to the bone marrow donor center, and it’ll tell you if you’re a match. A brand that is relevant when you have cut yourself is now a lifesaver. Another brand embracing active health is EmblemHealth. The new “This is What Care Feels Like” campaign has created a healthy network for New York: Connecting green markets and restaurants in live street demos, sponsoring fruit carts, partnering with master chefs to create cooking competitions for teens, and airing television commercials that give out health advice and tips. Yes, helping people to stay healthy benefits a health insurance company. But it also benefits us and makes that brand relevant to everyone who cares about his or her health. Renewable Marketing Energy When we create work that is as relevant as this, we are creating more than an advertising campaign. We are creating brand experiences that people can believe in, get involved with and share. Get it right and, just like renewable energy, we are harnessing a momentum that will power brands forward further and faster than ever before. |
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Here’s some excellent guidance for getting the best out of Linkedin’s endorsement feature.
By Linda Coles
Published October 11, 2012 
A word of praise goes a long way in social media.
LinkedIn recently made the endorsement process super-easy with just a simple click.
LinkedIn Endorsements are now live across the United States, India, Australia and New Zealand, and rolling out to everyone else over the coming weeks.
Although it’s too early to tell how valuable these endorsements will be to your LinkedIn networking, they are now an option on your LinkedIn profile, whether you choose to show them on your public profile or not.
Add some skills which will show on your public profile.
In addition to providing some credibility, this new Endorsement feature can also be considered a networking tool for savvy online marketers, because a LinkedIn endorsement is an easy way to get on someone’s radar. It’s also a way to show you care about the people who work with you.
Above all, this LinkedIn Endorsement feature is an easy way to make a little gesture and show recognition to your business connections whom you value the most.
So how does it work?
In order for others to endorse your skills, you first need to add those skills to your profile.
In Edit Profile mode, you’ll see the Skills area to click through. As you enter your skills into the box, it will give you a choice of those already listed for you to pick from, or you can add one that is not currently there.
Add your skills with the most important being listed first.
Make sure you add your skills in order of importance to you, as these will be the first ones listed on your profile and thus the easiest for your connections to see. As you get more endorsements for a particular skill, that skill will automatically rise to the top of the list, as your skills will then be listed by numerical order of endorsements.
When someone views your profile or you view the profile of one of your first-degree connections, you are offered the opportunity to endorse that person for the skills they have added to their own profile.
Endorse others easily by clicking the Endorse button.
With a simple click, the skills you choose to endorse are added to their profile with a thumbnail image of you, the person who endorsed them. If you don’t want to endorse your connection for a particular skill listed in this window, simply click the X on the skill you wish to remove and then click the Endorse button to accept the rest listed.
You can also scroll down to where their skills are listed, and simply click on the skill you wish to endorse by clicking on the + sign to add your endorsement to their profile.
It’s easy to endorse a connection by clicking the + sign on the skill listed.
As each endorsement is added, the figure on the left increases, giving anyone looking at your profile a very clear and instant picture about your skills.
Watch those endorsement figures rise!
Also, as you endorse someone or someone endorses you, that activity will show in your LinkedIn newsfeed, creating even more brand exposure for you.
Whenever you have some sort of activity on LinkedIn, whether you have commented on a group discussion, made a change to your profile or endorsed a connection, that activity shows up in your own newsfeed and if you are endorsing others, it shows up in their newsfeeds too. This simply gives your personal brand a little more exposure to others and puts your name back on the radar of those you are connected to.
This endorsement message will appear in both Paul’s and David’s newsfeeds for their connections to see.
It’s important to get endorsements, as anyone looking at your profile and comparing you to your competition will see them. Endorsements create an instant overview that is easy to compare with your competition. Obviously, you want to look the best.
Your endorsements are a great visual way for others to instantly see your skills.
You also have the option to hide your endorsements from your public profile by clicking on the arrow of the particular skill on the far right, although I am not sure why you would want to do that. At this time, this cannot be reversed. After all, you have the opportunity of not accepting endorsements in the first place if you don’t want them (see the next point below).
Hide your endorsements easily by clicking on the arrow.
When you click through from the arrow in the screenshot above, you will be able to pick which person’s endorsement you wish to hide.
Choose whose endorsement you wish to hide.
When someone or a group of people endorse your skills, you are sent an email each day that you receive another endorsement, and you will be notified who those people are up to a point.
See who has endorsed you today with an email directly from LinkedIn.
From an etiquette point of view, consider sending a message back with a quick thank-you to show that you appreciate the gesture. It’s easy to do from your skills area—just choose the person from their thumbnail photo and click Send Message.
Consider sending a thank you message for your endorsement.
You may also find that someone wants to endorse you for a skill that you don’t have listed on your profile. Again, you have the choice whether to accept that endorsement or not.
If you don’t want to accept it, simply click the X on the skill you don’t want to add.
Others may think you should have another skill added and wish to endorse you for it.
If you hover your mouse over a skill, a popup box with further information about that skill appears with a figure %, which refers to the popularity of that skill being added to other people’s profiles.
See how popular certain skills are and how often they’re added to other people’s profiles.
This new feature is a very easy way to endorse the skills of others and vice versa. When coupled with LinkedIn’s already robust Recommendations feature, it’s a very positive way to promote not only your personal brand, but also the brands of your connections.
What do you think? How are you finding this new feature so far and how do you think it compares to LinkedIn’s familiar Recommendations feature? Please leave your comments below.
A self-proclaimed security enthusiast has exposed a major flaw in Facebook, one in which nearly every user’s phone number can be used to view their personal information. His name is Suriya Prakash , and his method of cultivating numbers involves using Facebook’s mobile site to bypass security limits imposed on the social networking site’s regular portal, or so he claims. Here’s how he explains it. “About a month ago, I was just browsing Facebook on my Facebook mobile application and it had an option called ‘Find friends using contacts’—what it does is that it compares the contact list from your phone
“About a month ago I was just browsing Facebook on my Facebook mobile application and it had an option called ‘Find friends using contacts’ — what it does is that it compares the contact list from your phone to the Facebook database to see if you have any friends that are in your contacts but not on your Facebook account,” Prakash told The Next Web. “I also later figured out that simply ‘searching’ a person’s phone number (including country code) will show you their account.”
Using Prakash’s method, a person could search a random phone number to view someone’s full profile, and it works nearly every time since, according to Prakash, Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing so most people haven’t adequately protected themselves. That in and of itself isn’t too egregious, but the fact that Prakash claimed he was able to write a script to cultivate a massive phone book of everyone who lets you look them up on Facebook is the scary part.
The script he wrote saved user names from a range of generated phone numbers. Facebook protects users from this behavior on its site by limiting the number of times you can initiate a search, but Prakash claims he performed an end-around by running the script on Facebook’s mobile site, where he says it worked like a charm for four days straight. Facebook eventually caught on.
“Facebook has developed an extensive system for preventing the malicious usage of our search functionality and the scenario described by the researcher was indeed rate-limited and eventually blocked,” a Facebook spokesperson explained. “We are constantly updating these systems to improve their effectiveness and address new kinds of attacks.”
Prakash acknowledges that Facebook eventually blocked his script, but not before he was able to cultivate hundreds of phone numbers.
Old Navy gets “participation” in a fun, big way. Take a look.
