Infographic showing the growth of Slideshare
Here's an interesting infographic from Slideshare, reminding us of their reach to professionals, and those marketing to professionals. Are you using Slideshare? Some of the active B2B marketers put it to really good use as an external hub for their content: See Eloqua, and the less creative Dell.
7 reasons to take a serious look
Assuming that you're a B2B marketer, and have good content that can be directly used or re-purposed for Slideshare, we think that Slideshare is a grossly under-utilised tool, especially since the "Pro" version launched, after all if it's good enough for the White House...
Here are the reasons we think it may be worth a look:
Slideshare presentations are highly shareable and embeddable. It's similar to loading video content to YouTube - you get your content in an external hub and…
Social Media is still a new and scary world to many people and companies. Its a relatively new tool to the marketing world which is, without doubt, changing the way we work and live.
For small businesses, in particular, social media can be a daunting place.
We have created this Digital / Social Media reference for our Expert members that helps summarise all the key paid-owned-earned media techniques for the main social networks.
This post originally featured a crib-sheet from FlowTown to help small business get to grips with the most popular social networks. Unfortunately this is no longer available. We liked the "learn the lingo" summary, as marketers today, we're often translating the labels and vocabularies of the tools and this gives a neat summary.
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4 Social Hub Examples
As the number of social networks increases, brands have started to look at ways in which they can bring all their social networks into their brand owned websites. Contrast this with the more common situation where the only reference to social media on the main site are the ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ share buttons. These don't give any impression of the type of interactions and communities developed on these networks or customers own networks.
Social hubs can give customers a snap shot preview of the activity on each of the chosen social networks. This is a growing trend among the bigger, global brands which have active social outposts, often country-specific and they clearly want to bring that conversation and activity to their own site.
What is a Social Hub?
Social hubs tend to be content aggregation pages on a brands own website. Pulling feeds from any or all…
A short guide to help review if and how you use Pinterest
Prompted by interest in my first post on the marketing opportunities for Pinterest a couple of weeks ago, I thought a more considered ideas post might be useful. So I've summarised the key points that I feel are relevant to consider if you're set on taking your brand onto Pinterest. I've not got into the mechanics of how it works, others do it better already. First things first…
A reminder - what is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a platform for crowd sourced visual content grouped into topics (mostly lifestyle at the moment). From a broader perspective, it's a social network that allows users to visually share new interests by 'pinning' images or videos to their own or others' 'pinboards' (a collection of 'pins' that have a common theme).
Maybe this cartoon explains it…
Groupon - The Failed Magic Bullet? A 'cool tool' won't fix a weak sales promotion...
It's the third time now that that I've heard reference to new research on Groupon indicating that "32% of businesses using Groupon find it unprofitable". The report by Utpal Dholakia of Rice University in the US is the first of it's kind, surveying 150 businesses, it can be found here.
With the chatter this week that Google is in discussion with Groupon about a $5 billion acquisition it's likely that Google sees the advantages in a scalable, viral platform solution and they realise it can be made to work if the sales promotion is right.
There are common themes from those 32% of businesses that were unhappy:
Groupon promotions worked effectively to drive purchase, often too many sales were made
Some people spend a lot less than others - consumers are extremely price sensitive
The consumers using Groupon are deal hungry…
