JitterJam – Integrated Social Marketing Software for Business

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

Have you ever searched through Twitter to find conversations about your brand, your product, your market? How about Google? How many conversations did you find? Too few? Too many? Too many irrelevant conversations? How do you refine that search to find the true voices talking about your brand, your product, your market?

One of the biggest challenges in searching for conversations about your brand on the real-time web is creating effective search criteria. Twitter complicates this even more with its 140 character limit, and when you’re using the same criteria over multiple channels, it gets even more challenging to filter out the noise and bring back only relevant conversations. Here are a few tips to increase the relevance of your search results.

1. Search is a trial-and-error process.
• You probably won’t get it right the first time, nor should you expect to!
• Conversations are very fluid. A search that works well today may not work work tomorrow. Make sure you’re checking your results and trying new search criteria often.
2. Your brand, product name or company name is (just) the start.
• Try different combinations of keywords to hone in on chatter surrounding your brand.
• Using keywords to exclude conversations is just as important as keywords to find/return conversations.
• If you have a name that is associated with more than just your brand/product/company, your challenge is to filter out everything but the conversations that focus on your business or market. Look at the recurring keywords in the irrelevant results and use them to start narrowing your search.
3. Try different search criteria for different social channels.
• While it might be tempting to try an all-inclusive search across all available channels, you have a great deal more flexibility in searching for relevant blogs than relevant Twitter posts and can utilize more keywords. If your results are too broad, try tailoring the search for each social channel type.
4. Focus on finding your target market—not just chatter about your brand.
• Find out what people within your target market are talking about (trending topics). A good place to start is your current base of Twitter followers. Use this “target market” search to find relevant people rather than just conversations around your brand or market, and then start engaging those who are talking.
• Find events that to your target market and join in on the chatter about that event. This is also a way to identify events that you may want to participate in or sponsor in the future.
5. Think of different ways that your product or brand can be described and search using those descriptive keywords in your search. Let’s use a snack food with a brand name of “CrackerX” as an example.
• By alternative name or title. Search for people who want a “cracker, snack, munchie, or food.” Look for people talking about alternative types and brands of product in the market as well—”chips, popcorn, Doritos.”
• By description. Search for conversations about “crunchy, fun, healthy” with “snacks, food, munchies, treats” to narrow the search to your product’s specific category.
• By timing. Use events and timing to search for chatter—”game-day, BBQ, after-school, party, tail-gating” and more.
• By people, demographics. Look for a way to identify groups that your target market identifies with—a social object, a “tribe” to which they belong (or is a fan of). “SMU, UCLA, Patriots, Celtics, PTA” and more.
6. Marketers (and Agencies), you’ve already done the homework! Use what you already know!
• Use the psychographic and demographic profiles that you’ve created in defining your target market(s) to find core keywords for your searches.
• Bring your search engine keywords to your social search as well!

These are just a few ideas to help you refine your search. Do you have any special tips or tricks? Post them here!

Want to find relevant conversations on the real-time web and start engaging those who are talking? Try JitterJam and see how it can help your social marketing efforts.

The word “Networking” sometimes makes people think of a room full of people in suits exchanging business cards. That was how Networking used to be perceived, but with the extension of online social networks like Twitter and Facebook to live events, Networking today includes both social and professional events and enables people to connect on many levels.

You can find any number of events happening on a given day if you know where to look. From hobbies to education, professional interests to just simply meeting new people, you can readily find an event that will suit your tastes and interests. Here are a few sources for you to find your next event.

1. Meetup
• Meetup was created as a way for people to organize event, list them, and attract others to attend the event. It’s free to join and sign up for different groups. Organizers pay a subscription fee (starting at $12 per month) to utilize the site for their group/events. They may charge a fee for people to attend their events, but that’s independent of the Meetup site.
• There are over 7 million members attending events hosted by over 76,000 Meetup groups around the world. If you don’t see a group that interests you in your local area, it’s easy to start one.
• The events are categorized and subcategorized to help you find what you’re looking for. You can easily search by topic AND city, so you can even find events in areas where you’ll be traveling to in the future.
2. Eventbrite
• Eventbrite is a site focused on helping organizations sell tickets to their events. There is no fee to create and promote events, so many organizers use Eventbrite for easy registration and promotion of their free events.
• The benefit to you is that there are a number of great events to choose from, and finding them is pretty easy. Eventbrite has a great search engine that lets you put in a location and begin browsing events. Once you have a list, you can narrow the list down by relative date (today, tomorrow, etc.), location, topic, cost (most of the events are free) and/or perform a keyword search. And like Meetup, registering for the Eventbrite site is free.
3. Tweetup
• While there’s no website that lists these events, a relatively new phenomenon is the Tweetup. A Tweetup is a live Twitter meet-up (not to be confused with the Meetup.com site). It’s generally promoted on Twitter. People generally announce local Tweetups on their Twitter streams. Some of the events are very impromptu, and others are highly organized. Regardless, the events are fairly well-attended by those involved in social media (how else would they hear about them)?
• How do you find out about Tweetups in your area? Do a location-based Twitter search of people near you using the keyword “Tweetup” and start following the links to local events. Don’t forget to follow the people who announce and spread the word about these Tweetups—you’ll be able to find out about more events in your area through them. (Of course, JitterJam does all this!)
• Tweetups are often listed on Meetup and Eventbrite. Use those sites to search for events and bookmark the recurring events. You can also find new people to meet and follow through the registration lists!

I hope these tips will help you find a networking event that’s fun, interesting and educational! Happy Fun Stuff Friday!

Image credit: FOTOCROMO

Last Friday’s Social Marketing Creativity Coffee discussion surrounded the issue of generating a Return on Investment (ROI) from social marketing. This was a lively discussion regarding what companies are looking to get out of their social efforts and investment. Here are the thoughts and ideas that come from that discussion. It’s a long post, but that’s what you get when you have great conversation and great ideas.

1. Social Marketing is like an industry trade show.
• The point of having a "booth" at a trade show is not just about generating new business; it's also about communicating with your customer base. That's the same with social media engagement.
• Like a trade show, you "never know what you're going to get" on social networks. You may know how many "attendees" will be there, but you don't know how many of those leads will be qualified, how many will convert into sales.
• Good marketers have a process to move those conversations into leads, leads into customers, customers into advocates. (JitterJam does this, and more!)
2. You need a social marketing strategy and implementation plan.
• Determine what you want to get out of social marketing and your strategy to get there. Without these goals and strategies, you have no clear direction on what you want to accomplish or how to evaluate your success.
• Don't use a lack of understanding of ROI as an excuse NOT to engage in social marketing. Use the strategy planning process to identify what value that social marketing can bring to your business.
3. Instead of just focusing on ROI, look at the impact of your social marketing efforts.
• Traditional ROI calculations just measure revenues and costs. Social marketing can have much greater impact on your business.
• You DO need the tools to measure engagement, action, buzz, etc. across channels in order to see which messages have the greatest impact and which channels are the most successful for you.
• Don't use a lack of understanding of ROI as an excuse NOT to engage in social marketing. Use the strategy planning process to identify what value that social marketing can bring to your business—deeper relationships with your customers, better customer service, higher customer satisfaction, more repeat sales (that may or may not be trackable), word-of-mouth influence and more.
4. What is the impact of social marketing?
• PR and reputation management. Social media is PR. Social marketing can have a significant positive impact and influence on brand identity and recognition.
• Increased revenue. While you may not be able to attribute all the impact of your social marketing to specific revenue figures, in the case of promotional offers, make sure you have a mechanism throughout your value chain to track sales and a way to measure the impact of each social channel separately.
• Community growth. Driving and building a community of your brand's "fans" can be a starting point for deeper engagement and relationships with your customers. This should be a goal in itself.
• Communications with consumers. Social marketing enables direct conversations with your customers. It gives you a path to understand what your customers really think, what they are saying about you (regardless of whether or not you're listening), and how they feel about your products. It can help you quickly identify problem areas as well as new opportunities for growth and impact.
• Thought leadership. Live your company's values through your social communications. Are you a green company? Share articles, links, photos, etc. about re-use and conservation. Be a thought leader in the community you serve.
• Readiness. Engaging on the real-time web enables you to be ready to respond to issues as they occur. You have the mechanisms and resources to keep up on positive and negative chatter about your business. You can respond—in real time—to any crisis that might occur. Just make sure that you have already defined a crisis management process; any response will be public and may be publicized. If you're not engaged, you can't respond!

There's so much more we could list regarding the impact of social marketing on consumer-facing businesses as well as B2B companies. We'd love to hear from you. How has social marketing impacted your business? Has it been a positive experience for you? Please leave a comment and let us know!

Interested in joining us for our Social Marketing Creativity Coffee? Join us every Friday!

Need some help developing and implementing your Social Marketing strategy? JitterJam is now offering Advisory Services to help you get more out of your efforts.

In an earlier Fun Stuff Friday post, we talked about learning how to be a better public speaker through opportunities like PechaKucha and Battledecks. PechaKucha (try saying that three times, fast) is interesting because you have to get your point across in 20 slides shown for no more than 20 seconds each. What was originally created in Tokyo as a way for designers to meet and share their work is now a phenomenon that has spread to events in over 300 cities. Sounds like fun, right? Or maybe a terrifying situation?

What I’ve noticed about a good presentation is that the visuals captivate and illustrate while the points are clear and concise. And one of my favorite sites to learn about and find examples of good presentations is Presentation Zen. Garr Reynolds, former Manager of Worldwide User Group Relations at Apple Computer, publishes a blog (and published a book) on lessons in presentation design. What I love about this blog is the mixture of principles and practice.

I was thinking about how we can improve our presentations at JitterJam, and I remembered this site. I’m going back through it to get some ideas on how to make my point effectively, more visual, more memorable. Can you think of one presentation that have you seen lately that was memorable? What made it have such an impact on you? How can you apply what you saw to what you do?

Want a dose of creativity every Friday? Join us for Creativity Coffee at our HQ in Bedford, NH.

The Idea Spark discussion about Facebook Marketing was very lively last Friday during our Creativity Coffee Tweetup in celebration of the 5-year anniversary of @TechCrunch. The discussion surrounded how consumer-facing brands and businesses can gain more than just “fans” or “likes” from their presence on Facebook. Here are some ideas to spark your marketing creativity.

1. Facebook is a “game changer” that is appealing to a broad demographic of users that is mapping to the general population’s demographic make-up.
• Embrace Facebook for more than the youth market. In fact, the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is women 55+.
• Facebook is a great way to reach your target customers and draw them into deeper engagement with your brand. Try using Facebook Ads to begin finding new fans for specific target markets.
2. Post sharable content.
• Post videos, photos, links and other content that your fans will want to share with others—content that's interesting, entertaining or fun.
• Sharable content enables your brand to grow beyond your fan base and to be redistributed throughout (and beyond) Facebook.
3. Let your "fan" or "like" count be a goal—but not your only goal.
• DO drive people from your other marketing efforts (print, TV, direct mail, online ads, website, SEM, events, etc.) to engage on Facebook and through other social channels
• Getting people to "like" your brand is not that difficult. Getting people engaged with your brand and getting them to recommend and purchase—that is your ultimate goal. Use content, open conversation and conversion tools like promotions to engage them further.
4. Reward your fans for engaging with you.
• While fun content will keep your Facebook fans entertained and engaged, providing unique offers will drive measurable return of your social marketing efforts.
• Unique offers reward your Facebook fans for their loyalty and participation. Make sure that your offers are also sharable so your fans can invite others to participate as well.
• If your business has different locations, enable offers to drive revenue and participation at specific locations.
5. Let your fans be your guide.
• Even though your Facebook fans are engaged with you on one channel, make sure that you enable each individual to drive the channels, the frequency of communication and the content they'd like to receive from you. JitterJam's Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system does just that.

Would you like to join in our live discussions? We hold a Creativity Coffee hour every Friday morning at JitterJam's Bedford, NH office. Come by and join us! There's no charge, and no "sales" going on!

Are you stuck on a problem and can’t think of a creative idea to solve it? Need some help to make your ideas gel into a plan? Call a few friends (or strangers), sit with them and just talk. And let the ideas fly.

I have always found that my best ideas are a result of conversations I have with others. It’s not that I’m taking someone else’s ideas and running with them; I have found that the very process of expressing my point of view gets my creative juices running. Ideas pop in my head and out of my mouth, and suddenly, I have a breakthrough idea. While sitting and thinking about something gives me time to organize ideas and take action, but I crave interaction with others to spur my creative ideas.

When Ric Pratte, our CEO, suggested that we start a Creativity Coffee hour on Fridays here at JitterJam, I was all for it. I knew that we’d have different people in the room each week and would have an opportunity to have lively and diverse conversations about social marketing on a weekly basis. It would help us generate ideas for our customers, our community and our company. It would introduce us to new points of view and experiences that would help pave the way for new breakthroughs in thinking.

This morning, we celebrated TechCrunch’s 5-year anniversary with a Meetup and Creativity Coffee hour. We had some new faces in the room, some great conversation and some ideas about how Facebook could and should be used by businesses to engage their customers. We’ll be posting those ideas on the blog next week in the Idea Spark series. You can see our first installment of that series here.

So, Fun Stuff Friday now has two really fun hallmarks—coffee and creativity in the morning, and beer and bonding in the afternoon.

Boy, do I love start-ups.

Want to join us for a Creativity Coffee hour? Sign up here! There’s no cost. We just want to know who is coming and how much coffee to stock.

In Part 1 of this blog post, I stated that I didn’t believe that social media is the VERY BEST way to reach customers—that social media is just one tactic for reaching customers that should be driven by an overall marketing strategy. In this post, I’ll discuss some ways to achieve balance in your marketing approach.

Achieving marketing balance, to me, is taking steps to ensure that your marketing tactics are continually driving towards your goals and strategies. And it’s sometimes harder than it sounds. It’s easy to get distracted by new opportunities that present themselves every day, the changes in the market climate, by your competitors’ actions and even by game-changing events. Keep these tips in mind to help you continue to move towards your goal and weed out distractions that can tip you in the wrong direction. While goals and strategies should be evaluated on a regular basis, they shouldn’t be short-term milestones; tactics are the short-term levers that you can pull to move your business in the right direction, but your goals and strategies should tie into your longer-term business metrics.

1. Evaluate each tactic with the same lens.
If it doesn’t move you toward your goal and/or doesn’t align with your strategy, why do you want to do it? Yes, there are opportunities that could provide you with benefit. But if the benefit redirects the resources that you have slated to move you towards your goal, is it worth it?

2. Balance what you think you know with what you can learn.
We’re often surprised by the results of our campaigns. Consumers can be an unpredictable lot, and many of our assumptions about how our customers act can be very wrong. We need to stay open to learning as much as we can about what our customers want and acknowledge that those preferences change—sometimes very quickly. For instance, one of our customers asked their consumer contacts to provide their communications preferences across email, mobile, Facebook and Twitter. To their surprise, many of their contacts preferred to connect with the brand over Facebook and provided no email contact information—completely contrary to what they expected.

3. Don’t be afraid to alter your tactics.
Some marketers believe that after mapping out the perfect strategy and the supporting campaigns and tactics, they’re done. They execute the entire plan and THEN they evaluate. In today’s market, the immediacy of information gives us the ability to make changes to our tactics as we learn, and we shouldn’t be afraid to make those changes. Being a nimble marketer enables you to incorporate what you’ve learned and correct your course for the next tasks at hand—while keeping the end in sight.

4. Turn the channels.
What does email have to do with mobile and social media? Everything. Your marketing campaigns and methods should map to the demographics of your target audiences. However, the demographics of those using specific communications channels are ever-changing, and your opportunity to reach your target market through multiple channels is better than ever. Use one channel to reach your customer through another; for instance, use email marketing to drive your audience to your social media communities—and vice-versa. You shouldn’t be swayed into thinking that email marketing is dead for a certain demographic or that mobile marketing is only for the youth-oriented market. Facebook’s demographic used to be just college students; last year, the 55+ crowd was the fastest growing demographic on the platform. You never know when the winds will shift again, and you can maximize your impact by keeping agile.

5. Make it personal.
The broader the audience you target with a single message, the greater the chance that the message will get lost. By selecting smaller, highly-targeted segments and testing focused messaging on each of those smaller segments, you have the ability to continue to test and refine your messages and determine which messages are the most successful. Defining those segments is another matter (of course, we believe that JitterJam is an exceptional tool that makes this task much easier). It can be as simple as splitting a list into sections and A/B testing amongst small test populations or as refined as selecting segments based upon how frequently your contact base has engaged in conversations about your specific brand. The more personal and relevant the message, the better chance you will have of turning the contact into a customer and that customer into an advocate.

If you have a website or a blog or if you create marketing materials, you probably have run into instances where you needed graphics to make a point in a post, to illustrate your brochure or to make your website pretty. While there are many sources of royalty-free images, royalty free doesn’t mean FREE. You still have to pay to have the rights to download and utilize those images. So what’s a cash-strapped marketer, individual blogger or small business to do?

Say hello to stock.xchg! Recently acquired by royalty-free asset super site iStockPhoto.com, stock.xchg is all about truly free images. Individuals take photos and/or create interesting graphics and then upload them to the site. You get to download and use the images for free. Each artist has the right to ask for credit for their work, but the licensing requirements are very liberal. You can utilize the images for commercial purposes such as printed materials, websites and other marketing materials. You cannot compile and resell images, and you must get permission from the artist if you are going to use the image for something you’re going to resell (website templates, printed items you intend to sell, print-on-demand items).

What’s nice is that the vast majority of the images are very high quality and high resolution. Of course, if you can’t find what you need, convenient PAID content is served up by iStockPhoto right above and below the free stock.xchg images, but even those paid images are inexpensive.

Now you have no excuse not to include professional-quality images on your site and on your marketing materials. You’re welcome!

Photo credit:BrokenArts

We’ve started a Social Marketing coffee hour every Friday morning here at JitterJam HQ. The purpose of the coffee hour is to have free discussion and brainstorming to get our creative juices flowing and to spark new ideas that will help our customers, partners, friends and ourselves.

Last Friday, we decided to spark some ideas for our Entertainment Venue customers to help them increase their customer base, discover and engage new consumers, and utilize new tactics to increase the buzz around their business. Here are some ideas.

1. Create location-based social searches to find local people who are talking about the artists/acts that are playing your venue within the next 90 days.
• Let these people know that their favorite artist will be appearing soon!
• Invite them to get on a specific mailing list for that artist using JitterJam's Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system. Tag those people who sign up through that Make Me Happy link with that particular artist and perform regular outreach prior to drive ticket sales.
2. Utilize your current marketing lists to gather more targeted information from your contacts.
• Create a contest and send it out to your current lists. Get people to not only enter the contest, but also allow them to provide multiple contact addresses, their communications preferences and their list of interest. Utilize the intelligence you've built about your customer base to drive repeat business, deeper engagement and advocacy.
3. Promote yourself during your events.
• Ask people attending an event to text a code to join your marketing list through on-stage announcements, electronic and print signage, on beverage napkins, etc.
• Use an on-site contest with a public winner to increase participation in your opt-in program (e.g. meet the band).
• Update what's happening at your venue during your live events. Make sure you publish photos (barring any copyright issues) of the event as they occur.
• Encourage attendees to update their friends and fans about the event as it happens. Encourage the use of a unique #hashtag to develop your brand identity.
4. Make sure your website reflects all your communication activities.
• Ensure that your Make Me Happy link is available on every web page. Make it easy for your web visitors to opt-in to your marketing programs.
• Stream Twitter and Facebook comments about you and your venue on your site and ensure that your visitors can easily "Like" or "Follow" you!
5. Utilize crowdsourcing applications like FourSquare to get your "fans" to promote you.
• Claim your business on FourSquare and use the Make Me Happy landing page as a way for visitors to get discounts.
• Encourage people to try to create a FourSquare swarm at events and get others to join in.

Would you like to attend our Creativity Coffee? We'd love to have you join us in our discussion!