Social Video: 11 Inspiring Examples and What They Teach Us

Are marketing videos a secret strategy? Probably not. But you can certainly gain from using them in your marketing. The inspiring social video examples we will use in this article display some great hidden truths that teach us a great deal.

Social video

The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.

– Leo Burnett

Products that are remarkable get talked about.

–Seth Godin

Remarkable is a word many marketers are familiar with. Especially those that are fans of Seth Godin. Seth has written a lot about remarkable branding design.

Remarkable … it’s something businesses around the world are trying to be.

But remember, being noticed is not the same thing as being remarkable. Seth Godin talks about how running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but it’s not useful.

You don’t need to do crazy things to grab attention. And certainly not to be remarkable. You don’t want to border the line of insane and outlandish.

In his book, Purple Cow, Seth talks about how remarkability lies on the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t usually matter which edge, it matters more than you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

Here is the thing: don’t follow in the footsteps of other businesses. If you do, you’ll find that your marketing is boring.

Marketing isn’t about fitting in; it’s about standing out and making a difference.

Being innovative drives remarkable design, doesn’t it?

I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to ignore businesses that are pushing the envelope, getting their name out in the open … being innovative.

Before we continue, let me ask you a question.

What works best for video marketing design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by us and our readers.

The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.

Let’s examine the following marketing videos to see what they can teach us:

The Lego Movie.

Social video … The Lego Movie

“The Lego Movie” was simultaneously a work of art and an advertisement. It created a touching, enthralling story, and enhanced the value of the Lego brand all the while improving Lego’s bottom line.

What can we learn from this surprising and remarkable success? “The Lego Movie” gracefully integrated a compelling, human narrative with a brand and product message.

In our media-saturated world, people are becoming increasingly better at blocking out interruption advertisements, whether consciously, through services like AdBlock and TiVo, or unconsciously, due to banner blindness.

To cope with consumers’ decreasing attention span and growing impatience, brands need to stop interrupting them with brash self-promotions.

Instead, they need to engage consumers and entertain them while educating them on how their products and brand can foster a better experience.

Any good marketer will tell you that to make a sale, you don’t sell the product. Instead, you sell the emotion that the product creates.

To achieve this, you must focus on crystallizing and communicating the brand essence. Great sales center on the why rather than the “what” or the “how.”

What we learned

In the case of “The Lego Movie,” Lin Pictures focused on the values of creativity, youth, self-discovery, and courage. Only once these values had been established as the North Star did the Lego products enter the equation.

Seanne Winslow, the executive producer of “The Lego Movie,” explains that “when we created ‘The Lego Movie,’ our goal was not to create a movie about Lego, but to create a great movie that used Lego as the medium of communication.”

The idea was the core. The product was only the medium.

Inspiring social video examples … Dove’s Choose Beautiful

Dove does it again with this remarkable marketing video. There is no denying Dove is adept at crafting stories and encouraging its community to participate in those stories.

By focusing less on their product and more on their mission, Dove has been successful in creating emotional viral videos that have helped them stay top-of-mind.

What we learned

Think about tying your marketing to a larger mission to cultivate a loyal following. According to data from Gallup, customers who are more loyal and emotionally attached to brands bring in 23% more revenue, so take advantage of this by committing to marketing that makes them feel recognized and important.

AT&T Commercial

Check out this short AT&T video/commercial. It is only 30 seconds. Can you spot its secret of success?

What we learned

Personalization is central to its success. You can never go wrong with this in your strategy.

Homeward Bound.

Social video marketing … Homeward Bound

This emotional account of Saroo Brierley’s journey to trace back his original roots after a tragic separation from his family is nothing short of powerful.

By inserting its product into a story of loss, love, and restoration, Google Earth was successful in positioning its capabilities as undeniably life changing — but it doesn’t feel too showy.

The video makes you feel that Google Earth isn’t out to make money, but rather they are out to build a service to improve the lives of their users.

What we learned

Appeal to emotion. Emotion is an incredibly powerful driver that can influence the way people act and respond to your product or service.

Best video marketing campaign … Intel’s “Look Inside”

Tell the story of how you’re doing more with your products. Like how Intel built the first 3D printing lab in Sudan and taught local medical staff to print and affix their own prosthetics. Breathtaking.

What we learned

It never hurts to find a great cause to create the emotion you are looking for.

Purina Friskies’ “Dear Kitten”

We’ve heard it over and over: stories are easy to consume and share and can have a pretty remarkable impact on marketing success. And we’re not sure we’ll ever find a better storyteller than this cat.

What we learned

Stories are a fantastic way to spread your message. Look for unique ways to tell the story, like with this cat.

BMW hidden truths

These two BMW marketing videos do display some great hidden truths.

Have you seen these BMW videos? Watch them both here … each is only 60 seconds. We will then examine each video and what contributes to their strengths and weaknesses and their ability to influence or persuade.

How many times do you hear “I want my video to go viral”? To make this happen you have to create content that is pretty innovative, exciting, and cool so that your audience will want to share. Well here’s the kind of video that ticks all those boxes.

BMW Canada has released these videos which have been viewed over 7 million times (at the time of writing). The first one was the most popular and it became the number one worldwide auto video on YouTube after just 2 days.

The title of the first video makes you think that you’ll be seeing BMW cars taking on concrete walls and losing.

The videos are pretty clever and keep you on the edge of your chair as you watch them.

What we learned

In marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering.

These videos certainly achieve this goal, don’t you think?

Social video … Guinness empty chair

This Guinness marketing video demonstrates that Guinness marketing has certainly noticed the integrative value of story and video.

“Empty Chair,” tells the story of a bartender who leaves a pint of Guinness at an empty table every night amongst birthday celebrations and sports team’s victories.

No one sits at the table, and the woman shoots a dirty look to anyone she catches eyeing one of the empty chairs.

Related: An Update to Starbucks Creative Ideas and Innovation

Without fail, the frosted glass is there each and every night. It’s a powerful image that serves as a sign of hope for the bartender.

But we aren’t exactly sure who the beer is for until the very end. Everything comes together when a soldier finally returns home to claim his Guinness.

The spot finishes with the tagline:

“The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.”

What we learned

Awesome and powerful ending. Save your best for the closing.

Bank branding video

Have you seen the remarkable branding video design from this Spanish bank? The video was created to celebrate the 130th anniversary of Banco de Sabadell, which is in a city in Catalonia, Spain. It is a very simple story.

A little girl puts a coin in the troubadour’s hat. He then starts playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Then the magic begins. If you haven’t seen it, watch it now, it is only 5 minutes and it will inspire you.

What we learned

Never hesitate or dare to do something different.

JetBlue

JetBlue launched a brilliant new ad campaign called “Air on the Side of Humanity”. Have you seen it? You might want to check it out. It is one of my all-time favorite marketing videos.

They ingeniously use pigeons as a transposed metaphor for frequent flyers that are challenged by business travel and crowded flights.

Believe me, I can relate. The spot shows crowded skies full of pigeons while an off-camera narrator says “the reality of flying is not very pretty”. It’s a royal headache and a major inconvenience.

They show crowded jostled pigeons on a building ledge lined up single file facing the camera while the narrator says, “They pack you in there, you hardly have any space for yourself. Hey, I’m a big guy and I need some room to breathe”.

As the narrator continues talking about the future situation being bleak the camera focuses on a man’s legs sitting on a park bench throwing crumbs to pigeons on the sidewalk as the narrator says,

“They throw you crumbs and act as if it’s a 5-course meal”.

Next, they show a lonely pigeon on a busy pedestrian sidewalk as people walk around ignoring a confused bird as the narrator says, “I feel completely ignored”. Then the narrator asks the question, “There’s gotta be a way to fly with a little respect, you know?”

Then they cut to a different voiceover announcer which says, “Enjoy JetBlue’s award-winning service, free unlimited snacks, and the most legroom in coach.” An awesome way to engage customers with their value propositions, isn’t it?

What we learned

What I love about this engagement approach is that it takes a customer experience perspective that no doubt was derived from deep customer insights.

As a frequent flyer myself I was able to relate to the spot on multiple levels. How about you? Does the brand connect with you emotionally?

Volvo Trucks’ “Epic Split”

Is there really a better way to showcase the precision steering of Volvo’s trucks than have Jean-Claude Van Damme do the splits between two 18-wheelers moving at roughly 20 mph while Enya plays in the background? None that we could think of. What about you?

What we learned

Always take advantage of the visualization effects that a video promotes.

The bottom line

After watching these marketing video examples, there is little doubt about the growing significance of marketing videos to gain and hold attention and convert customers. What do you think?

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Adapting to Major Changes in the Social Media Climate

An Update to Starbucks Creative Ideas and Innovation

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

How to Begin Telling Stories Like a Ninja: Secrets to a Social Media Campaign

Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories do a good job of giving the meaning that can be remembered. Are you interested in learning how to create a social media campaign by telling stories?

Looking for the latest social media marketing tactics? It is not terribly hard to accomplish these objectives. We’ll share with you how the most successful businesses use social media to grow business and brand loyalty. This is a four-part series, with this article being part 4, how to tell remarkable stories.

Here are the links to the other Social Media Campaign Secrets series articles:

Part 1 The Big Picture

Part 2 Targeting Customers

Part 3 Listening and Engaging

So let’s start with a simple question. How do you make your ideas more compelling? Even if your message is true and important, it’s hard to reach a general audience with facts alone. Tell remarkable stories that are memorable – stories have the power to captivate and inspire people, from high school students, busy parents, or even members of Congress. In this blog, we’ll discuss 14 steps to be an awesome story creator and teller.

Like to hear a great story? How about telling stories? Great storytelling. A great way to spread ideas. Facts are meaningless without a contextual story. Don’t tell facts to influence, tell stories. The more you improve storytelling, the more your influence … it is as simple as that.

Stories make it easier for people to understand. They are the best way, by far, to spread your ideas.

Awesome stories surprise us. They have compelling characters. They make us think, make us feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that numbers and text on a slide with a bar graph don’t.

Stories make presentations better. Stories make ideas sticky. They help us persuade. Savvy leaders tell stories to inspire us, motivate us. (That’s why so many politicians tell stories in their speeches.) They realize that “what you say” is often moot compared to “how you say it.”

Certainly, you have noticed the tremendous abundance of marketing strategy choices in the marketplace today. No needs go wanting, do they? Consumers have everything they need and therefore their decisions are based on what they want. And what they want is driven by what they believe.

Elements of story examples

Here are some perfect examples of the elements of stories:

The point

The Wizard of Oz

Every story should have a point. How often have we been regaled with high drama and intricate detail, only to have no payoff? Most of us have seen The Wizard of Oz and can sing out in unison Dorothy’s final words in the story, “There’s no place like home.”

Without that, and without her realization of what she values, her adventures are all for naught. Make sure you have a payoff in your own stories.

A dramatic question

Raiders of the Lost Ark

“Will Indiana find the Ark before the Nazis get it?” is the conflict of the entire story. Once that question is answered, the story ends. But wait: there’s more. A great answer to a dramatic question can have an ironic twist. The answer usually is not merely, “Yes.” Instead, it’s, “Well, yes…but…” In Raiders the answer is “Yes, but the Ark contains inconceivable power…more than we care to handle.”

See the irony?

The final shot reveals the Ark stored inconspicuously in a massive warehouse. The irony is complete. You should develop stories with both dramatic questions and ironic twists if possible.

Content that includes emotion

Apollo 13

The first time I saw Apollo 13 I was on the edge of my seat asking the question: “Will they make it back?” On the edge of my seat, I watched as the characters struggled, toiled, and prayed to get the astronauts home.

Then I took a step back…:” Wait. I was there when this really happened. They make it back!” So what compels me to watch the remainder of this film every time it comes on? Ron Howard has the uncanny ability to make the audience care about what happens to the characters. Whether it is through the riveting soundtrack, poignant conversations between husband and wife, or struggles between colleagues, we care.

The bottom line

Creating stories that cause us to feel, to empathize, and to understand are critical. Emotion should be created in every facet of the story: words, images, voice, and music. That should be your objective.

Set a pace

Lord of the Rings

Notice any emotional scene between Frodo and Sam, or characters that have romantic connections in the Lord of the Rings? In this story shots are long in duration, the movement is subtle, and the soundtrack is smooth and peaceful.

Contrast that with the epic battle scenes: shots are quick with no transitions, quick zooms and sweeping panoramas of the battlefield dominate the scene, and the music: as powerful and relentless as the battle itself. All of the elements come together to develop a consistent pace or rhythm of the scene, don’t they?

Here’s the deal

At times, however, an intentional contrast can achieve a great effect. Why would a director deliberately use slow motion and cut out the soundtrack at a particular point in a battle scene? To draw attention, of course.

Telling stories … the gift of voice

Stand By Me

Oftentimes, people become reluctant about recording their voices for others to hear. Voice-over personalizes a story to an intimate level.

The narration of Richard Dreyfus as the adult Gordy LeChance, in the movie Stand By Me, adds a nostalgic tone of reminiscence to a bygone era. Clearly, voice impacts emotional content as well.

Less is more economy

Master Card “Badger” commercials

This is where the mantra, “Less is More” comes out. No one needs to be a more economical storyteller than commercial writers. The entire process must be completed in no more than 30 seconds in most cases.

The old Master Card commercials about the hard-luck dog badger attempting to get home are masterpieces of the economy. Make your objective to use fewer images and words to convey meaning. This technique can pay big dividends.

*Telling stories lyrics … powerful soundtrack***

Jaws

Need I say more about the impact of the trademark “Da-dum. da-dum da-dum.” Don’t leave the soundtrack to an afterthought. Its choice can make a huge impact. Choose the soundtrack as instrumental music in lieu of lyrical.

Those were great examples, weren’t they? Want to be able to use stories in your marketing that could be that effective?

The bottom line

Here are 14 steps we recommend to create and tell an awesome story:

Step 1 Engage your audience

Your audience needs something to do. They need a reason to be there, listening. Stories, when properly practiced, pull people into a dialogue. It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as active a participant as the storyteller.

Ask the audience to think back to early passions and interests and bundle the story with specific experiences. Show them this is important, this is remarkable and you are a part of it.

Step 2 Make the audience care

Whenever I am fortunate enough to see and listen to remarkable stories being told ‘life’ in action, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in, much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.

The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically. But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all. There is no single answer. One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.

You may be wondering

Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings, like it or not, and to make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke in them some kind of emotion. See our article on the Guinness storytelling strategy in this regard.

Step 3 Explain why they should care

Make it clear to your audience why what we were seeing and hearing matters. Even if it is not always explicitly stated, the message should be clear.

It is hard to choose just one element that a successful story must have, but if I had to choose just one, I’d say it is this: Show clearly why your topic — or result, cause, mission, etc. — matters. What are the big picture and our place in that picture?

Pixar’s Andrew Stanton said something very similar when he identified the most important element of storytelling as ‘make me care’. You must make the audience care. And you must let them know clearly why they should care.

Step 4 Make a promise

Very early on you need to get the audience to believe that this story is going to go somewhere that it will be worth their time. The secret is a well-told promise about the upcoming story.

Step 5 Telling stories … construct anticipation

In a great story, the audience wants to know what happens next and most of all how it all concludes. In an explanatory narrative, a series of actions can establish a narrative flow and the sense of journey that is created is one form of anticipation of what comes next.

A good story has a beginning where a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation, a middle where the character confronts and attempts to resolve the situation, and an end where the outcome is revealed. It does not interpret or explain the action in the story to the audience.

Instead, a good story allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action. This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys facts and information boring.

Check out our article on Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements.

This story was created to market and build the brand. It is a very simple story. It advocates learning to read no matter your age or status in society. To us, it creates pure magic with the story, the visuals, the music, and the emotion.

Step 6 Spark their curiosity

Your goal is to tell stories in an opening, an aperture of excitement. Ignite the fires of curiosity that will live within us all. It’s a celebration of human curiosity and it matters to who and what we are. You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need to always make your message painfully obvious.

This is not about being vague or unclear, but it is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out … creating some curiosity. That’s one of your jobs as a storyteller. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and deduct because that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

Step 7 Touch audiences with an emotional connection

The Google Reunion story is about as emotional as it gets.

Stories like this provide a chance to experience a variety of emotions without the risk of those emotions themselves. Emotions like wonder, fear, courage, or love can be tested out in the minds of those as they listen to a story. You may remember the feelings of emotions that can trigger memories or create resolve as a result of hearing such stories.

The experience of hearing stories can awaken portions of emotional lives that may have lain dormant or have not yet been explored.

Be dynamic with your stories like Google. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination, so give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and humor to get people fully engaged. This story definitely engages us, doesn’t it?

Be creative, not only with words and images but also with the methods you use to convey them. Like the music as well as the messages.

Step 8 Talk about memorable human interest

Storytelling is largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think.

Step 9 Make it personal

Well-told stories can help us to learn about other cultures, ideas, and ways of thinking. They can provide opportunities to know how past generations responded to challenges.

They can also let us know how new generations are encountering and dealing with similar opportunities or the new challenges they face. Use a creative story that builds on some big forces such as politics, religion, geography, nationalism.

If you really listen to your customers, you can leverage their stories to drive your creativity.

Step 10 Trigger a question

Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions as your narrative progresses. As the storyteller, you can ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience to come up with the questions themselves.

And yet we must not be afraid to leave some (many?) questions unanswered. When we think of a story we may think of clear conclusions and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more complicated than that. There are an infinite amount of mysteries to ponder and puzzles to be solved.

Now

Many observations cannot (yet) be explained, but that is OK. This is what keeps us going forward.

Step 11 Emphasize the visual

“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway

Here visual does not mean only the use of graphics such as photography, video, animations, visualizations of data, and so on. Visual also means helping the audience to clearly “see” your ideas through your use of descriptive language, the use of concrete examples, and the power and simplicity of metaphor.

Step 12 Make the tough choices about inclusion and exclusion

Whether you have 5-minutes, 18-minutes, or an all-day seminar in which to tell your story, it is never enough time to tell all that you know or to share everything in as much detail as possible.

Time can be a real obstacle, but it’s also a great enabler if you are willing and able to put in the time to think long and hard about what’s the most important and what’s less important for reaching your audience in a way that is honest, informative, and engaging.

Remember

You can’t include all that you know or all that there is to say. The secret is in knowing what to leave out. This is not easy. Balance is key.

Step 13 Story is about change

We’re all learning all the time. And that’s why change is fundamental in story… life is never static. Think of change in two ways. First, the content of every good presentation or story addresses a change of some kind.

Second, an effective presentation or a story told well will create a change in the audience. Don’t let the only change you create be in your audience the change from wakefulness to sleep.

Step 14 Show a sense of the future

A good story is a mix of logic, data, emotion, and inspiration. We usually do fine with the logic and data part, but fail on the emotional and inspirational end.

Certainly, we need to infuse a bit of the future into our talks to inspire people to make a change. Most importantly, a good story should not end when the speaker sits down or the class comes to an end.

The bottom line

Great storytelling and stories are a very integral part of being persuasive. If you want to persuade your customers and create a memorable experience at the same time, you must master the psychology of storytelling. Give them a try today.

Digital Spark Marketing. location in the Finger Lakes.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

10 Laws of Customer Experience Design

Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success

10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence

Effective Listening and Engaging For a Social Media Campaign

Are you interested in learning how to create a social media campaign? Looking for the latest social media marketing tactics? It is not terribly hard to accomplish these objectives. We’ll share with you how the most successful businesses use social media to grow business and brand loyalty.

Here are the links to the other Social Media Campaign Secrets series articles:

Part 1 The Big Picture

Part 2 Targeting Customers

Part 4 Telling Stories

What does customer focus mean to your company? Do you have a passion for helping customers? Serving customers? Improving consumer engagement would be our choice. But there are lots of possible options, aren’t there? Especially with listening to and engaging customers.

Do you have an understanding of the secrets to building relationships? Especially the ones that are essential for a social commerce business? Here we define a social commerce business as the use of social engagement to personalize and energize the shopping experience. It provides a social context to shopping and is both a channel and way of doing business.

They should be a top priority, so read on.

What do you feel is the most important factor in establishing customer relationships? How you make customers feel is the most important factor …hands down in our opinion. Like making new friends. It is becoming the most important element of social commerce.

Related: Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success

Business is a people activity; people like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Ones with whom they have relationships are at the top of the desirable business option list. The stronger the relationships with your customers, the greater will be their trust and loyalty to your business. So it is very logical for businesses in establishing customer relationships.

Studies show time and again, that your best, most loyal customers are the aptest to tell their friends about your business, creating strong word-of-mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing is the most important element of any marketing campaign.

So how do we propose to build a world-class listening and engagement business?

The best businesses, regardless of the circumstances in which they operate, find a way to win. They understand a simple fact: businesses that engage their customers outperform those that do not.

Here is a kicker

A recent Gallup study has shown that customers who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer. Actively disengaged customers represent a 13% discount on the same measures.

Effective listening and engaging … pay attention

Here are 13 tips for your customer engagement strategy. They apply for one on one in-person or online engagement. Note that following these tips will yield a good customer experience. In most cases, you will have to go beyond this level to yield a great customer experience.

Consistent service

Consistency goes hand in hand with providing great service built on solid trust. Internal expectations lead to external results. From a business perspective, consistency applies to every aspect of who you are and what you do.

Importance Transparency

Transparency is another competency that should come naturally. Yet so many businesses have trouble coming to terms with what it really means.

Customers and clients are smart. They know when you’re being upfront or when they are told a mistruth. If honesty is the best policy, they’ll appreciate and admire you more when you admit to a mistake, rather than playing games or even worse, avoiding the topic altogether.

This would be crazy

Don’t try to hide or cover up your errors. Address the issue directly, explain how you will handle it, and share what steps are being taken to prevent the errors from occurring in the future.

People are human

People are real; they are not numbers or statistics. It is as simple as that. They are human and want to be treated as such. They dislike being treated as a number. And they prefer relationships that work best for them.

Be friendly and socialize your business. People do business with people, so make it personal. Customers should want to do business with you because of you and your employees. Make your customers feel at home. You may have a great location, cool displays, great value, etc. That’s all great, but if your people can’t make your customers feel welcome and appreciated, all of the other doesn’t matter so much.

Relevance is vital

People have many priorities and rarely enough time. So pay attention and don’t use their time with irrelevant messages and conversation. Engage them with only the messages and topics that are relevant to them.

Strictly avoid broadcast messaging.

Communicate effectively

Effective communication is the cornerstone of any successful company. In today’s fast-paced business world, having a range of communication channels available such as phone, e-mail, instant messaging, fax, etc. is key to maximizing your ability to communicate effectively with customers.

The bottom line

People like to talk with and be around friendly people. In such situations, they share quite a bit about themselves. And it obviously makes sense they expect the same in kind.

Customer care

Assume you are the company owner. Not all owners or executives make great leaders, but the ones that are should be emulated.

Watch …

how they take pride in how they deal with customers and employees and then follow their lead.

Start with observations

Consider starting questions with this phrase: “I noticed that you …” What happens when you are forced to think about this is that you start to consider what you know about someone before you meet them based on where you are, what they look like or what you know about them already.

An example

One of the best conversations I had at an event recently was because I noticed that someone was using two different phones at the same time. Asking why led to an amazing conversation about time optimization and technology.

Interrupt with questions

Many people think good listening means always letting someone finish every thought and nodding along. Instead, active listening requires that you ask questions while you are listening. Sometimes this means interrupting – but this isn’t something to be afraid of.

Often the interruptions will lead to tangents that create more intersections for both the people in a conversation.

Seek stories instead of answers

There are questions that lead to answers, and then there are questions that lead to stories. Here’s one way you might start a story-seeking question, “What inspired you to …”

When people share stories, they go beyond feeling like they are being interrogated. They open up and they connect. The more stories you can hear, the more connection you’ll feel to everyone you speak to.

Friendly and social

Be friendly and socialize your business. People do business with people, so make it personal. Customers should want to do business with you because of you and your employees. Make your customers feel at home.

You may have a great location, cool displays, great value, etc. That’s all great, but if your people can’t make your customers feel welcome and appreciated, all of the other doesn’t matter so much.

All the time

Amazing companies don’t always deliver ‘Wow!’ type experiences, they are just better than average all of the time.

The Kicker

Consistently all of the time is the secret sauce.

Experience

People are always looking for memorable experiences in their lives. They tend to remember both the very best and the very worse experiences. They prefer those they treasure and will share with friends.

Attention to details

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest impact. Figure out the details that your customers enjoy and make them a routine part of doing business with you. Be vigilant … always listening and learning.

Try and remember things customers tell you and then show them you listened. Trying new ideas. Put your social commerce business in motion by being adaptable.

Want to know the best part?

Here is a story that helps me with better customer engagement:

When my son was about two and a half, he developed a funny habit of walking around the house from time to time, chiming out, and “I’m here.”

Although this little boy was strongly connected to his family and his small class of school friends, he still had that need to express himself.

I’m here. I exist. I want to be seen, and heard. I want to be recognized.

And as human beings, we never quite lose that. We might get a little more sophisticated about how we say it, but ultimately we all want to let the world know:

I’m here.

If you intend to market something — to ask for someone’s hard-earned money and irreplaceable time — you must begin by seeing (and honoring) who they are. And clearly acknowledging their presence.

You need to know them as well as you know yourself, as well as you know your family and closest friends.

Here’s the kicker

Now it’s up to you. Choose one customer service strategy to start with. Have a meeting around it. Discuss how to implement it. Then, do it and repeat the process, creating something good for your customers to talk about! Soon you will have a much stronger social commerce business.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

How to Measure Social Media Marketing Performance

To measure social media has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes to reach out to new and potential customers.

It is essential to understand how to measure online community marketing performance. Various metrics are used to gauge the success of a social media campaign, but some of the most important include engagement, reach, and conversion rates.

1. Reach

As the marketing world continues to evolve, so does social media’s role. Once seen as a purely social platform, social media plays a major as one of the performance marketing channels. As a result, businesses need to measure their social media performance to ensure they get the most from their investment.

Reach measures the number of people who see your content, which indicates how well your content performs. There are several ways to increase reach, such as using hashtags and tagging other users.

2. Mentions

Social media marketing can be an excellent way to keep in touch with customers and boost your business. One way to measure social media marketing performance is by looking at the number of mentions your business receives.

Mentions are any time your brand is mentioned on social media, whether in a post, comment, or even a hashtag, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Keeping track of the mentions will give you a good idea of how often your brand is being talked about online. But more importantly, it will help you identify negative sentiment around your brand. If you’re receiving a lot of negative mentions, that’s a sign that your social media management and marketing efforts need to be improved. On the other hand, if you’re receiving mostly positive mentions, that’s a good sign that you’re on the right track.

3. Impressions

Any marketer worth their salt knows that social media is a powerful tool – but what good is power if you can’t measure its effects? Impressions are one of the most basic metrics in social media marketing and refer to the number of times your content is viewed.

This metric can be useful in gauging the reach of your content, but it’s essential to remember that not all impressions are created equal. A person who scrolls past your content on their feed will have a very different impact than someone who takes the time to stop and read (or watch, or listen to) it.

That’s why, when looking at your impressions, it’s important to look at engagement rates – the number of people taking specific actions on your content, such as liking, sharing, or commenting. Together, these two metrics will give you a complete picture of your content’s performance.

4. Promote Viral Sharing With Motivation

The first step to take when trying to promote viral sharing is to offer encouragement. It could be a discount, sweepstakes entry, or simply recognition on social media platforms. The second step is to make it easy for customers or followers to share your content.

It means using social media buttons on your website or blog and including share links in your email marketing campaigns. Finally, it would help if you kept an eye on your analytics to see how your content performs. It will help you determine which content types are most popular and how much reach your campaigns get.

Businesses need to take a strategic and data-driven approach to social media marketing. It starts with setting clear objectives, such as increasing website traffic or improving customer engagement.

Once objectives have been identified, businesses can start to measure performance by tracking key metrics, such as reach, impressions, clicks, and conversions. By regularly monitoring these metrics, businesses can stay on track and adjust as needed to ensure that their social media marketing efforts achieve desired results.

Social Media Tools Recommended: 20 Clever Ones to Simplify Productivity

When it comes to productivity with your social media marketing, I’ve found that there are many areas for improving your productivity. These include automation, scheduling, communicating, engaging, and more. Here are 25 social media tools recommended for you.

When I look for helpful productivity tools, I often grab ones that make a difference in one or more of these areas.

Each of these social media productivity tools I’ve highlighted below fits into one of these categories. Here’s hoping that a bit of help in each area can unlock some spare time for you.

Twibble

With Twibble, you can set up an RSS feed you want to publish automatically to your Twitter feed, complete with a featured image pulled directly from your article. And the fun doesn’t stop with images: You can edit the times that new posts go out, the frequency with which they’re sent, and the text and attribution on each. You could end up with something like this:

Twibble offers filters, too, in case you only want to post articles containing certain words (or want to exclude articles that contain certain words). You can wire up multiple feeds and track clicks and performance, too, all for free.

WeVideo

With WeVideo, you get worry-free cloud access to your media, Ken Burns-style animations, voiceover capabilities, and a library of licensed music to make video editing stress-free. Sharing capabilities include Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Adapting to 4 Major Examples of Social Change

Social media tools recommended … SiteDrop

Collaborating on your work should be a snap, especially if you and your team are spread out with travel or remote work. One way to keep a project in sync is with SiteDrop, a fun tool backed by the team behind Digg and Chartbeat.

SiteDrop syncs with a chosen DropBox folder pulls in all the files and photos from the folder and displays everything in a stream of information that you can easily share with teammates. Each file comes with its areas for likes and comments, and you can create as many different sets as you like, based on your DropBox folders.

SiteDrop pitches itself as a tool for project management, design, and photography, and I think there could be uses for coordinating content research, social media campaign ideas, and more.

Magisto

Magisto lets you synchronize audio and visual aspects to make an emotional connection with the viewer. Share your videos on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, or your blog.

IFTTT and Zapier

Two of our favorite automation tools— IFTTT and Zapier—can help you coordinate and automate your marketing efforts in a variety of fun, unique ways. We’ve written about 34 tips to wire up an IFTTT recipe for social media, and anything you can’t figure out with IFTTT, you can try with Zapier.

The former is a free service, the latter gives you your first five free and then switches to paid plans (Zapier has hundreds of connectable apps and services, compared to IFTTTs dozens).

social media tools list — Social media tools list.

Dailymotion

Live and on-demand, Dailymotion is the place to watch videos of sporting events, hilarious bloopers, fashion shows, and more.

Metacafe

With a youthful tone and appearance, Metacafe showcases short-form videos, gaming, television, and music.

AddThis

AddThis is an easy way to install those sharing and follow buttons you see all over the place, but their focus is on keeping people on your site and reducing bounce rates. They allow people to share your content and follow your social networks without leaving the page they’re on.

There are a ton of other ways you can use AddThis, such as implementing sharing buttons in newsletters, so it’s worth checking out.

Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet makes it quick and easy for readers to share your content, or pieces of content, to their Twitter followers by – you guessed it – click to tweet. You create your pre-written tweets and Click to Tweet provides a link that, when clicked, will open that tweet inside a user’s Twitter account.

It’s an easy way to eliminate the barrier of typing out a tweet for your readers to share it, and since you’re working with a link, you can use it however you want.

Playbuzz

Playbuzz is a digital publishing platform where you can create content and embed quizzes directly on your website. The goal is to share stories that people love, and it seems to be working.

Playbuzz is one of BuzzFeed’s biggest competitors. Just as with BuzzFeed, Playbuzz lets you share your content on practically every device and network.

Cyfe

free social media tools — Free social media tools.

Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard that makes it easy to monitor virtually every piece of analytic data about your business (really). Pre-built widgets pull data from popular services like Google and Salesforce.

Add your own custom widgets or Push API for integrating additional data. Boom: all the data you could ever need (and none you don’t), all in one place. Track brand mentions, Twitter followers, and Facebook demographics from the social media dashboard.

Automate client reporting with SEO, social media and advertising data from the client dashboard. Plus, there’s a web analytics dashboard, sales dashboard, project management dashboard, IT board and about every widget, you could ever need.

Piktochart

Piktochart lets you create innovative, design-intricate infographics complete with icons, images, charts, and interactive maps. Once finished, save and publish your newly minted content directly to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube, and even convert long-form infographics to multi-slide presentations on SlideShare.

Visme

With Visme, you can easily create beautiful presentations, infographics, reports, web content, and wireframes all in one place. Share your content online as a URL or on social media, embed it on your website, or download it for offline use.

Curalate

With 2.6 billion images shared each day and Instagram the de facto social media network for savvy Millennials, there’s no denying the power of visual content. Kick-start your visual brand management with Curalate.

Curalate applies image recognition algorithms to social media conversations and then scours social media sites including Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook to find what people are saying about your brand in pictures.

Instantly see what people are visually sharing about your brand, collect and moderate fan photos for user generate content, push content to a fully customizable, shoppable image gallery, and schedule your images for posting on Pinterest and Instagram.

Social Rank

Social Rank is the easiest way to identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter and Instagram. Social Rank sorts your followers based on Most Valuable (highest profile followers), Most Engaged (frequency of retweets, mentions, and replies), Most Followed, and Best Followers (followers who have engaged most recently with you).

Add additional filters to find followers based on bio keywords, geographic locations, interests, and activity. Create custom lists for special engagement campaigns and find out who your competitors’ top followers are!

Typeform

I quite enjoy a survey that doesn’t feel like a survey. Those are exactly the type that TypeForm specializes in. Typeform surveys ask one question at a time; survey takers move through the survey chronologically via the smooth UI or keyboard shortcuts (e.g., press Enter to go to the next question).

Plus, you can add visual components to your questions, and that makes it even easier for those filling out your form.

Creating a new survey is a time saver as well. You simply drag and drop the types of questions you want to include, and you can set the color scheme, fonts, and images with just a couple of clicks.

And of course, TypeForm provides all the relevant analysis and data that you might need from the survey results.

Wideo

Wideo works in tandem with your marketing strategy to create videos in minutes. You can create professional videos online and share them on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you prefer to have Wideo create your video, graphic designers are on hand to assist with your marketing needs.

Vimeo

Vimeo’s platform is similar to YouTube and is ideal for video sharing, discovery, and sparking creativity. You can get inspired by individuals and businesses that are passionate about video.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed is one of the most popular quiz-sharing websites to date. The site’s editorial style makes it easy to create, view, and share quizzes. You can share your content on practically every device and network.

The bottom line

Don’t let what you know … limit what you can imagine or maybe even dream. Confidence never comes from having all the answers. It comes from being prepared for, and open to, new ideas and questions. Prepare your mind for new ways of thinking. Only then will you take advantage of all the business lessons learned.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

7 Key Benefits of an Innovative Social Business Strategy

I am about to tell you how to build an extraordinary and innovative social business strategy. But first I want to tell you an important story about one such strategy. This is a story about a business near my home … a landscape nursery business.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

– Maya Angelou

A landscape gardener ran a business that had been in the family for two or three generations. The staff was happy, and customers loved to visit the store, or to have the staff work on their gardens or make deliveries – anything from bedding plants to ride-on mowers.

More details to study: 10 STEPS TO SUPERCHARGING YOUR E-COMMERCE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

For as long as anyone could remember, the current owner and previous generations of owners were extremely positive happy people.

Most folks assumed it was because they ran a successful business.

In fact, it was the other way around…

A tradition in the business was that the owner always wore a big lapel badge, saying Business Is Great!

The business was indeed generally great, although it went through tough times like any other. What never changed however was the owner’s attitude, and the badge saying Business Is Great!

Everyone who saw the badge for the first time invariably asked, “What’s so great about business?” Sometimes people would also comment that their own business was miserable, or even that they personally were miserable or stressed.

Anyhow, the Business Is Great! badge always tended to start a conversation, which typically involved the owner talking about lots of positive aspects of business and work, for example:

the pleasure of meeting and talking with different people every day
the reward that comes from helping staff take on new challenges and experiences
the fun and laughter in a relaxed and healthy work environment
the fascination in the work itself, and in the other people’s work and businesses
the great feeling when you finish a job and do it to the best of your capabilities
the new things you learn every day – even without looking to do so
and the thought that everyone in business is blessed – because there are many millions of people who would swap their own situation to have the same opportunities of doing a productive meaningful job, in a civilized well-fed country, where we have no real worries.

And so the list went on. And no matter how miserable a person was, they’d usually end up feeling a lot happier after just a couple of minutes of listening to all this infectious enthusiasm and positivity.

It is impossible to quantify or measure attitude like this, but to one extent or another it’s probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, on which point if asked about the badge in a quiet moment, the business owner would confide:

The badge came first. The great business followed. And that my friends are the best social business strategy that I know of.

So do you and your staff like making new friends and building new relationships? This is becoming the most important element of a social business strategy.

Creating positive experiences for building customer relationships often will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the little things you can do to build customer relationships.

What is social business? Is your company a social business? If your answer is no, think again. It’s not rocket science. What makes a social business? Why put emphasis on being social, of course.

Sometimes small actions or inactions by a business can have a big impact on customer experiences. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit customer experience strategy.

Here are some further thoughts on a social business strategy.

Social networks

The fact is that social networks are facilitating huge numbers of people to share their ideas, beliefs, and stories – creating communities of influence. Social is now the top Internet activity and by 2017, the global social network audience will total 2.55 billion.

Nick Blunden, Senior Vice President of Digital at The Economist Group describes the social business as a mindset or a culture. Social recognizes that collaboration, particularly collaboration facilitated by technology, and the collective knowledge that results from that collaboration is a large source of competitive advantage for businesses.

Social networks are giving people a voice to share their stories – and ultimately be heard. People now have a microphone to share their experiences with clients and partners that want to better understand how to drive transformation, inspire innovation, build collaboration and create amazing, personalized customer experiences.

And when you put people at the center of the conversation through social business, the audience begins to listen, co-creation and collaboration occur, and most important – the community becomes engaged.

Social business … source of competitive advantage

Social recognizes that collaboration, particularly collaboration facilitated by technology, and the collective knowledge that results from that collaboration is a large source of competitive advantage for businesses. Moreover, social business leadership comes in all shapes, forms, and sizes, as it smashes down silos and fosters connectivity and new levels of collaboration like never before.

Innovative social business strategy

A social business strategy isn’t just about tweeting and likes – it’s about something far more powerful. As Bryan Kramer explained in his book: “There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: #H2H” businesses are starting to behave and sound like real people dealing with other people, rather than “business” to “consumer.”

Example of social business … connecting and personalizing

It’s about connecting people – employees, partners, and customers – with each other to share knowledge, identify expertise, and better reach customers. Leaders are using social business strategies, technologies, and practices to make a significant impact on their businesses and communities.

Using the power of personalized storytelling through social business, impactful stories can be unleashed into the marketplace – and shared like never before.

Customers today are demanding a more personalized experience than ever before, which leaves businesses working harder to meet these rising expectations. When used effectively, the rewards of personalization can be enormous – increasing sales and revenue, enhancing online conversion rates, boosting average order value, driving cross-sell and upsell initiatives, and strengthening customer loyalty and retention.

But even more powerful than personalization is a concept that marketers have been familiar with for years: real-time personalization. It’s not just making advance decisions about what message customers will see the next time you interact with them – it’s also being prepared to make fact-based decisions about personalized messages to create real-time, meaningful interactions.

And while most companies are beginning to understand personalization and even real-time personalization, others are taking this concept a step further to include personalized engagement, which, in society, is a two-way conversation.

They are leveraging personal connections and giving people a platform to tell their stories through social networks – exposing large numbers of people to others’ ideas, culture, beliefs, and technologies, and creating communities of influence.

what is social business — Are you amplifying connections?

Social business ideas … amplifying connections

Customers have grown increasingly overwhelmed with outbound marketing offers, and consequently, the effectiveness of traditional outbound marketing campaigns has significantly declined. The ability to connect with customers on their own terms, at any time, with any device can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. We already know that real-time personalization allows you to successfully:

Social business strategy … message relevance

To increase response rates of inbound channels consider maximizing the relevance of messages presented in real-time.

Improve each customer’s experience by personalizing his or her interaction with your company
Maintain a consistent dialogue with customers across all channels
Achieve better overall marketing results, including increased sales and revenue, improved online conversion rates, and strengthened

Customer loyalty and retention

But social business takes all the benefits of personalization and brings them into a very public forum. It gives people a way to share their insights with others – on a massive scale – and creates overwhelming value for everyone.

Tying it all together

In the end, it’s about social, mobile, and real-time connections – and how those pieces work together to enable stronger connections among people. They can share more easily than ever, right at the moment, at any given time.

What companies need to do is live and breathe what the principle of social stands for – which is being open and listening.

Understanding how customers want to interact in the future – and meeting them there – will become increasingly important when it comes to interactions, and truly creating a sense of personalized engagement.

The bottom line

It’s all about wearing and expressing your enthusiasm and passion all the time, isn’t it? That is a true priority of running a social business.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of being social to improve their business are most successful in achieving customer trust and loyalty.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Most Effective Types of Social Media Content

Here’s a fact about your social media content and strategy. You want to post valuable content.

You want engagement, virality, retweets, likes, shares, followers, and all the other good things that come to social media marketers. If your social media management doesn’t promote this kind of activity, then it’s not even worth it to keep trying!

So the question is, what kind of social media content gets that kind of love? More importantly, what kind of content gives you the most value?

“Value” here is defined in terms of revenue, ROI, KPIs, and engagement. You want to spend your content marketing money in ways that have a substantial return on your investment. That’s the whole point of social media, right?

So, rather than act on hunches, your mood, or what you ate for breakfast, let’s look at the data. In this article, I want to show you exactly what types of content will give you the greatest value.

The 6 Types Of Social Media Content That Will Give You The Greatest Value via @neilpatel

CLICK TO TWEET

Top of Form

Get Your Free Guide To Social Media Content That Will Give You The Greatest Value!

Bottom of Form

1. Infographics

Infographics are the most socially shared form of content.

In 2013, Slideshare reported: “The data’s in: Infographics have more virality than presentations and documents!”

It’s still true.

Noah Kagan of SumoMe recently conducted one of the most massive social sharing studies in the history of the planet. He and his team crunched data from over 100 million articles.

Here’s what they discovered.

What type of posts typically receive a lot of shares?…Infographics.

The data indicates that infographics claim the top spot.

I’ve produced a bunch of infographics over the years, so I totally understand the data.

Infographics are incredibly engaging. Since humans process visual information faster than words, it only makes sense.

The human brain tells us “reading is hard” and “looking is easy.”

An infographic uses the power of visually appealing content to trick the brain into reading. Besides, we understand the content better when it’s paired with pictures.

Neomam

It’s no surprise that kids like picture books. But it’s not just kids; adults are the same way! The brain itself likes pictures.

The takeaway is simple: Share infographics socially, and the social world will share it right back.

2. Interactive Content

Interactive content is all the rage.

Wikipedia defines interactive media in this way:

Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user’s actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video, audio, games, etc.

The content marketing industry has moved past the static read-it-and-process-it form of social media content.

Instead, savvy content professionals are producing content that users can better engage with.

At the beginning of 2015, Ion Interactive published a survey of content marketing trends. Their thesis was, “Clearly, content is going interactive.”

Slideshare

They quoted William Comcowich, the CEO of Cyber Alert, who said this:

“Content marketing is becoming less about the words you put on a page, and more about the experiences you create for the consumer.”

One of the most viral forms of interactive content is the quiz.

You’ve probably taken one of these quizzes.

Quizzes are a two-way form of content. Users do something with it rather than just consume it. Besides, people love to share their quiz results.

The Atlantic famously reported that The New York Times’ most-shared content of 2013 wasn’t an article at all. It was a quiz.

If that’s true of a news company that produces thousands of articles a year, then how much more valuable would it be for your brand?

Interactive content is valuable for so many reasons. Once you start posting interactive material, you’ll never again revert to the old ways.

3. Content That Evokes Strong Positive Emotion

If your social media content doesn’t spark people’s emotions, then it probably won’t get shared very much.

CoSchedule’s research discovered that “posts with a higher emotional value get more shares.”

There are all kinds of emotions, though. What kind of emotional response gets the most shares?

Not surprisingly, it’s the happy emotions that inspire people to share.

CoSchedule

Buffer’s analysis of emotional content found the same trends to hold true. “Positive feelings” and “positive ratings” were correlated with positive emotion in the shared social media content.

Bufferapp Blog

If you want truly valuable social media activity, focus on emotion. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.

Emotion is a universal language that evokes similar responses everywhere.

Obviously, your emotional language will vary according to your audience and their particular demographic makeup. Broadly speaking, however, emotional language in social media will produce valuable results.

4. Content With Images

It shouldn’t be a surprise that image-rich content is incredibly shareable.

Data for this comes from all kinds of sources, but some of the most compelling statistics are from Buffer’s research.

Of course, that’s just Twitter. What about Facebook?

The same holds true:

If you keep up a steady output of image-rich content on social media platforms, you’ll be sure to increase your value.

5. List Posts

One of the most obvious results of OKDork’s study (Buzzsumo) was this:

“People love to share lists and infographics.”

Here’s that chart again:

Content marketers classify content according to several types of blog posts. Here is a common classification:

List Posts: Content that has a certain number of points, like the article you’re reading now.

How-to Posts: Content that explains exactly how to do something. I write a bunch of these.

What Posts: News articles and general information.

Why Posts: These are explaining articles, and they usually include the word “why” in the title.

According to Kagan’s data, list posts came out on top. Since he analyzed over 100 million articles, I’d say that data is reliable.

Hubspot did a similar study. Their findings? List posts came out ahead, too.

Lists and “why” posts proved to have the most reliable social traction, averaging around 21,000 shares per month with a variance of less than 2.5%.

Between list posts and why posts, list posts won out.

Lists narrowly claimed the most social traction at 22.45%.

Content marketing pioneers like Brian Clark have long known the power of list posts. Clark’s article “7 Reasons Why List Posts Will Always Work” provides one of the primary reasons why the list is an irresistible form of content—the headlines are magnetic!

Some writers explain that the brain is hardwired to tune into lists. Since this is true, we are more likely to share, engage with, and benefit from list posts shared on social media.

6. Newsworthy Content

In raw numbers, news articles get more social shares than any other type of article.

The data above shows the number of shares for a six-month period according to the industry. It’s clear that the news industry has an advantage.

Here’s the challenge. It’s hard to be a source that breaks news as it happens. There are two types of businesses that are able to do this:

Big news organizations that can afford to retain journalists and reporters around the world. (BBC, CNN, and Al-Jazeera, for example.)

Niche sites that focus on a narrow slice of news. (Search Engine Roundtable and Mac Rumors, for example.)

Most businesses that produce content are focusing on deep long-form content rather than as-it-happens breaking news.

If you’re not in the news industry, you probably don’t want to be producing news articles. Why not?

Because, when analyzed according to industry, news articles—called “what-posts”—were the worst performers. Only in the news, technology, and entertainment verticals are news articles shareable.

According to Hubspot, what-posts are risky, and they are social low-performers:

What-posts were the riskiest format, showing a high variance of 13.45%.

What-posts had the lowest social traction, earning 17.88% of total shares.

If your niche is news, entertainment, or tech, what-posts may be valuable on social media. Otherwise, you’re better off sticking with some of the other methods in this article.

The bottom line

Now that you know the most shareable types of social media content, what should you do?

You may choose to produce this kind of content and share it on your social channels.

That would be fine. But first, let me suggest something else.

Your audience might want something different entirely. They may react favorably to a list post but completely ignore a newsworthy post.

The best method is to make sure you know your audience, analyze your data, test different types of social media content, and develop a powerful strategy.

Outlook Corruption: Do You Know How to Prevent the Problems from Happening?

The popularity of MS Outlook as an email client is increasing rapidly and many organizations are considering MS Outlook as their primary email client. MS Outlook offers countless smart features. However, just because you love MS Outlook doesn’t mean you need to overlook its one major flaw. Apart from the emailing function, MS Outlook also offers eye-catching features such as a task manager, calendar, contact manager, web browsing, and journal. It develops an MS Outlook data file, known as a personal storage table or PST files on the local hard drive. The MS Outlook data files or the PST files save all the content of the mailbox such as emails, attachments, contacts, etc. However, the only disadvantage is that the PST files are extremely vulnerable to Outlook corruption. The PST file size limitation, which is dependent on the outlook version you’re using, is said to be the primary cause of the PST file corruption.

Problems of the PST File Size Limitation

MS Outlook developers use two formats, Unicode and ANSI to store the PST files on the local drive. The size limitation is not identical to these file formats. The ANSI PST file can be seen in the MS Outlook version of 2002 and earlier, which comes with a size limitation of 2GB. This means that you won’t have the authority to store more than 2GB of email content in the PST files. In contrast, the Unicode file format can be seen in the MS Outlook versions of 2003 or later, where the size limitation of the PST files is either 50GB or 20GB, based on the MS Outlook version you’re using.

If you’re using MS Outlook 2010, 2013, or 2016, the size limitation is 50GB. And if you’re using MS Outlook 2003 or 2007, the size limitation of the PST files is 20GB. Due to this size limitation, MS Outlook users face outlook corruption.

When the PST files reach the maximum size limit, you will undoubtedly face major issues regarding Outlook effectiveness and performance. If you consider accessing bloating Outlook or PST files, the application will either freeze or crash. This is a troublesome situation. The outlook corruption will also happen if you try to access the oversize PST files. Even though the rate of corruption is lower in Unicode file format, it’s not invincible to corruption.

How Can You Avoid Outlook Corruption?

Some people say that you cannot avoid Outlook corruption. This is a misconception that you do not pay attention to. If you manage to follow some proper steps, you will be able to prevent Outlook corruption.

Make Sure You Take Regular Backups

This is one of the best ways to mitigate the consequences even if you face Outlook or PST file corruption. Don’t forget to take regular backups of your PST files. PST file corruption can make you lose your important files and data permanently. However, when you take regular backups, you will be able to recover all the data that has been damaged due to the PST file corruption.

Therefore, make sure you don’t forget to take regular backups of the PST files. As per Peer Spot, data backup is important.

Avoid Irrelevant Add-Ins

The add-ins you install will not only degrade the performance of the MS Outlook software but also make the PST files much more prone to corruption. Don’t use MS add-ins that won’t help you in any way. Sometimes, the add-ins can cause different types of issues that will ultimately cause the PST files to corrupt.

If you think that the add-ins are the primary cause of the Outlook corruption, make sure you check each add-in thoroughly and remove the disturbing one.

Use Proper Antivirus Application

This is another great step to prevent the MS Outlook data files from corrupting. If you’re using a free version of antivirus or online security, the programming of the antivirus can affect the processing of the email content within the PST files. Additionally, if the speed of the antivirus is slow, it will take a significant amount of time to scan all the email content. If the antivirus is outdated or faulty, it might also cause the PST files to corrupt.

Make sure you don’t use MS OneCare as the software has quite a reputation for deleting the PST files. You need to use the antivirus program correctly while also paying close attention to the updates.

Shut Down the Computer Properly

You need to be careful while turning off the computer. This is an extremely important step you need to consider. Failing to turn off the computer properly will cause many problems, including corruption of Outlook data files.

Sudden outrages of power are one of the most common causes behind the abrupt shutdown of the computer. If your computer shuts down automatically or abruptly while working with the MS Outlook application, the PST files might get corrupted. This is why you should use a UPS.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve gathered some insights to prevent the MS Outlook data file from facing corruption, make sure you implement these steps. Even if the PST files are corrupted, contact us and we will assist you.

How Long Does SEO Take To Start Working?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing and continuous process, which means your website won’t be indexed by search engines instantly. In fact, it takes a considerable amount of time before your site starts to show up in search results. This is true even if you hire an expert SEO firm instead of working on the site yourself. While you can expedite the process with
on-page SEO, there’s no ‘magic button’ that will make your website show up in search results overnight.

Moreover, because there are so many factors that go into optimizing a website for search engines; it’s almost impossible to estimate the timeframe in which you will start seeing those wonderful green arrows from Google. Nevertheless, you can speed up the process with these simple tips:

Add Rich Content To Your Website

First and foremost, before you even begin to think about SEO optimization, you need to create high-quality content on your website. Whether your website is a blog, eCommerce site, or a corporate portal, you need to ensure that the content is engaging, of high quality, and solves a specific or targeted problem.

Moreover, the content should be original, relevant, and contain correct usage of grammar and syntax. In addition to increasing your organic traffic, optimized content can help improve your website’s Search Engine Ranking (SEO) and is often used as anchor text for internal links.

This, in turn, helps Google understand what your website is about and crawl your website more efficiently. Keep in mind, however, that search engines don’t like duplicate content, especially if it’s across multiple websites.

Use Google’s Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are short, snappy summaries that Google shows for certain search terms. If your website is having difficulty ranking for specific search terms, you can try and have those terms added to a featured snippet.

As mentioned, featured snippets are summary boxes that show up at the top of the search results, usually in the first couple of results. You can get Google to show a summary of your website by submitting your content to Google, via Google Search Console.

We advise against keyword stuffing and trying to ‘trick’ Google into displaying a featured snippet. Instead, create quality content that answers your user’s question, and Google will likely include your summary as a featured snippet.

Be Patient And Stay Committed

SEO is an ongoing process, which means that you have to be patient and stay committed to your SEO strategy. While you can expedite the process with on-page SEO, there’s no ‘magic button’ that will make your website show up in search results overnight.

However, if you want to speed up the SEO process and get those wonderful green arrows from Google, you’ll have to ensure that your website is ‘search engine friendly. This means that your website should be easily crawlable and navigable by search engines, as well as provide high-quality and rich content.

For example, if you’re using WordPress to power your website, make sure you have installed a suitable theme and are using the right plugins. Make sure your website is fully optimized for mobile, has a sitemap, and is regularly updated. Moreover, you should also be leveraging social media to attract more traffic to your website.

Develop A Content Marketing Strategy

Another approach to setting up a local SEO agency is to develop a content marketing strategy and optimize your existing content for search engines. This means that you need to be regularly publishing unique and engaging blog posts, eCommerce product descriptions, press releases, and corporate posts.

While there’s no set rule for how often you should publish new content (this depends on your industry and audience), try to publish at least one or two posts per week. You should also try and generate more backlinks to your website. This can be done by guest posting on other websites, publishing press releases, creating infographics, and link building. By creating more content, you will also be increasing your chances of showing up in Google’s “related searches” section.

Add Structured Data To Your Website

Structured data is extra descriptive code that you can add to your website, to help search engines better understand and display your content. For example, if you are selling products on your eCommerce website, you can add structured data to your product pages to display pricing, availability, and review ratings.

Structured data is especially important for eCommerce websites, as it is one of the main ways that search engines can pull product data. With Google Shopping, product data is crucial, and without it, your products might not show up in search results.

To add structured data to your website, you will need to use a code generator, like Schema.org or Commend. Alternatively, you can use a free SEO plugin, like Yoast SEO, to add structured data to your website.

Make Your Website Responsive

Lastly, you should also try and make your website responsive to ensure that it’s easily accessible to all devices. According to a 2017 report by ComScore, more than half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, with most people using their smartphones.

This indicates that users are increasingly using their mobiles to navigate the internet. By making your website responsive, you can ensure that your website is accessible, regardless of what device your users are on. To make your website responsive, you can use a responsive theme, or you can add responsive functionality to your existing theme.

Conclusion

SEO is a long and arduous process, and there’s no guarantee that your website will rank at all. That being said, optimizing your website for search engines is an essential part of digital marketing and will help you to grow your business.

By following the tips outlined above, you can speed up the SEO process and get your website in front of more users. However, SEO isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a long-term strategy that requires patience, perseverance, and commitment.

15 Social Media Marketing Tips To Skyrocket your Marketing Results

If you wanted to learn more about building the best advertisements, how would you go about it? For us, the answer is pretty simple. We learn best by studying and analyzing impressive social media marketing tips and design examples. In this blog, we will define 13 essential marketing tips and design elements we rely on to create effective advertisement messages. We also illustrate with the best examples of each that we could find.

Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.

It is an excellent way to learn and stimulate design ideas. Let’s get started:

Generate fan togetherness

Biltwell makes motorcycle accessories, and they also make great engagement happen on their Facebook page with some fantastic helmet art. Check out this example of the fan helmet art they routinely highlight, which encourages fan submissions and generates a feeling of togetherness around the brand. It seems to be an ongoing campaign of Biltwell’s.

Grab and hold the attention

Did you see Nike’s Re2pect … a Tribute to Yankee Shortstop Derek Jeter? As most of us know, future Baseball Hall of Famer Derek Jeter recently retired. So, one of Jeter’s long-time sponsors, Nike, released a commercial paying tribute to him. The ad’s name “ RE2PECT” is a tip of the cap to Jeter’s jersey number – and a host of athletes and celebrities can be seen paying tribute to the Yankees captain.

Use extraordinary prizes

I think tickets to the World Cup are the single best title that marketers could offer this year, how about you? Hyundai teamed up with YouTube channel Copa90 for a contest with the World Cup of prizes. Check out their video.

Emotional influence

The Zillow real estate company has built an entire marketing campaign on changing home buyers with emotional impact. Have you seen any of them? We like them so much that we have searched for them on YouTube frequently.

“Homecoming” is Zillow’s sixth TV spot, the latest in the company’s highly successful national advertising campaign. You cannot beat these ads. There are no better means of influence or the power of persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion.

Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the skills are important to remember.

The homecoming commercial ending message says it all:

You are not just looking for a house; you are looking for a place for your life to happen.

This commercial focuses on emotional appeal in grand fashion. It is the secret of this business’s success. It creates strong persuasion in our opinion. An excellent example of a successful advertisement design.

Photo contests

If you are going to compete in a picture contest, why not compete in a grand way? National Geography launched a competition on Facebook where fans can experience the thrill of having their photo on a National Geographic magazine cover. Wow, now that is a great incentive, yes? Fans just upload their photos to Facebook, caption it, and they are entered to win a travel package. It seems like a great image generator that fans will also want to share on their Facebook pages.

Social media marketing tips … Four Seasons’ company page

One in three professionals online is on LinkedIn. How many of those are making hotel reservations around the world and spending company money? Plenty. That’s why it’s so smart for Four Seasons to build a helpful, engaging LinkedIn presence.

They feature great videos and graphic content, and they also post job listings. It’s a great example of a LinkedIn company page done well (and they were also selected as one of LinkedIn’s top company pages of 2013).

Social media marketing tips … customer end state needs

Focus on client needs end state and not the means. The end state is the only priority.

A good example of this is this Prudential’s billboard ad. This commercial considers the end state needs of its customers … the retirement needs of target customers are the business’s objective. An excellent interactive graphics drives home the purpose.

Simple messages

Make the message as clean and straightforward as possible. You cannot overachieve on the simplicity of the message. A message that the reader will quickly understand. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words.

This Guinness “Empty Chair” commercial salutes the character of a community as they honor one of their own who is out of sight, but not out of mind. The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character. Guinness proudly raises a glass to those who are #MadeOfMore.

Social media tips and tricks … relevant to your target market

Misty Copeland is only the third African American female soloist ever to dance for the American Ballet Theatre. But her route to the top was anything but an easy one. She only danced ballet for the first time at the age of 13, a full eight years later than most dance pros start training. And when she began to grow into a woman, she developed muscle tone, large breasts, and big feet – not exactly the accepted shape for a ballerina.

However, her refusal to give up on her dream is celebrated in this impressive new campaign for sports brand Under Armour, called ‘I Will What I Want.’

Have you seen this commercial? If not, take the 60 seconds to review it. It will indeed create a topic of discussion for you and your friends. That is certainly Under Armour’s objective, isn’t it?

Build a Best Vine Challenge

Easter social media contests are tricky. There’s only so many bunny or chocolate references that consumers can withstand. I enjoyed how Mashable brought Easter to Vine with this creativity-inspiring campaign. They explain: “In many countries around the world, decorating Easter eggs is an annual spring tradition. So for this week’s Mashable Vine Challenge, we want you to fire up your imagination, and decorate your own.”

*Social media design examples … visual elements***

Use pictures/visuals to convey the message much better than words. “Seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words” are two common sayings that reflect a bias and preference for visual presentation.

Here is a four minute Samsung ad with 15-20 new features shown for their iPhone. No talking. And so simple that you quickly grasp the features and don’t lose interest. And the coordinated music has a way to keep you tied in emotionally. Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?

Letting the visuals totally carry the messages.

Microsoft’s company page

Sometimes overlooked as one of the big social media channels, LinkedIn is actually the third most popular alongside Facebook and Twitter, according to recent research. If you’re looking for ideas on how to kickstart your LinkedIn efforts for marketing, take a page out of Microsoft’s book. They include behind the scenes looks at the company; question-and-answer posts; blogs and thought leadership; and more.

Storytelling

Have you seen the remarkable branding video design from this South African business? The Bell’s TV commercial features a father whose intrepid spirit demonstrates just what it takes to be a true man of character. The video was created to market and build the brand. It is a very simple story.

It advocates learning to read no matter your age or status in society. To us, it creates pure magic with the story, the visuals, the music and the emotion. It certainly finds emotional triggers

If you haven’t seen it, watch it now, it is only 2 minutes and it will inspire you. It is certainly easier in our top 5 of all time.

Social media design examples … authentic

What do you feel is the single most significant factor in the design of an advertisement? Being the most authentic advertisement design is probably not the top factor, but it is certainly in the top 5, don’t you think? It certainly influences the action taken considerably.

We like to examine advertisements to learn what drives the best ones to be the best and the terrible ones to be that bad. Today we will examine one of the best we have seen in a while. Perhaps one that is the most authentic we have ever seen.

Here is the commercial for you to judge for yourself:

Terry Bradshaw Talks Shingles

Integrated campaign

Your ads should be integrated components of an integrated marketing campaign. Remember; stop interrupting what people interested in, and be what people are interested in.

It was in early 2009 when IBM began its Smarter Planet marketing campaign strategy. At the time, the strategy seemed very ambitious … maybe even a bit risky, even for IBM. But their success was based on a strategy to build out a long-term campaign.

To do this they defined a theme around their vision (Smarter Planet). They used the theme to craft a marketing strategy connecting and integrating many smaller marketing objectives and tactics as they could. They also linked their core competencies to this theme, vision and challenge.

This very successful campaign continues today, 6 years later.

The bottom line

Building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.

Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple initiative examples and you will be leading the way.

Remember, it is not what advertising does with the consumer; it is what the consumer does after reading the advertisement. After looking over these enablers and Allstate’s mayhem ads … how do you think they did?

What are some of your experiences with advertising as a component of an integrated marketing campaign?

Do you have an advertising design experience to share with this community?

Need some help in capturing more customers from your advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy improving your advertising design?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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