Quantcast
Channel: Johannes Ahrenfelt» Featured

Tools for Listening to Help Your Social Media Strategy and Build Your Brand

0
0

Social Media tools are great for sharing your ideas, thoughts and company products but we tend to forget that ‘speaking’ will only truly work if we also ‘listen’. One of the most important and crucial aspects of ensuring that your social media efforts work is ‘listening’. Discovering what your customers are saying about you, what they like or dislike about your products/services is as significant as organizing your online presence, spreading your own ideas via blogs and setting up a Facebook business page to market your products. Companies spend thousands on a website, SEO and analytics but forget to listen out what people are saying about them but also about similar products and companies. By listening well you will be able to handle your online reputation properly and ensuring that YOUR viral buzz is positive.

5 Tools for Listening, Learning and Managing Your Online Reputation

1. Google Alerts

This is a great tool to use to ensure you are keeping track of any articles, news, or comments about your company, brand, products, or services. You can set up an automatic email alert to ensure that any content mentioning something about your business will send you an email with the content. There will be a slight delay in the alerting but hey it’s free.

2. Google Reader

This handy tool will store all your RSS feeds in one place. This type of listening tool is perhaps the most sophisticated as you are analyzing information from different blogs across the Web and learn from other experts. You also get a flavor for what people are talking about as well as trends in various areas.

3. Twilert

Another great tool specifically for keeping track of what users are saying about you on Twitter is twilert.com. This program will alert you whenever anyone discusses your company, brand, products, or services as well as whether the tone of the content was negative or positive.

4. HowSociable

This is an excellent little helper to track and protect your online brand reputation but also to give you an idea about how visible you are. It actually provides you with a score! This service is also going to be offering a Pro service soon which will allow you to receive detailed reports which can be exported to PDF, brand comparisons with your competitors and you can track your social media results with historical data.

5. Social Mention

Another fantastic and powerful tool for tracking your online brand reputation, seeing what users are saying about you and comparing your results. Social Mention allows you to receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, as well as news articles and blogs which are in your area of interest.

So as you can see, there are dozens of different online listening tools to learn about online trends, tap into expertise as well as playing Big Brother to protect your brand and reputation. These tools are also great for determining your return on investment for the time and money you invest into your social media marketing. By listening you can start organizing your online presence with an effective Social Media strategy.


Why am I not more productive? Increase your productivity

0
0

Thinking about being productive and how to increase productivity

I recently went on a course on developments in digital marketing. My main reason for being there was to network with local businesses and speak to the course leader whom I knew. During the course we had to work in pairs to solve a problem that the course leader had set online, we were given a deadline and off we went. I had the fortune to work with a very experienced woman and we used her new laptop (MacBook Pro…great choice) to do the activity. Things went well for the first 3 minutes until her TweetDeck began pinging her with new messages. Each time a new message popped-up she would lose her focus and look to the right-hand corner of her screen to see the message. The pinging occurred every 2 minutes and we never completed the task properly. How many hours a week will be wasted and how many assignments will be delayed as a consequence of these seemingly minor distractions? Employee productivity is clearly important.

“Don’t bother him, he’s wired in”

- The Social network

This quote crystalizes the state of being productive, well at least the state where we stand a chance of getting there. This line was taken from the film The Social Network, you know the Facebook film, and shows how programmers in this environment put their headphones on to get time to focus. This is what we need to do. Let’s look at the reasons we sometimes get distracted:

The Un-Productivity Check List

Try to answer these questions as truthfully as you can.

1. When I work on [Add Important Task Here] I always close my browser window.

2. I limit time on [Favorite Social Networking site] to x minutes in the morning, a touch after lunch and a brief stint in the afternoon.

3. I switch off my mobil phone (or keep it on silent with phone facing down – If you’re a parent and switch your mobile off but leave the screen facing up you’re OK too)

4. I set my email software (Mail, Outlook etc) to ‘Offline’.

If you can say YES to 3/4 you’re almost ‘Wired In’ – well done. If not consider the amount of time you are wasting in a day\week\year? How is that impacting on your work(load)? If you don’t notice any impact on your work and you said YES to 1-2 that’s even worse…

The only distraction we need in front of us should be our: Goals, USPs or Purpose. Put these clearly somewhere, post it notes on your wall, on your desktop or do like me and print them on my coffee mug (though that is a tiny bit sad…). So next time you need to write that all important blog post, get wired in and focus.

How to Brand Yourself with QR Code Marketing and Facebook

0
0

What is personal branding?

Personal branding is very critical in today’s growing social market. You have to give yourself an image that can go on to represent you as a brand. If you do not already know, personal branding means the way others think of you. If you think of this in broader sense, you can think of it as marketing yourself like if you use QR Code marketing to lead people to your Social Media profile(s).

Many people think that personal branding is out of one’s own control and one should stop doing efforts to take control over it. However, with the presence of social media, it is not difficult to portray an image that you want or maybe, your business requires. You can easily control some of the factors that lead to personal branding. Controlling these factors means playing around with personal branding. If you do it right, you can achieve great things.

Remember, you cannot avoid personal branding in today’s social world. Even when you are blogging and updating your activities on social networks, you are branding yourself at the same time. Think of it in wider sense, think of yourself as a product and you will understand the concept of personal branding.

What you need to do is to understand the factors that lead to personal branding. These factors include all sorts of communication and interaction with others including email exchanges, social media updates, telephonic conversation, blogs and even everyday conversation with friends and family members. Think of it as the perception that people get when they interact or communicate with you or you communicate with them.

Personal branding can be categorized into internal brand and external brand. The external brand would be precisely what we have talked so far. Whereas, the internal brand is what you think about yourself. Generally, internal brand does not coincide perfectly with the external brand. This is normal and you should not worry about that.

How can QR Codes and Facebook be used as a personal branding tool?

If you are looking to promote your personal brand, then you do not need to worry about finding useful tools. There more tools than ever and you can use most of them without having to pay. However, in this cloud of tools, it becomes a little ambiguous which tools to use and which ones to avoid. Sometimes paying a small sum can really make the difference between free with no support v a few ££ for dedicated support.

When it comes to Facebook, one of the leading social networks of this decade, you do not need to think twice. If you want to read about effectiveness of Facebook as a marketing tool. Facebook can also be used as a personal branding tool. All you have to do is to see how the other executives are using it for personal branding. You can then pick the right strategies and can create one for your business. A quick way to really drive traffic and interested employers and prospect to your social media profile is to focus on how you can promote yourself using QR Code marketing as a combination with Social Media to boost your social presence.

The major reason to use Facebook as your personal branding tool is number of users that it has. Moreover, these users are not just kids anymore with 40% users above the age of 35. When you are using Facebook for personal branding, you have to make sure that you have developed a sound strategy. The problem with such a huge user base is that a single mistake can ruin all your efforts. Therefore, you have to be careful with your strategy and have double check and test it before implementing it.

QR Code marketing will help you gain a clearer idea how people interact with you as a brand as well. Use a decent QR Code management service so you can track and change the content people see when they scan. This control of the QR Code is essential so you can engage the person, employer or colleague by sharing different information at different times. Pointing them to your LinkedIn profile on Mondays and Facebook page on Fridays ensurs you are always in control of what they see and when. Facebook is great as long as you use it with the view to share it as a professional tool, not a social one.

You can use Facebook to promote relevant data, positive traits of your personality, opine on contemporary events and talk about latest happenings relevant to your business. However, you should not be revealing things that you would not reveal in a management meeting of your company. Similarly, you should not promote anything that can potentially go against the positive image of your company. Above all these, you have to care about the community and should contribute to it positively.

If you can follow these simple rules, you will find using QR Codes marketing with your social media profiles like Facebook, will help you in promoting yourself quickly, effectively and in a good light.





Latest Images