By Special K – ETMG Writer/Editor

Lately I’ve been on a quest to know more about the next generation of social media tools and to consider where these tools fit into social media marketing strategies. This past week I devoted some time to checking out Quora, a question and answer platform which has been given increased weight by Google’s Social Search during the past several months. In addition to its ability to improve SEO, the site provides great opportunities to engage with potential customers and to enhance one’s expertise and reputation.

Quora, the brainchild of two former Facebook employees, has seen steady growth in both its user base and in the number of unique pageviews since it first launched in 2010.

On Quora, you can ask and/or share your expertise by answering questions about virtually anything. In addition to having access to the basic question-and-answer organization of knowledge, Quora users can follow specific questions, topics, and/or people. Your Quora homepage displays a real time feed of the various topics, people, and questions you have followed. You can also view the profiles of people following your questions and answers. These followers add credibility to the quality of your answers and help boost your personal rankings on Quora as an expert responder.

A quick look at Quora's home screen.

The generally high quality level of questions and answers reminds me of LinkedIn’s Answer section where business professionals ask and answer questions that are grouped by business verticals. However, one is not limited to asking only business and/or career-related questions. You can ask whatever you want. The quality and number of answers you receive will depend on the quality of the user base.

Based on my early explorations of Quora and supplemented with research, Quora’s current user base seems to be heavily weighted towards Silicon Valley insiders and tech–focused content.

To get a good sense of the wide variety of information covered in Quora, I typed in the phrase, “Social Media Marketing” The extensive list features queries ranging from “What is the most effective way to build/grow a social networking group or community?  to “What is the best way to build a solid strategy in social media marketing” to “How effective is B2B social media marketing?”

Quora search return on "Social Media Marketing"

Now that I’ve emerged from the multiple worlds of interesting Q&A’s one can find in Quora, I’m preparing to make a return visit to learn more about the best use from a marketing and business perspective where I will provide my readers with some best practices and tips.

By Neets – ETMG Blogger

Trade shows, events, and conferences can be very hard on the environment ­with all the paper, printing processes, giveaways, shipping materials, fuel usage and booth construction materials. Fortunately, there are many eco-friendly options that will help you reduce your carbon footprint.

1. Partner with vendors who are committed to conducting a green certified business.  Green Certified businesses use materials and practices to protect, preserve and sustain our environment.

2. Reduce paper waste by limiting the total volume of paper.  Instead of handing out printed brochures, white papers, etc., hand out a business card-size document with just the URL’s where the participant can find your collateral. Direct attendee to event related information on their Smartphone’s using a QR Code.

3. When possible, have your attendees fill out surveys online, instead of distributing paper versions.

4. Work with a print broker to locate green printing options for your banners, collateral, and signage. They can point you towards environmentally friendly paper options, soy inks instead of petroleum-based inks and printing processes that substantially reduce waste and use renewable energy resources.

5. Think about your giveaway and if it really has value outside of your branding. Is it just a novelty that will find it’s way into the garbage, or will it have a functional or decorative use that will outlast the event?

6. There are many great green giveaways that are made with organic, recycled, biodegradable, sustainable and environmentally safe processes and materials. Have a giveaway distributor on your side to help you find these.

7. Use and reuse environmentally safe packaging and shipping materials. There are now many biodegradable and recycled content options that allow you to safely pack your materials and then use them again for the next event.

8. Consider having your printing projects produced at a print shop close to the event and delivered by courier. For materials that can’t be produced near the event, plan ahead and use ground shipping instead of air shipping. Air shipping pours 8 times more carbon emissions into the environment than ground shipping.

9. Use Forest Stewardship Certified (FSC) lumber, plywood and sheet goods in your booth construction. The FSC is committed to responsible management of the world’s forests, and promotes the use of sustainable wood products.

10. Promote your green practices: More and more people are interested in having  greener options and working with environmentally sensitive companies. It only takes an extra line of eco-friendly ink to explain how a collateral piece was printed, or to indicate the green materials and processes in your giveaways.

By Special K –  ETMG Writer/Editor

A landing page is a customized web page that is displayed when a visitor clicks on an advertisement or a link. The main purpose of a landing page is to provide a targeted sales pitch for the visitor. Depending on how the link has been configured, the landing page might be your home page, or it could be another page on your web site. If you are using your web site to do any kind of sales or marketing, then you would probably benefit from using landing pages. Here are a few more things you might want to know as you consider your options.

The effectiveness of a landing page is measured by conversion rate. Simply put, the conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who, after making a casual visit to your web site, are compelled to do something specific (e.g. purchase a product) once they have arrived at your site. What counts as a successful conversion depends largely on what kinds of actions you want your landing page to elicit. For instance, I may click on a banner advertisement about an upcoming Neil Diamond concert. If I end up purchasing tickets to the concert, then, in the eyes of the product marketers who designed the landing page, I have converted. Landing pages are also used to drive other kinds of desired actions. For instance, they might be designed to get visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, to download software, or to register to receive email updates.

Businesses that use customized landing pages, when done well, experience much higher conversion rates than businesses that simply use a home page. This analogy may help explain why. The person who visits your home page is a bit like a person who drives by your building and may take notice of your business name and the services offered, but most of the time, this person isn’t going to be compelled to do anything specific at your business. The person who ends up visiting your landing page, however, is more like a person who has been deposited into your reception area where someone knows his/her name and is already in the process of providing  relevant information, products, and/or services that s/he has expressed interest in.

A landing page provides a targeted and personalized experience to your potential customers. If you are using your web presence to compel visitors to do something specific, then a landing page will help you achieve your goals.

By Kathy Wilson – ETMG Writer/Editor

Whether to use assure, ensure, or insure—that is the question.

Here are a couple of recently edited examples where the content owner made the wrong choice:

“URLs are the top search engine criteria, so it is important to take needed steps to assure [should be ensure] that your business is listed at the top of search results.”

“The failsafe capabilities of this product have been designed to insure [should be ensure] a smooth transition following unexpected failures.”

In the documents that I review, these three words seem to get mixed up frequently, even though they have distinctly different meanings.

Assure means to promise or to reassure and is always in reference to a person. “I can assure you of that.” “He assured his sister that he would pay back the loan.”

Ensure means to make sure or make certain. “It is important to take needed steps to ensure that your customers are satisfied with your service.”

Insure typically refers to insurance and means to protect against loss. “State Farm insures its policy holders against theft, fire, and flood.”

There is one more common mistake specific to the word “ensure” that is on my pet peeves list—the missing “that.” This applies when ensure is followed by a sentence rather then just a noun or sentence fragment. Here are a couple of recent examples:

“Careful planning and management is required to ensure [that] the infrastructure supporting the manufacturing operation has adequate capacity to support all robotic units.”

“Techniques are required to ensure [that] end users enjoy a quality experience, even in the face of fluctuating network capacity.”

Stay tuned for more pet peeves in upcoming blogs.

By Nancy Langmeyer – ETMG Writer/Editor

Case studies are great sales tools because they are written through the eyes and in the voice of the customer. This adds significant credibility in a sales cycle when sales people need a strong differentiator to sway a prospect in their favor.

I personally love to write case studies because I enjoy interviewing people and capturing the essence of their story. I have a knack for getting substantial details on the personal and professional success that the people I interview achieve with my clients’ solutions. It’s these details that add flavor to my case studies and make them an exceptionally good read.

Here are the six steps I follow when I create my case studies – hopefully they will be useful to you too.

1. Learn all you can about the customer you are interviewing.

Whenever possible, the first thing I do when assigned a case study is to quiz the people that were or are actively responsible for the customer relationship.  Whether sales people or the folks that installed a product, these are the people that can provide me with a comprehensive background on the customer and the overall engagement. They can guide me towards the topics I should delve into and explore – or clue me in on any hot spots to avoid. This helps set the stage for an intelligent conversation with the customer and makes the best use of the 20-30 minute conversation we’ll be having.

2.  Prepare a comprehensive list of questions.

I have a standard set of interview questions, which I customize for each call. The questions range from finding out how the customer first got interested in my client’s company to asking them to describe the implementation, and of course, the benefits of the implementation. While I may not get to all my questions, they are there to keep the conversation (and me) on track. And here’s a little tip for dealing with hard-to-interview folks – the ones that are naturally guarded or quiet. When they answer with a simple yes or no, I typically respond with questions such as “Tell me more about that” or “Can you explain that?” It’s surprising how much these types of questions can get people to open up and share more of the story.

3. Get the facts.

During the interview, the key thing is to get the facts, of course. This builds the foundation of a successful story – and the more hard-core facts, the better. The most effective details are quantifiable results, such as costs savings, productivity increases, revenue generated and the like – in actual numbers or percentages. When one customer says that he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, another customer is going to listen! A lot of people are hesitant to share exact numbers, but I usually can get them to comment to some sort of percentage or best-guess estimate of savings, even if it’s man hours or a softer measurement than dollars.

4. Add humanness.

Here’s one of the things that really adds value to my case studies. To elicit some great quotes, I end our discussion with a series of opinion-related questions, such as “What did you think of the implementation?” People often share with me the good – and then the bad and the ugly (especially if my client is not on the phone). Besides the good info that is quotable, the not-so-good information is often helpful because there may be some angst on the part of the customer that my client doesn’t know about. I also ask the customers a few final questions – such as “How would you describe this solution to your peers?” and “Would you recommend this solution to them?” These questions cause the customers to pause and then share what they really think about the whole engagement – and these comments are typically golden nugget quotes.

5. Don’t be afraid to clarify.

This is true especially for freelancers like me. I learned a long time ago that it’s much easier to feel humble and admit that I don’t understand something, than to use incorrect facts and get the story wrong. Every customer I’ve interviewed has been very kind and gracious – they understand that their expertise is not mine. They are always willing to explain things and clarify what we’re discussing, even when the situation is very technical.

6. Finish up with “What’s next?”

This is an excellent way to end the story – and it is also helpful for my clients because they get a glimpse into what else the customer might be interested. When added into a case study, it’s another indication that the customer is happy with my client’s product and there is a growth path in the future.

Case studies can be fun and engaging – and excellent sales tools. I hope these tips help your company produce some great ones!

Need to find the origin of an image? Try dragging and dropping the photo into Google Image search. You can do this using Google Chrome and you’ll discover all the places the image exists on the web and you’ll likely find the creator of the image pretty quickly. If you’re not using Google Chrome, and your browser can’t drag and drop, you can try pasting an image URL or uploading the image right into the Google image search bar.

By Nancy Langmeyer – ETMG Writer/Editor

Marketing folks are starting to put budgets together for the upcoming year and they may be asking themselves which sales tools to focus on next year.

Case studies and white papers can both contribute significant value within a sales cycle so let’s take a look at the benefits of each.

White papers:

The overall value: White papers essentially provide your company with a means to express thought leadership. They are written as unbiased, company-independent documents that actually reflect the benefits of what your product or service deliver, but in an indirect way. This is achieved by positioning the functionality and capabilities of your solutions in a best-in-class manner, so in competitive situations, these attributes become the yardstick of success against which all other solutions are measured.

When to use them: If you are venturing into a new market or are in a start-up phase, white papers provide a significant opportunity for your company to show that it has industry expertise on the topic being discussed. It’s an excellent tool for building credibility early on in a sales cycle and may help your company get into the door of a prospect’s company.

The work at hand: These documents tend be a minimum of eight pages (often up to 24 or so) and do require that an industry expert within your company provide the input. It can be written in-house, or outsourced.

Case studies:

The overall value:  Case studies are for companies that want to show successful implementations of a product or service. A case study is typically written from the perspective of a customer, often in his or her voice, as a peer-to-peer communication. Because they are created by your company, you have the opportunity to highlight specific features that you know can be used as a competitive advantage in sales situations.

When to use them: Because they are essentially an unbiased endorsement, case studies can provide a tipping point during a competitive sales cycle. When prospects are really interested in your company’s solution, they love to see how their peers were able to use your product or service to overcome a business challenge.

The work at hand: The first step is to get a customer to agree to participate, and then you can schedule an interview. Once the interview is conducted, the story can be crafted by an in-house or outsourced writer, and approved by the customer (and most likely, the company’s legal department). This final step makes sure that the customer is happy with what is about to be published and it’s protects you and your company as well. While it may be a long process, it’s well worth it in the end.

Both case studies and white papers are of great value to sales and marketing people. We’ll talk more about how to create a compelling case study and an informative white paper in future blogs.

By Kathy Wilson – ETMG Writer/Editor

I’ve just finished editing a very long white paper (~4,500 words) that started out with a bang but unfortunately ended with a whimper. This has brought to mind another of my pet peeves—the lackluster ending. How disappointing is it to read a thoroughly researched and well-written piece only to find that the conclusion section has been tacked on as an afterthought? Did the writer expend so much energy getting to that point that there just wasn’t enough left to summarized the paper properly?

Many readers are seriously multitasking and this creates very short attention spans. They first read a title and ask, “Will this be worth my time?” If the answer happens to be yes, they might read a summary sidebar, the introduction or executive summary section, and the concluding paragraph in order to get the high points. Only then will they dive into the meat of the paper, provided of course that they have the time and the interest.

This makes your intro and closing paragraph(s) of utmost importance. The more compelling they can be, the more readers are likely to engage with what you have to say. Like bookends (does anyone remember those?), these two key sections frame your material. They even help you organize and focus content in a way that keeps the body of your paper on track. In short, your opening is your hook, but your closing is that golden opportunity to crystallize key points for your readers. Nail these two elements and the rest should be relatively straightforward. In fact, many writers only fill in the middle sections of their papers after they have completed their lead-in and close.

So before you let yourself run out of steam, ask why you just went to so much trouble to write something and are then willing to jeopardize it all with a hastily thrown together ending. If a writing project has worn you out, if you’re feeling uninspired or distracted because you need to get onto the next big thing, walk away for a while until you’re ready to end your paper on the strongest possible note.

 By Nancy Langmeyer – ETMG Writer/Editor

Yeah, yeah, this Bobby McFerrin tune has been around for a while, but guess what? There’s some truth to it!

I am one of those people that likes to read about self-improvement topics and take classes on the nine ways to lead a better life (smile!). I recently learned a very valuable tool for stress that I am now able to put into practice in the most frantic times. The simple secret is this: Everything will work out in the end. Yes, that’s my new motto, plain and simple – and it works! I may not like the outcome every time, but everything does work itself out, somehow, some way.  

Think about this in your own life. Have you ever had something that didn’t work out in the end, one way or another? Ever? Like me, it may not be the outcome you would prefer, but there is always an outcome.  

I’ve learned the hard way that if I want the best outcome possible, I need to stop stressing over how things will work out. As you’ve probably experienced yourself, stressing over the outcome of a situation only impedes the eventual outcome. So if you “don’t worry” and “be happy,” you have the opportunity to exponentially improve the chances for a better resolution.

Say you’re about to leave for a holiday (which I just did) and you’re going to be out of the office for a week (which I was). Your to-do list is large, looming in front of you (yikes!). You feel panic seeping in…your eyes begin to blur…and you simply can’t figure out how to get it all done before you leave (sigh!). 

Here’s where the opportunity to change the outcome comes in. You have the choice to continue down the path of panic, but where does that lead you? Most likely to a bottle of wine (a glass in my case), an aspirin or two, or perhaps out-and-out hopelessness.

Or, you can say to yourself, “Okay, I’m not going to worry, because I know everything will work out. Everything on this list will either get done, resolve itself somehow, or it can wait until I get back.” With this new “don’t worry, be happy” mantra, you begin to feel some calmness and, with that, comes clarity. Your productivity grows and you begin to see the true priorities, and you tackle those with gusto. All of sudden, you feel like a super hero, knocking off one task after another.

It’s a pretty darn simple practice, but trust me, it’s an effective one! For me, I accomplished the “must do’s” on my list, realized a whole bunch of things could wait until I got back, and was able to happily leave on my vacation! Now I’m planning a holiday party…in four days…and while I feel the panic rising, I’m able to stop it in its tracks, because I know…everything will work out, one way or another!

Happy, stress-free holidays!

By Kathy Wilson – ETMG Writer/Editor       

Bullets can be used very effectively to focus the reader’s attention on your points. And there is definitely an art to good bullet writing.

Whether bulleted items are sentence fragments, full sentences, or full paragraphs when being used in a document, they need to be as short as possible while still informative. This is particularly true for bullets being used in a presentation. And wherever they are, bulleted lists should always be in a consistent format, starting with a verb, a noun, or an adjective but not a mix of these.

Writing bullets for PPT slides is probably the most challenging (and often the most fun) because you need to condense complex copy into a very compact form. Sometimes this is a little like tackling the puzzles in the morning newspaper as you ask yourself, “Are there five or six words that will capture this point or concept most effectively?” Also, since many times slides are published after a presentation is over, they can’t be too condensed or readers will miss the point. So the trick is to make bullets as meaty as possible while still cutting out any unnecessary fat.

Here’s an example from a slide titled Building Teams:

*Assign resources to the project

*Organize project team(s) and engage partners

*Define roles and responsibilities

*Create a shared vision with desired outcomes

*Build in accountability with incentives and rewards

And here’s another that describes Critical Success Factors for a customer loyalty program:

*Strong, committed executive sponsorship

*Strategic alignment

*Fully motivated and educated workforce

*Management and employee incentives

*Short term / long term balance

*Unremitting customer focus

*Flawless execution

There aren’t many words being used in these two bulleted lists but they definitely say a lot. Both use rich and expressive word choices that can stand alone, and they serve equally well as a lead-in cue for a speaker’s presentation.

Sound easy? Give it try the next time you’re breaking a long paragraph into bullets, or creating the perfect bulleted list for that next presentation. Make things as concise yet informative as possible, and remember that less is more unless you go too far (in which case less is less). That’s the balancing act we all need to safely navigate when writing bullets.