By Special K- ETMG Writer/Editor

Quora.com

We’ve been researching best practices that businesses can employ when using Quora as part of a social media marketing strategy. As a result, we’ve come up with a short list of things you can do today to build relationships around your brand on this relatively new site.

As we mentioned in our earlier post, Quora’s question and answer platform has been given increased weight by Google’s Social Search and provides great opportunities to engage with potential customers.

Here are 5 things you should be doing on Quora right now to help you market and improve your customer relationships:

1.  Establish yourself as an expert.
You have a strong understanding of your customers’ concerns and demands, as well as experience addressing them. Share this wisdom by following and responding to questions that are related to your business and area of expertise. Assuming you provide informative answers, people are likely to go to your bio to find out more about you and visit your website. Quora allows you to customize your bio for each topic you follow, so you can provide relevant links with each question you answer. Since Quora enables focused conversations, you will most likely find other industry leaders to follow who will help you build your expertise.

2.  Generate leads.
Find questions that relate to your products or services and see how many people have viewed the question and who, specifically, is following it. Then reach out to these folks and build a relationship.

3.  Research, monitor and engage.
Quora is a great place to get honest feedback from a wide range of people about topics pertinent to your business goals. In this vein, you can also use Quora to monitor what people are saying about your business, your products and services, and your competition. Set up a Google alert to notify you when your company name is mentioned on Quora. When the conversation relates to your business or service, jump in and engage with your potential customers.

Monitor questions and conversations about your brands on Quora. Image: iStockphoto

4.  Get content marketing inspiration.
Look for questions related to your business with few answers and a large number of followers. Then write a blog post responding to the question. In your post, provide a link to the Quora question, and in the Quora answer field, link to your blog.

5.  Leverage social media integrations.
Conversations on Quora can be integrated across multiple social media platforms, which provide enormous exposure to current customers and prospects. Quora interfaces nicely with both Twitter and Facebook so that you can send your questions and answers through both social media channels. Take advantage of these integrations for greater exposure.

As with other social media platforms, you’ll want to use Quora carefully and avoid over-promoting yourself or your company. However, given its growing popularity and SEO power, Quora cannot be ignored as a relationship and business-building tool.

For more information:

What is Quora?

http://www.wedomarketing.com/blog/what-is-quora

How to get started on Quora

http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-started-using-Quora

Does Google use data from social sites in ranking? (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4

Social media and the problem of self promotion

http://www.wedomarketing.com/blog/social-media-and-the-problem-of-self-promotion

By Neets – ETMG Blogger

A couple times a year, we have an opportunity to attend The ASI Advantages Roadshow, a traveling mini-tradeshow for folks in the giveaways industry. Each time we go, we come back with a few ideas to share.

The show travels to over 60 cities across the United States and Canada. With only 50-60 vendors, it offers a less crowded, more personal environment to talk to giveaway suppliers, check out items in-person, and learn about new products.

Here’s what we found worthy of sharing at a recent ASI Advantages Roadshow in San Jose, CA:

MousePaper Mouse Pad from Digispec

MousePaper® Mouse Pads from Digispec

These mouse pads are a great combination of mouse pad and note pad. They offer a lot of real estate for your corporate message and are made with recycled paper. A patented ‘mousing’ texture ensures smooth tracking.

Best features: green product, usability, large imprint area

Branded Woven Label

Custom Multi-color Woven Solutions

There are a number of suppliers that offer custom, high-resolution woven lanyards, labels, appliques and patches with the look of embroidery but the clarity and durability of loom weaving. We liked the intricate level of detail and the ability to use text as small as 8 pt. for your marketing message.

Best Features: custom-quality, durability, fine detail and ability to brand at small scale

Sample Branded RFID Blocker Credit Card Sleeve

RFID Blocker Sleeves from American Greenwood Inc

Many credit cards, passports and driver’s licenses use an embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) chip to store personal and account data. Unfortunately identity thieves can download that data with an RFID skimmer as they walk past you or stand nearby. These full-color RFID blocker sleeves offer protection from identity theft and communicate your message at the same time. Made from a durable patented process, these sleeves resist tearing and can be used over and over again.

Best features: full-color printing, durability, FIPS 201 compliant, great for government, financial, and security customers

Sample Lenticular Postcard

3-D Lenticular Printing from Enduraline^®

We’ve all seen promotional giveaways using lenticular printing that allows you to see two different images depending on your viewing angle. Enduraline offers a three-dimensional aspect that gives the illusion of motion and depth, and practically forces people to pick up your postcard, business card, calendar or notebook to get the full effect.

Best features: “wow” factor, full color printing, fully customizable

Soupreme Soup Mug from VisionUSA

Soupreme™ Soup Mug from VisionUSA^®

It’s hard to resist this sturdy 15 oz. plastic soup bowl/mug with attached spoon and gasket-seal lid. It’s BPA-free, microwave- /dishwasher-safe, and the perfect size to enjoy soup, cereal, or even a giant cup of coffee! The generous 3” x 1.125” imprint area means your message or logo will be front and center.

Best features: visibility, usability, great for everyday office use

As we’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, there are literally tens of thousands of options out there for your next giveaway project, most of which are only available through an ASI giveaways distributor. If you find you need assistance with your next giveaways project, we’ve posted a downloadable project checklist tool and we’re always happy to help.

Read more:

http://www.advantagesroadshow.com/

http://www.digispec.com

http://www.enduraline.com

http://www.americangreenwood.com

http://www.vision1usa.com/aboutus.asp

http://www.wedomarketing.com/blog/have-a-giveaways-distributor-on-your-side-giveaways-part-3

Image: iStockphoto

Sample of Pinterest "Boards"

1. http://mashable.com/2012/02/01/pinterest-traffic-study/
2. http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/12/five-ways-brands-can-leverage-pinterest/
3. http://pinterest.com/about/

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.