Costs associated with Effective Social Media

There are two ways to execute effective social media marketing:

1. Stand-alone as a distinct separate silo within the company or marketing department
2. Integrated as part of a holistic marketing strategy

The first method – stand-alone Facebook or Twitter marketing – is good for companies with limited resources, who want to drive a small group of customers to take action.

Investing in a small stand alone social program can be $1,500-5,000 a month.

The biggest bang for the buck is from Facebook and Twitter updates which drive traffic to a value-add blog.

Knowing your audience and the different buyers you have, then writing a blog aimed at them once or twice a week is the most effective way to leverage Facebook or Twitter. You can also add a teaser, with a high quality photo on your Facebook site, and Tweet about the blog.

Using Facebook and Twitter to amplify a blog is a long-term strategy that can take 6-12 months to become effective, but once you have the machine working it is very valuable marketing. You build loyal followers and create an advantage not easily taken away.

To jump-start a stand-alone program, Facebook ads drives traffic to your brand page, and Google Ads drives people directly to the blog. These are the quickest way to get some return on your investment, in a short time i.e. a week or two .

For $30-100 a day you can use Facebook, Twitter or Google Ads to amplify your message. Be sure to set dedicated URL’s to analyze traffic using something like Google Analytics, and make sure you try three or four slightly different ads.

This allows you to measure the response rate to the different wording and determine the most effective.

If you are a Fortune 1000 company and have dedicated web and online staff, then Facebook and Social Media marketing should be thoughtfully integrated into your event marketing, product launches and customer service.

For an incremental $100,000 a year you can start to get a much higher ROI from your events and sponsorships. If you allocate $5-10 million to social marketing and have dedicated staff for the social media function you should follow five best practices:

1. Integrate social media with product launch, events, and customer service. (Read more about using social media to drive revenue in a recent blog.)
2. Respond within minutes or hours (not days) to any comments on social media about customer service, product capability, sales locations etc. You need to track your company or product name to do this.
3. Tell a continual story through social media. There should be an ongoing thread, trend and voice to your efforts. This includes showing pictures from your events to give your Facebook fans a sneak-peak at videos and don't forget to use the power of 'crowd sourcing'.
4. Measure and Analyze everything. If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Getting great amplification from events through social media  experiences should be compared with direct response from Google Ads and money spent on SEO.
5. Stay educated – Facebook has it’s EdgeRank, Google has it’s SEO algorithm, Twitter has GroupTweet - multi-grouping and all these things change. This will change your strategy on a regular basis. Read a lot about it and attend seminars or find peer groups to keep up to date on best practices.

Some companies are spending $10million plus on social media. They are getting phenomenal returns in part because many of their competitors have not figured it out yet.

Be the first ones in your industry to really leverage it and figure it out and you will reap the rewards but raise your awareness and measure the risks carefully.

Leading Virtual Effectiveness

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A Short Introduction to Co-working and the Cloud

A co-working facility is an open office environment shared by multiple freelancers and SME companies or company representatives. A collaborative group of connected individuals.

These facilities are often much less expensive to rent and maintain than traditional office space because of the flexibility of 'office hours', and they can closer to participants’ homes.

Co-working spaces are still in their infancy in many locations but they are very popular, economic and very efficient. Therefore, they have to be considered as a viable option in these troubled times.

research proposes that there are only about 70 such 'co-working' locations in the world, sprinkled throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But their potential contribution to growth and recovery is greater than these numbers might suggest.

Just as cloud computing represents a more nimble and spontaneous, multi-sourced data environment that may augur the next new thing in technology, 'co-working' sites are the seeds of a less restrained and possibly more creative “cloud office” environment of the future.

Co-working cannot and does not provide a single solution to multiple organisational problems but could be a contributory factor in the examination of effective flexible working practices in difficult and dynamic market exposures.

Here is an indicative list of some problems to be considered and addressed.

• the space demands of flexible, multi-geographical workforces;
  
• the costs of permanent offices;
  
• the potential inconvenience of working at home, especially for employees with children and dependants;
  
• the inexperience that many employees have with alliances and joint ventures, which are natural outgrowths of shared space;
  
• the energy waste and carbon footprint inherent in a commuting population;
  
• and the sheer waste of time, resources, human capability, and energy spent moving people back and forth across a metropolitan area, only to have them on the phone or reading e-mail most of the day.