5 Creative Social Media Campaign Microsites

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Marcie Giovannoni

When it comes to building a successful branded social media campaign, there are countless creative strategies and tactics at a brand’s disposal. One strategy becoming more popular (especially with the rise of social media) is the microsite.

A brand’s main website already has a structured navigation, ecommerce actions and basic social needs, and adding an additional component for a campaign or promotion could get complicated and/or make a mess of the site. Enter microsite, stage left.

A microsite is a dedicated site that is used to highlight a brand’s product, a promotion or a campaign. It’s an exclusive place for fans and consumers to engage and interact with unique content: both brand and user-generated.

Microsites are an effective method of enhancing marketing efforts, efficiently targeting additional audiences that companies normally wouldn’t have time to reach using the traditional approach.

The most common social media campaign microsites contain user-generated content, creating context for the brand as well as credibility.

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Hashtag Campaigns Done Right

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Marcie Giovannoni

A hashtag isn’t just a word, or combination or words- it can be a brand, a passion, a spirit or a joke. However, it is most of all a community in conversation. It’s people coming together to share excitement, pride, gripes, stories and/or loyalty for a common interest.

Why does it matter? Hashtags not only create conversations and community, but they can create context for your brand or product.

As social media continues to exponentially grow, brands are trying to find new ways to set themselves apart and engage with their audiences.

Many big name brands have initiated hashtag campaigns- some successful, others horrific and some that just fell flat. There are many crucial parts to a successful hashtag campaign, and even the tiniest slip can cause one to fail.

Sourcing user-generated content and fan content is becoming more and more popular as brands are realizing how important consumer engagement is to their economic success. User-generated content demonstrates brand loyalty and also gives other audiences context for the content and, most importantly, the product.

Integrating user-generated content from a campaign back to a brand’s website can not only increase engagement with fans potentially unaware of the campaign or not on social media; but can also extend the mileage of the brand’s hashtag campaign content. Another benefit of bringing the campaign back to a website is that it’s been known to increase time on site exponentially. Continue reading →

5 Benefits of Using an Internal Social Media Dashboard

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Marcie Giovannoni

Digital content is replicating at an exponential rate, and cutting through the clutter is becoming more and more challenging everyday. With 100,00 tweets, 571 new websites created, 347 new blog posts and 48 hours of YouTube videos being uploaded EVERY MINUTE, the era of big data has arrived. Trying to cut through the noise and discover the best content pertinent to your business and industry can be an overwhelmingly daunting task.

By implementing an internal dashboard as part of your social media marketing strategy, it allows you to easily surface the most relevant content as well as curate and share the best of that content to your own social networks with just one click.

An internal dashboard can be one of many things: social media command center, corporate social media hub, social media monitoring dashboard or a content curation station. Whatever its function, there are optimal business and marketing benefits that come with using a visual monitoring tool.

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Build Your Brand by Integrating User-Generated Content and Community into Your Website

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Julie Blakley

With the number of people on social networks continuing to explode (according to eMarketer, there will be 114.5 million user-generated content creators online by 2013), the opportunity for brands to leverage content created by consumers in marketing efforts will continue to grow.

Especially when backed by the evidence that millennials are more likely to both share brand experiences online and are more likely to have purchasing decisions influenced by both anonymous user-generated content and word of mouth from people they know, the importance of integrating user-generated and social content into marketing campaigns and websites is going to be paramount in the coming years.

>>See which brands are getting it right in 5 Best Social Media Campaigns with User-Generated Content

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Winning the Context War with User-Generated Content

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Marcie Giovannoni

Today’s technology understands who your consumers are, where they are and what they want. We’ve reached an era where relationships with technology are much closer than ever before.

Published in 1999, The Cluetrain Manifesto argued that markets are conversations and the Internet is going to be where those conversations will take place. Changing business’ perspective, Cluetrain got people thinking about the Internet as a marketplace and how to market goods through traditional marketing and advertising within a digital space.

In the coming years, social media would take the stage and completely revolutionize digital marketing and advertising. Social media has become a market in itself, fostering conversations between all ages, genders, races, nationalities, etc. The amount of content/data being produced from the beginning of time until now is replicated every 48 hours.

Keeping consumer attention and cutting through this noise is a major challenge that companies face within their marketing strategies. This is what Gary Vaynerchuk has deemed the Context War.

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