So, your Facebook contest was wildly successful. Congratulations! You have tons of new fans, a fresh audience for your product or service, thousands of potential leads—now what? After the contest wraps up, how do you keep all those folks coming back?The real challenge of running a Facebook contest isn’t handling the logistics of the contest itself, but rather, figuring out how to maintain a connection with all those Facebook followers once the hoopla dies down. Ideally, you want to make your Facebook page so chock full of relevant, entertaining or compelling information that it becomes worth your follower’s while to return again and again—whether or not you offer them an actual incentive to do so.

Providing that kind of value to your Facebook fans can be achieved using a variety of strategies. Here are a few of my favorites…

Start a Conversation - Ask your Facebook fans what they think—of your company, of your product, of your latest advertisement—whatever! Encourage them to share their thoughts and opinions openly, and respond to as many as you can. Foster an atmosphere of honesty and mutual respect by handling criticisms with grace.

Share Tips - Give your Facebook followers information they can put to good use. Share tips on using your product more effectively. Point out features they may have overlooked. Advise them on how to get the most from your service. It will keep them coming back for more.

Host a Poll - Opinion polls are fun for Facebookers and pretty darn interesting for those of us in the back office. While they may not be scientific, Facebook polls offer an instant picture of how your followers feel about a particular issue. It’s a great opportunity to capture your audience’s attention and gain some valuable insight for your marketing team as well. Polls are also inherently interactive so encourage comments with votes and you’ll undoubtedly increase the chance that your polls show up in user feeds.

Show Your Human Side - People love to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Show them. Highlight your outstanding employees, post pictures of the firm’s holiday party, provide a of video-tour of the home office—let your followers get to know the people behind the products they’ve purchased.

Say Thanks - The success or failure of your business lies in the hands of your customers. Make it a point to say thank you. Post a personal message from the CEO. Showcase a “Customer of the Month.” Make it clear that you appreciate every single one of your customers and treat your Facebook followers accordingly.

A Facebook contest is a great way to get people in the door but keeping them around requires that you spend time and effort on the post contest content.

What are some of the best ways that you have seen to keep an audience engaged after bringing them in through a Facebook contest?

It’s easy to understand the logic behind content marketing—that establishing yourself as a thought leader will build your brand and generate leads. But it’s one thing to appreciate the idea; it’s another to actually create a content marketing culture in a company to enable successful execution of the strategy.

The Content Challenge

Content marketing can take many forms—blogs, white papers, email newsletters, social media postings, You Tube videos, personal appearances, self-published print magazines, and so on. But where does all this content come from? According to a recent survey, this is clearly the biggest problem with implementation—with respondents saying that their greatest content marketing challenges are producing engaging content (36%), producing enough content (21%), and budget to produce content (20%).

Making It Work

The most important aspect of content marketing success is making it a fundamental part of your company’s operations. It can’t be an afterthought if it’s going to pay off. - Mashable.com reports on three success stories here.

The following steps can help you generate content and successfully implement a content marketing strategy:

Have strong upper management support. Management-driven support (e.g., job descriptions, financial incentives, awards, visible enthusiasm) is essential.

Convince employees of the value. Tying content marketing to the personal benefit of all stakeholders is the surest way to get participation.

Provide adequate collaboration support. Most of the content experts in your company are probably not skilled in writing, editing, video production, printing, social media, etc. You need to have employees, resources, and processes that content experts can use to turn their knowledge into useful, publishable material.

Keep control of your brand. You don’t want people producing content that’s not consistent with your branding. Provide editorial guidelines and practical brand-building suggestions.

Develop meaningful metrics to track success. Nothing encourages buy-in more than demonstrable results. Measurement also helps to justify content marketing costs and indicate necessary adjustments.

Include mechanisms for customer input. Content marketing works best when it’s interactive—drawing potential customers into a relationship with your company.

Reuse existing content. You can alleviate the content-supply problem by putting existing material to new uses. Often, it only takes a little modification.

Stay informed. The Web is full of information on content marketing, such as The Institute for Content Marketing’s 10 essential content marketing templates and frequent articles on sites such as techcrunch.com. Executives and marketers should stay on top of content marketing trends and strategies.

As stated extremely well in “Content Rules” you need to speak to your customers and prospects in a way that makes them appreciate your expertise and tells them about the benefits of your products/services not simply the features.

“The inherent tension in marketing is that companies always want to talk about themselves and what their products or services can do. Everyone else meanwhile, only wants to know what those products or services can do for them.”

Good content does not just appear, rather you need to work at it and make it part of the culture of your organization.  So start small but ramp up quickly because content based marketing will not only be a key part of your inbound strategy but should be key to generating leads and sales opportunities.

]]> http://www.michaelgcohen.com/2012/01/creating-a-content-marketing-culture/feed/ 0 http://www.michaelgcohen.com/2011/06/how-to-get-information-in-a-world-of-facebook-connect/ http://www.michaelgcohen.com/2011/06/how-to-get-information-in-a-world-of-facebook-connect/#comments Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:01:32 +0000 Michael http://www.michaelgcohen.com/?p=1154

A friend working on a very cool stealth start-up approached me the other day to talk about sign up forms and the type of questions he should be asking people when they join his soon to be popular site. In a world of Facebook Connect, I first questioned what percentage of his audience would even create their own login on his site but as we discussed further it became apparent to me that whether people signed up directly on his site or they used FB Connect he needed to collect certain pieces of information that would not be readily available …

A friend working on a very cool stealth start-up approached me the other day to talk about sign up forms and the type of questions he should be asking people when they join his soon to be popular site. In a world of Facebook Connect, I first questioned what percentage of his audience would even create their own login on his site but as we discussed further it became apparent to me that whether people signed up directly on his site or they used FB Connect he needed to collect certain pieces of information that would not be readily available through FB but were vital for the marketing of his business. So again, in a world where it is anticipated that most users will log on to the site using FB, how could he capture the three or four (note that it is important to narrow down to at most 3/4 additional questions) pieces of information that would be vital to personalize marketing communications?

While he could certainly use the Facebook profiles of his members to get some amazing social data on their likes, favorite sports teams etc, the information available would vary too much from member to member and further would take a long time to mine given the current Social CRM tools available. So without scrapping Facebook as a login option, what could he do? For me the answer was simple, use a couple of triggered welcome email messages and a clearly discernible incentive. Upon signup with Facebook Connect, a triggered email campaign would begin where the goal was to welcome the member to the site, but the ultimate goal was to get the same three or four pieces of information that would have been captured had the signup occured completely onsite.

With four pieces of information to gather and an on-site credit to offer users who gave all four pieces of information (whether they did so all at once or over the three emails the incentive was the same) a welcome campaign was designed so that three emails would be sent to the user from the trigger moment of a signup with Facebook Connect (those who signed up directly received a different campaign) and the other two sent 24 and 48 hours after respectively. The three emails were designed to both welcome and aclimatize the user with the site but also were to be excercises in info gathering and pushing the user to make thier first site transaction. A complex set of requirements.

So what did it look like in practice? A triggered mini-campaign of three emails to both welcome the user and capture four key pieces of information was launched where the information gathering exercise was tied directly to the incentive offered. While I can’t share the emails themselves, I will give you a bit more detail.

In each email a key piece of the site served as the functionality to be described but rather than use text, it was done using an embedded video. The use of the video engaged people in the email right away and the simplicity of playing the video allowed for the real estate that would have been taken up by that text to then move up the graphics and text about profile completion (answering questions) and the incentive that went along with it.

Another key part of the email design went to the database behind it and using one of 5 possible dynamic questions/phrases (i.e. not asking the user something that you already had the answer to, questions dynamically appear based on the customer profile) in each email so as to gather new information each time and not present the user with anything non relevant or already known. The email was designed in such a way that the last thing the user saw was a dynamic question that got to one of the four pieces of information that was desired. The question was always graphically rich and tied directly to the incentive available for reaching a 100% profile.

While it was expected that it would take two or more emails to get most people to complete their profile, by tying it into the incentive and making the site information part of the email be a video rather than using that real estate for text there was a tremendous amount of users who completed thier profile after just the first triggered email and nearly everyone was done after email #2.

The timelyness of a triggered campaign combined with great design and a smart database have now allowed this stealth company to have 4 tremendously key pieces of profile information about their customers that would have remained unavailable had they simple accepted the information they received through Facebook Connect as the best they could get.

What about you, any great ways to incent your users to share more info with you?

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Being a lawyer by degree, articled and called to the bar and having spent my fair share of time in and around law firms I can say that the words digital or social do not really enter the marketing of most law firms. Of course every firm has a web presence and a few have even taken a leading role with iPhone apps, but the foray into real digital or social marketing has been slow if at all. Given that so much of today’s modern digital marketing is about creating content you would think that law firms which do this incredibly well would be all over blogs and sharing links across the social web but there is little activity. So my small piece of advice to law firms is this, start small and start with Facebook for recruiting. You really cannot go wrong and the effort while not large in scale will pay dividends in the form of a connection with top notch law school talent. 

Attracting and retaining top talent is a challenge for any business but it is an especially important point for law firms to pay attention to right now. Top students are all using Facebook everyday, if they come to work at a place that tells them they cannot use Facebook they will immediately feel a disconnect between the old and new of the firm. Further, if you only have a passing attempt at a Facebook presence for your law firm now, step it up immediately. Top students are going to visit your website and learn lawyer bios, they will be able to tell you why your firm fits with them but I guarantee they will all feel a deeper and more immediate connection with your firm if you use Facebook as your landing page (print this on all your materials, both the firm website and your Facebook url) and get personal.

Facebook is not a place to repeat the content on your corporate website or in your printed brochures (are you really sure you still need to print these), students are smart and they will read all of that. Use Facebook as a place where you tell the students what life is like as a student at the firm. Share pictures from charity and other firm events. Rotate a current student each month to answer questions and respond to wall posts – I guarantee they will feel a tremendous sense of responsibility and will enjoy your trust in the brand to them. At the end of the day start small and think about how you can make Facebook the place that your corporate website cannot be, the place where the best and brightest students will also know behind the LLP are people and good, fun people at that.

Share your culture, make Facebook your landing page for recruiting, get people to “like” you…you will not be disappointed.

Photo credit – Associate Press

Some of the best ideas are the ones that at the heart are really quite simple but it is in the execution that the winners and losers are separated. The “coming soon” page has been a staple of Internet business from the very beginnings of websites. As the Internet got more mature so did these pages, initially showing countdown clocks to launch dates and eventually including email signups and social media links. So if the idea was so simple, why then were so many companies struggling to be able to use their coming soon page to help build momentum and hype before launch? Sure many companies promised that if you signed up and tweeted a specific line you would get an advanced place in their beta launch list, but really nobody had come up with a way to make this all automated and effectively simple. Enter Launchrock.

Launchrock executes everything you want in a coming soon page to perfection. It allows you to customize the page with a your own logo and just enough information to tease what your company is going to be about. It allows you to include both an email signup and social media links. Best of all they have built in mechanisms to help you build the momentum and buzz you want for your startup before you’ve even gone live. By letting you set incentives such as inviting 3 friends to get early access to the site, Launchrock has taken the best of what has been built in disparate places and brought it together in an extremely simple and yet beautifully executed online application.

Still in beta, you can sign up to get your own invite and of course if you share with your friends you will get that invite even faster. I highly encourage you to check it out.