Internet Marketing Strategy 2.0

Now you can find more of what you're looking for on Facebook and discover fun connections between people, places and things.

Robin Good: Sonia Simone at Copyblogger has a good, valuable article, on learning how to create an online sales letter without utilizing those silly, counterproductive and hyped-up web marketing techniques that populated much of the online sales letter panorama. 

As you do not really need to write in red all-caps characters your sales letter title, nor need to use the yellow emphasizer to highlight every other marketing sentence, here is some good advice on how you can start thinking and executing differently your sales letter title and key content points.

From the article intro: "In other words, we’ll take the same persuasion techniques that the high-pressure guys use, but we’ll creatively adapt them to a social media audience that hates hype and hates salespeople (or at least they think they do). "

Much needed, useful advice. 7/10

Full article: http://www.copyblogger.com/smart-people-sales-letter-1/

Robin Good: Splurgy is a new web service which allows you to engage and reward your best social media fans by offering them unique discounts, coupons and access to offers in exchange for their contribution to make those actions "visible" to their own social networks.

With Splurgy it is also possible to make access to exclusive content, links or guides on your web site available only to those that are your true social advocates. The “Fangate” feature allows your website to give access to exclusive content only to those who follow your social channels.

Last but not least Splurgy collects the name and e-mail address of every user that socially engages with your promotions.

Free to use.

Key features: http://www.splurgy.com/features/

Video tutorials: http://vimeo.com/splurgy/videos/rss

More info: http://www.splurgy.com/

Robin Good: If you are interested into "digital storytelling" and in how it can help your company tell its stories about itself and its products most effectively to the world, here is a great collection of presentations all focusing or related to this topic.

Published by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, this collection brings together the best of the many digital media training sessions hosted by KDMC, the Knight Digital Media Center.

This archive collection contains many unique recording such as David Pescovitz (BoingBoing) on "The Future of Technology and Storytelling", "How to Tell Sories with Data" with Edward Segel and "Digital Storytelling: New Media's New Storytellers" by Amy Hill among many others.

A treasure trove of good stuff. 8/10

Full collection: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/presentations/cat/storytelling

P.S.: Check also Karen Dietz unique newsradar on Digital Storytelling right here: http://www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it

Robin Good: If you are interested in learning what the "reputation economy" is all about and why it will trump traditional approaches to marketing in the next few years, I highly recommend reading this Wired feature article.

In it you will find not only lots of good information on what measuring reputation really means, and how reputation may be used in the near future, but you will also get a shortlist of the key companies moving in this space and a simple ten-step reputation plan that you can use to start steering in the right direction.

Here a few excerpts from it:

"When asked for the sources upon which a user's trustworthiness is based, reputation startups list the usual suspects -- LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter -- but refuse to go further, saying that the algorithm is proprietary.

For these trust-validation services to become credible they're going to need to differentiate their products from those offered by companies such as PeerIndex, Kred and Klout, which collect digital information from different social-media sources.

Their metrics -- who I "follow", who "follows" me, who I know professionally, where I check in, what I chat about -- are measuring social influence, not reputation.

"Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action," says Joe Fernandez, cofounder of San Francisco-based Klout (wired 08.12). "Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"

"...reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations. Sure, you might be an impeccable Airbnb host, but does that mean I would trust you with my car?"

"...Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.

On Stack Overflow, for instance, reputation is a measure of knowledge; on Airbnb it's a measure of trust; on Wonga it's a measure of propensity to pay; on Klout and PeerIndex it's a measure of influence."

"The most basic level is verification of your true identity -- is this person a real person? Are they are who they say they are?

It's also foreseeable that data giving a good indicator of character, such as reliability and helpfulness, in one marketplace is a baseline of how you will behave in another marketplace.

Do we do what we say we are going to do? How well do we respect another person's property? Can we be trusted to pay on time?"

Valuable read. Recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?page=all

Robin Good: If you are wondering why engagement on your Facebook page is so hard to come, with few questions and comments sparking up your page, here is a number of good questions to ask yourself, before buying into Promoting your posts which is what Facebook is trying to get you to do.

“How do I get my Facebook fans to participate more on our page?”

Motivating fans to like, comment on, and share your posts not only strengthens your bond with existing fans but also helps get you in front of a new and bigger audience: their friends. If no one’s talking to you on Facebook, it’s hard to know if your social media marketing efforts are going anywhere — and it’s definitely not much fun.

The key reasons for our failure on this front is generally a lack of creativity and perseverance on our end to utilize the right ingredients that spark engagement for our readers. A few little changes can make all of the difference in the world.

Useful read and reminder of what to look at. 7/10

Full article: http://marketingland.com/14-reasons-no-one-talks-to-you-on-facebook-13660

Robin Good: Knowing how to facilitate the sharing of your good work is a key skill today, as if it isn't easy, immediate and frictionless, most people will not take the extra time to stop and invest their own time to let their friends know.

This is why knowing how to add a Retweet button at the end of your eBook or PDF guide can be so useful and effective. And by the way, retweeting is not the same as tweeting. So if you know how to package a ready-made "tweet" for others to use, the benefits you get are more than just one.

From the original article by Michael Stelzner: "Did you know you can add retweet buttons inside your PDF files?

The benefit: readers can effortlessly share your great work with their Twitter followers—just by clicking a button in your PDF file.

Below I lay out how to do this in six simple steps."

Useful. Well explained. 7/10

Useful: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-add-retweet-buttons-in-your-pdf-documents/

Robin Good: If you are interested in building your online reputation, increasing your credibility and trust, which, in my opinion, are the most critical factors to run any kind of online business, I suggest you check and question each and every point touched in this article and see how well you are doing.

Building your online reputation is less about logos and brands in the traditional sense and more about authority, reliability, consistency (walk your talk) and relatoshionship building and understanding one key essential thing: your reputation comes from how effective you are in truly helping and supporting the audience you have chosen.

To the point. Helpful for anyone marketing anything online. 8/10

Full article: http://socialmediatoday.com/pammoore/987321/social-trust-factor-10-tips-establish-credibility

Robin Good: Web of Stories is a free web site service which collects and organizes great people recounting key memories in video. Web of Stories also provides an opportunity for anyone to record, upload and share their own story in a video clip.

Record your story here: http://www.webofstories.com/record

On the site, you can already find plenty of videos of famous scientists, authors, movie makers and artists telling their stories through video.

Thematic channels: http://www.webofstories.com/channels

Telling stories, to help others understand an idea or comprehend what your product / service is all about, is increasingly being recognized as one of the best approaches to convey information in a mode that can be easily followed and absorbed.

P.S.: Web of Stories has lots of interesting clips, but nonetheless the opportunity for viewers to vote and rate such videos, navigation and access to the collection best parts remains yet an area in which major imporvements can be done.

Try it now: http://www.webofstories.com/

Robin Good: VocabGrabber is a free web-based app that allows you to easily visualize all of the keywords contained in any text and to identify the most relevant ones at a glance.

VocabGrabber, a service from Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, instantly calculates frequency, main subject categories covered, and can sort by relevance, alphabetical order and familiarity all of the words therein contained and save them for you in a word list.

"VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context."

Not only.

Vocabgrabber creates also a visual thesaurus map related to any word you want to explore, provides definitions for any term highlighted and examples of how that word is ised inside the text.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/

Robin Good: Vivocha is a web-based marketing and engagement platform which allows web publishers and online brands to interact, listen to and engage with their customers through a number of different dynamic widgets which can be easily integrated on any web site.

At its core Vivocha is a customer support, real-time analytics and website monitoring service integrating live help and support tools.

Widget functionalities include live communications when your "marketing" staff is available, allowing you to respond immediately to potential customer requests, see relevant contextual information about them including their contact info, location and referral web site or search query and their preceeding path through your web site pages.

It is also possible to follow any visitor on your web site in real-time as he navigates through your pages, to share web forms that need to be filled and more.

A free basic plan is available allowing up to 130 chats or callbacks, 75 transcripts and surveys, 30,000 page views per month.

Pricing: https://www.vivocha.com/pricing/

More info: https://www.vivocha.com/