Social-smart is addressing the brand, research, marketing, and online sales needs of businesses with a social network engagement funnel. It is a multi-channel social networking solution for driving awareness, conversation, insight, and web traffic. Social-smart makes social media marketing more affordable and efficient.

Its web-based Dashboard integrates what is usually fragmented across different web sites and services into one convenient place – with a single sign-in. If you are a marketer, it makes coordinating and managing a campaign in-house, easier. If you are a small agency or consultant, it streamlines campaign launch and management so you can focus on profitable content-development and moderating services.

Email: jasper (at) social-smart.com
Website: http://www.social-smart.com
Blog: http://socialsmart.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SocialSmart
LI Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1770513
LI Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasperblake

I have often talked about the power of video in promoting a business of whatever size. This is a great example. Tom Hinchey and I recently made this video for Christy Miller.  Her business, Desert Flower Does, provides  a service similar to those reality TV shows ‘Queer Eye‘ and ‘What Not to Wear‘ – except for the free $5000 credit card to spend of clothes of course!  Rather, Christy helps you to make the most of the wardrobe you already have. If you are trying to ‘power-dress’ on a budget and want to maximize the effectiveness of what you have, or want to add a few pieces that will increase your credibility with your clients or business partners, then Christy is certainly the person to call.  We wanted to create a video for her that would be entertaining while effectively getting across to prospective clients what it is she can do.  We are very pleased with the result. It is certainly much more effective than the text and photos she currently has on her website – and the video can be on her site and working for her 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  The ‘Reality TV’ comparison is actually a very good one.  The easy and cheapness of video on the web effectively makes it possible for anyone to market themselves via their own online ‘Reality TV Show’.  Love them or hate them, and a lot of people love them – just check their ratings – they can make for compelling viewing, and what better way to attract potential customers to what you are offering than by people being able to see it? It can be effective for virtually any business, even if it is just to help prospective customers get to know you  better and make you more approachable.  Any Phoenix-based business should give either us, or Tom a call and see what video could do for your business.

A few weeks ago Tom and I did an impromptu interactive social media seminar at the 3000 Club Friday networking meeting.  It went so well that we decided to get together with our friend, Christine Springer, an expert and teacher on all things  LinkedIn, and create a seminar series on social media.

The first of that series – ‘Social Media Idol‘ starts on April 20th. Jasper is the seminars’ Simon Cowell character and the event and series have been designed to be interactive – in other words, you do all the work and we stand there and give our critique!  Only kidding –  don’t worry, Jasper isn’t nearly as harsh as Simon Cowell can be!  This first seminar is based on the premise that you need to know what the job is before you choose which tools you are going to use, and covers lots of interesting subjects like ‘purple cows‘, ‘buyer personas‘,  ’inbound marketing‘ and Web 2.0! 

This first seminar provides the groundwork for the later seminars in which we look at some of the specific tools of social media, such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and Video Blogging – yes, even the video blogging will be interactive!  

Join Christine, Tom Hinchey and myself on Monday, April 20th OR Monday, April 27th from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at Catch 22 Sports Grill in Phoenix . (Food and drink specials will be available!) The cost is $34 in advance for the initial seminar – register here or at Christine’s site  www.LinkForSuccess.com.

Adam Coomes (@adamcoomes), President of Infegy, sets up a search in Twitter for “social media whores” (or some such term for people who might be interested in his product).

Finds @BlogDudes and checks out their profile.

Adam follows BlogDudes.

I get an email telling me that Adam is following BlogDudes on Twitter

I check out Adam Coomes profile and follow the link to his website.

I check out the info on his company’s product – Social Radar

I Tweet Adam back saying ‘thanks for the follow, I would be interested in finding out more about Social Radar’.

I get an email from Brooks Morgan from the same company regarding setting up a webinar

Talk to Brooks on the phone to sort out mutually agreeable time

I participate in webinar

I am impressed and will likely become a buyer for our next client project.

Bish Bosh – done deal – sweet meat from one tweet!

And that, B2B ers, is how you increase your business using Twitter!

Its called “Inbound Marketing“.

Social Radar's graphical depiction of key influencers on the social web

Not the musical theme from the enigmatic Geico branding in this case, but highly pertinent to anyone with a brand to promote. Probably more a question of ‘who’s talking’ though.

“If you’re a brand manager, do you want to know who’s searching for your brand? Absolutely.  Do you also want to know how many people are talking about your product online? Absolutely”.

So wrote Eric in yesterdays’ post – ‘The New Rules of Branding‘ on buzzstudy.com (well worthy reading).     You can also extend that to who is talking about your competitor’s brand and why, so that you can tweak your message accordingly if necessary.  How do you find out though, especially when there are potentially thousands of sites, blogs, forums and social chatter to search through? 

You find someone with the right bit of technology, of course.  In my last post, Searching The Social Web for Your ‘Buyer Personas’, I mentioned Radian6 and today I had the pleasure of participating in a webinar with Brooks Morgan of Infegy,  looking at their social research application, Social Radar.  When you want to know your market and consumers quickly this is the sort of resource to use.  Traditionally, the only way to access this sort of information is through extensive consumer surveys and focus groups studies, all of which take a lot of time and a lot of money. What applications like Social Radar do is monitor the buzz – what people are saying about your product or company online – and they can do it in seconds rather than weeks. It is perhaps a narrower demographic than you can access using traditional methods, but we are chiefly concerned here with companies looking to market through social media.  In this respect an application like Social Radar, though not cheap, can save you a considerable amount of manual online information gathering which can end up being a laborious and expensive process in itself!

“Companies that can create real-time interaction and involvement with their customers will be best prepared to succeed in the new media world”, Eric so rightly says.  However, companies want to know two essential bits of information before they will hire you to manage their social media campaign for them:  

Where is the conversation taking place that they need to be part of and,
how can they monitor the effectiveness of their participation in that conversation – that all important ROI.  

And our answer will be – “We have an app for that”.

In order for a business to start that all-important conversation with their customers they first have to know where those customers are conversing. There is no point spending hours and hours on your Facebook account if all your ‘buyer personas‘ are conversing on MySpace.  So, how do you find out where that conversation is taking place?  Well, there are three basic ways:

1. If you want to do it yourself for free using tool like Google Alerts, following the guidelines in Robin’s article above,
    
2. If you want to do it yourself and you don’t mind spending some money, then use a tool like Radian6 - it is probably THE most comprehensive tool on the market at the moment and has a very extensive set of features that allow you to manage the data that you retrieve so you can make best use of it,
    
3. Or, if you don’t want the hassle of learning how to use and implement a strategy using something like Radian6 then we are more than happy to do it for you!

The third option may certainly be the more expensive of the options but, for those companies of a certain size, having a team with the expertise to not only extract this kind of information but to create the kind of compelling content that will attract those buyer personas to see you as a solution to their particular need – and in a measureable way – is more than worth it.

It is increasingly apparent that the two things that companies want most when considering a social media strategy is:

1. Knowing where they should be participating  
2. Being able to measure the results of that participation (ROI)

That  is why in the past few weeks we have been moving ourselves to a situation in which we can provide those solutions.  Watch this space for more news very soon.

April 26-28, 2009, San Francisco, CA: The Nonprofit Technology Conference is THE place to engage around the technology issues that face the nonprofit sector. “Nearly 1200 people will come together from across the country and around the world to connect with our peers, learn from our heroes, and change the world. It’s true that our sector will face remarkable challenges in the coming year. Joining us for the 2009 NTC will put you among those poised not only to meet those challenges, but to rise above them”.   Thanks to Mashable’s events guide for the story – Note: Mashable readers can get the NTEN rate ($200 off) when using code Mash09NTC to register!

Tom and I have a particular interest in this event because we persuaded The 3000 Club to enter three of the videos that were created for their blog into this year’s NTC video competition – one of which was our spoof e-Harmony ad  (above), aimed at highlighting the business networking opportunities that  3000 Club membership provides.  The winners get an all expenses paid trip to the conference – that would be nice!  We’ll let you know if we win anything – or not!  The other entries can be seen here – A moving endorsement by Anna Gonzales, and Founder, Lon Taylor tells the 3000 Club Story.

If any require an example of a small, very localized business that is using social media to increase the number of customers coming to their shop it is Pizza Party in Santa Clara, California.  I commend you click on the link and watch the video that is on their site – a news item on their local ABC 7 News.  (Note: the fact that a local pizza shop is using social media to increase their business is worthy of local TV news!)  26 year old co-owner, Bear Silber, uses Facebook and Twitter to promote specials and offers, and even has a webcam so you can watch your pizza being made!  He also has his own iPhone app!  How cool is that?

Although his pizza shop has been around a long time, Bear makes it clear that if it is going to remain around in the future then the old methods of advertising, like Yellow Pages and door-hangers, are no longer going to cut it.  He uses the internet everyday anyway – utilizing social media is a natural move for someone like him, and it is obviously paying off – his business is increasing because of it.  It is a great example to other small businesses with a local market – social media can work for you to.  And if you are not as web savvy as Bear, then we are here to help.  All you have to do is ask.

I saw this on Social Median and was compelled to do my part in helping Samsung create a world wide rave. Or, failing that, at least a Wales Wide Rave! Having spent three very happy years at Cardiff University this video certainly attracted my attention. I don’t think it is too Wales-centric to appeal to a wider audience and I commend it to you as a great bit of viral marketing.