Is it me, or are LinkedIn Company pages getting better by the day?

It seems like there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t find reason to love LinkedIn’s company pages all the more. In August I realised that colleagues were “liking” the updates I posted to our company page – making the page both a useful internal communications tool as well as an effective way to spread word of our company news even further.

This past week I started thinking…..the LinkedIn company pages are so easy to update and lay the news out in such a nice way (along with stats on clickthroughs) that it’s a real shame that we can’t have this type of page for as an “in the news” page on our website.

I spoke to a web developer I work with and voila! He pointed out the new LinkedIn Company Page API. He said that there is a good chance he can build an import plugin to load the LinkedIn Company Page content into our content management system……which means that we could effectively stream our company page updates into an “in the news” page on our site.

How cool would that be?! No more clunky updating of news coverage pages!

As if all that weren’t enough

On September 12th, Buffer went and announced Buffer for LinkedIn pages. I already have a personal Buffer account for sharing my own updates to Twitter and LinkedIn, but I think it’s now time to get a business account so that we can easily share company news to Twitter, LinkedIn, our LinkedIn Company page, any relevant LinkedIn Groups, and our Google+ business page.

Watch this space – I’ll keep you posted on whether the LinkedIn import plugin experiment was successful!

I am not a publishing house!

Firstly, a big thank you to Clevertouch for inviting me to last week’s breakfast briefing: “Your Digital Marketing Strategy for 2015 and beyond….” While I gave the bacon sarnies a miss (veggie!) I did walk away from the Brewery on Chiswell Street with some food for thought which I’ll explain below.

Are you a content marketing machine? ClevertouchBreakfastBriefing

As Adam Sharp finished his breakfast presentation “Moneyball Marketing and Revenue Performance” I realised that like a lot of marketers, I’m in danger of not being on top of my marketing technology infrastructure because I am at times rather consumed by content marketing.

I do love content marketing. Proper thought leadership based content is the way forward in marketing,  and no matter how small your organisation is, you should have a content marketing plan.

But it’s easy to become wholly consumed by content marketing, especially if you’re under resourced. Given the hype surrounding it, many marketers feel as though they should be dedicating a large part of their day to producing and distributing engaging content. Take a look at this article from Erin Nelson on the @exploreB2B site that I read this week, which says that “B2B content marketers are most challenged with producing enough content, as opposed to early findings in which the greatest challenge was to produce engaging content.”

Are we becoming so consumed by content marketing that we’re putting quantity before quality, and are we somehow forgetting our marketing technology infrastructures, so carefully put in place?

The Solution

I’m not saying it’s easy – Continue reading “I am not a publishing house!”

It’s official. I’m addicted to Buffer

Why Buffer?

Because it’s totally awesome and I can really see how this tool could help a busy company where a lot of people have a little bit of time to contribute to growing a brand via social media. I love the “team” element of this tool and I am going to spend all day tomorrow convincing a few of my colleagues as to exactly why we should use it.

What is it?buffer

It’s an online tool that allows you to populate a stream with content that Buffer later shares across your social networks at specified times throughout the day (or night). In this sense, it’s not unlike Hootsuite which, while Twitter focused in its GUI, gives you the capacity to tick other social networks when you go to share, and to schedule your sharing.

So how is it different than Hootsuite?Continue reading “It’s official. I’m addicted to Buffer”

5 very obvious reasons Linkedin Contacts won’t replace your company CRM

A few weeks ago, when I saw that LinkedIn had announced its “Contacts” services I got VERY excited. My first thought was:

“Can I finally do away with my CRM?”

A smarter way to keep in touch. Apparently.
A smarter way to keep in touch. Apparently.

Sadly, the answer is no 😦 LinkedIn Contacts is not going to solve my number one database marketing problem, which is keeping my data current.

I want my contacts automatically updated within my CRM every time they move companies, they change job titles or even change departments.

Looking to LinkedIn for a solution is entirely logical because the site hosts all of this information (I do realise there are likely regulations on how much of it they are allowed to freely share). Quite a few CRM companies boast LinkedIn integration (Salesforce has probably gotten the furthest with it, but even the Salesforce/LinkedIn integration (featured on the LinkedIn website actually) doesn’t seem to have specifically what I want).

Enter LinkedIn Contacts and I wonder if my CRM-related prayers had been answered. Alas, no. For the reasons I’ll list below, LinkedIn Contacts is not going to solve my dated data problem any better than the so-called LinkedIn integration features many of the CRM companies offer. In fact, having not even yet used LinkedIn contacts (I am on the waiting list) I can tell you that it while it will be a freelance/contractor’s dream, it won’t actually help companies that much.Continue reading “5 very obvious reasons Linkedin Contacts won’t replace your company CRM”

Creating a Content Marketing Plan: Part II

ContentMarketingPuzzleAt long last, I’ve got a draft of my content marketing plan! Read part I of this post to see how I started out.

It’s been a challenging and rewarding exercise that has not only highlighted the significance of business elements such as geography, but also the importance of both themes central to the business and the stages of sales/buying cycle.

However most importantly, this exercise has taught me that what I’ve got now really is a draft and not the final content marketing plan. This is because in this instance, I need input from across the organisation. I’ve developed and applied a strategy to creating a content marketing plan and I’ve developed a structure that I’ve dropped ideas into.Continue reading “Creating a Content Marketing Plan: Part II”

Creating a Content Marketing Plan: Part I

This week I’ve been allotted the somewhat daunting task of creating a content marketing plan to span the 12 months going forward. As a digital

Excel may be the perfect starting point
Excel may be the perfect starting point

marketer I love playing with social media and other delivery channels, but let’s be honest:

Content is the life and soul of the party.

Without content, I’d be left with an amazing digital marketing communications infrastructure that went completely unused! And with content being such top priority, it is not surprising that any company would want a well-researched, thoughtfully constructed content marketing plan.

While constructing a content marketing plan is not an easy task, I would say it’s so far been a rewarding one – you very quickly realise potential marketing opportunities and gaps simply by analysing the content you do have and brainstorming from there.

Getting started on your content marketing plan:  Spare me the templatesContinue reading “Creating a Content Marketing Plan: Part I”

March 20th Fast Forward Online Summit – B2B Marketing

On March 20th B2B Marketing is offering a series of free webinars that have caught my eye. I’ve been to a few of their events and the speakers have B2B Marketing Fast Forward Summitalways been top notch (have met some great long term contacts at B2B’s events too!)

I’ll definitely be  logging on for:

‘The 5 Truths of Modern Marketing – How Marketing Automation can help you fast forward your marketing in today’s world’ on 20th March 2013 10:00am – 10:45am GMT.

‘The Future of Email Marketing – Actionable Insights for Today’ on 20th March 2013, 2:00pm – 2.45pm GMT.

‘The Evolution of the Marketing Department’ on 20th March 2013, 3:00pm – 3.45pm GMT.

You can sign up for all webinars here.

The “live” blog: Proof that the blog is alive & well

I don’t need proof that the blog is alive and well. I don’t support the theory microblogging in its various forms has overtaken the blog with its bite sized, rapid fire delivery.

I don’t need to look any further than the live blog as an entity to prove that not only is the trusty web log still an essential piece of any social media marketers toolkit, but also that it’s still a dynamic medium capable of extending to incorporate various forms of microblogging to provide inclusive, up to date content (contributed by multiple authors no less).

Research Reveals Popularity of Live Blogging

This isn’t my headline or my research – it’s simply the title of a great article I read back in November and tweeted about.

I love Roy Greenslade’s definition of live blogging:Continue reading “The “live” blog: Proof that the blog is alive & well”

Have you reached your social media saturation point?

I get a lot of calls from recruiters. The more flattering ones are for the “global marketing director” roles…..the others are from recruiters hoping that I have a job to offer.

It’s these ones I find most difficult. The CV’s are amazing. They are over the top. They are….a  little too much in most cases.

It’s when I get these sorts of emails that I realise:  Every company has its saturation point, and it’s no different with social media than it is with any other type of marketing service offered.

I’ve realised it’s very important to know when your company has reached its saturation point with social media. We don’t all need Facebook and all the bells and whistles that go with it. We might not even need to tweet should our audiences not actually be on Twitter. There is a good likelihood that we should all have a brilliant LinkedIn company profile, but at the end of the day, if your customers are not accessible via LinkedIn, why use it as a resource?

It does go to show how many people are being sucked in by so called “social media consultants”.  As social media gains momentum, I would hope that the best consultants can actually gauge what their customer not only wants, but also  needs.

If it’s every bell and whistle – great! But sometimes, at the end of the day, a handcrafted and proactive LinkedIn account is more than enough.

Am I wrong?

What I learned about social media from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs wasn’t a close personal friend. Rather, I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading his biography lately. It’s a big beast of a Steve Jobsbook that I might not have had the time to read had I not had many hours to spare when my daughter was in the special care unit at Homerton Hospital….premature babies sleep a lot, and so I spent many an hour beside Ava’s bed reading about Steve Jobs – sometimes to myself, and sometimes aloud to Ava while other parents could be heard reading fairy tales to their children in the various languages of all the nationalities present in the ward.

Steve & social?

Beyond various mentions of Facebook, there is no real coverage of any thought or comment Steve Jobs might have had on social media.

What’s inspired this post is a slightly more abstract theme mentioned throughout the book, a concept familiar to me but one I hadn’t seen identified and explored at such length before.

It’s best described with a quote (from Jobs himself) that appears close to the end of the biography:

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact of some the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity [pages 567-8].

I like to think about computers helping people to express their creativity, and I couldn’t help but to think that social media has simply been an extension of this. For me, Continue reading “What I learned about social media from Steve Jobs”