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How to Create a Successful Multi-Channel Experience

As a business, you will need to find a successful way to grow your brand. Offering your consumers a multi-channel experience is a great way to do this. What better way to promote yourself or your brand than on Social media?

Having spent the last 5 years focusing on how Social Media can increase sales and brand awareness, I wanted to share with you some great case studies that have happened to me over the past four weeks that proves how successful a multi-channel experience can be.

First, I used an online application called Slideshare which allows users to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios. I spent over four hours creating a Facebook for Business presentation for one of my trade show seminars. Once I had finished it, I uploaded it to Slideshare. After three days and 115 views, I noticed on my twitter mention stream, the below tweet.

Slideshare had actually chosen my presentation as “Presentation of the day”. They have over 73,000 followers on Twitter alone. Within three minutes of their tweet, my presentation went from 115 views to over 8,000. This one tweet was so powerful from Slideshare because some of their community went on to ‘pay it forward’ and the presentation now has grown to 12,500 views. (Picture below)

I then went on to write a blog based on the Slideshare presentation which further validated the power of social media. The “Facebook for Business” blog attracted more attention from my readers and as show below, it was shared over 130 times, generating more views of the presentation via the blog.

In the blog, I shared a link to a Facebook for Business webinar, based on the original presentation. I took this blog and ‘pinned it’ to my Pinterest account. This was then picked up by one of my followers and ‘repinned’ to their board.

Not only did that person sign up to the webinar, and attend; one of their followers who saw the ‘pin’ on their board, signed up to the webinar. This allowed me to capture their email address and add that my database. The same happened inside of Twitter. One of my followers retweeted my tweet and she, along with two of her followers signed up to my webinar.

I then received an email from an event organiser in Slovakia who saw my presentation from one of their followers who retweeted it, and contacted me. I am now asked to speak at their event later this year. I was also contacted by a TV personality who has asked for my help in generating traffic to their online store. I also shared the presentation on my Facebook Fan Page and Google+ Profile.

After seeing how much interaction I had around my Social Network accounts, I decided to check my Klout score. I was pleased to see my score had jumped up and I had become a strong influencer of Facebook.

This marketing was 100% free and started in one place. Social Media works as snowball effect if utilised to its fullest. I have proved that anything is possible with Social Media if you use the right networks and the right tools.

Harnessing the power of Social Media: what is your social capital?

Ever seen a friend ‘check in’ to Pizza Express on Facebook and through – I could do with an Il Padrino with extra anchovies right about now?

One consequence of social media is the increase in social influence. Every Tweet or Facebook post consciously or unconsciously has an impact on those around us, whether in thought, behaviour or actions. The more weight, or influence, you carry in this arena, the more you have what is now termed as ‘social capital’. And to add to the pressure – we’re now scored on it.

Eminent Harvard political scientist Robert D Putnam believes social capital can be measured by ‘trust and reciprocity’ between peers and within communities, but as abstract, subjective concepts it’s hard to see what that looks like – especially digitally. But it can be done – and online companies are springing up to help people do it.

Klout, for example, measures influencers on topics across the social web – from Barack Obama to Korea, photography to Libya – and gives them a Klout score from 1-100. This is based on factors like the size and combined influence of your engaged audience and the actions your activity generates (such as tweets, likes and comments). So, essentially, they know what they’re talking about, what everyone else is talking about, and whether they’re talking about you.

So how can you improve your social capital? Two top tips are:

Look at your strategy. Or if you don’t have one, devise one. All content – every tweet, post, comment, recommend or like – should be part of your bigger picture. How does it shape the social persona you want to portray? Is that hasty tweet going to support all your hard work – or undermine it? Think about where you want to be in the world of social media and the strategy you need to get there.

Taking it to the next level. Not happy with the rung you’re sitting on, on the ladder of social influence? You can only get higher with a helping hand from those around you. The key to social interactions is engagement, increasing not only your social value, but that of the people and communities you engage with. See your activity in terms of investing in the value of the areas you operate in, rather than in terms of boosting your own standing, and you’ll reap the rewards.

Social capital in the only currency that counts in the social media world. Invest wisely.

Exciting News From Facebook, Magento & Amazon

Some further exciting e-commerce news from the past days.

Magento mobile

Magento has announced their launch of Magento mobile:

“The product includes a new administrative manager (which we wrote about earlier this week), a native iPhone app that is fully customizable (colors, images, buttons, etc), and a service where Magento manages the submission and maintenance process for the iTunes App Store.”

Amazon Webstore

Amazon has introduced with Amazon Webstore a completely customizable e-commerce platform. Details to be found on Amazon Strategies:

“It is essentially a 100% stand alone store. It’s not like Target.com where you know from the look and feel, and especially checkout, that this is an Amazon-cloned experience.”

Facebook Credits

Interesting relationship that Eric Eldon conjectures on Inside Facebook: Facebook’s ambition in regards to Credits (their virtual currency), points towards a business model where the usage of the platform may become mandatory. Facebook is predicting high revenues coming from the taxation of Credit driven transactions:

“[If] Facebook is planning to make this much money from Credits, the implication is that the company is trying to make the platform very successful overall. Otherwise, if it kills the platform, it will not be able to make a third of its revenue from Credits.

[..]
If Credits is to account for a third of Facebook’s revenue in the next 12 months, like Parker said, another implication is that the mandatory roll-out is coming sometime very soon.”

Payvment

Payvment, the inter-network e-commerce solution for Facebook, plans to diversify after their last successful financing round: The APIs from MasterCard will be incorporated as alternative payment methods to PayPal. According to own statements, the MasterCard payment method will be very helpful for the planned internationalization. Furthermore, Payvment wants to extend its offering to other networks beyond Facebook:

““It’s always been plug-and-play for networks,” [Payvment-CEO Christian Taylor] says. “We never had a goal of being a company that just sat on Facebook.””

Zappos API

Zappos. The online retailer started with shoes and expanded into a universal retailer and social web company. Now they have introduced an own API. The roadmap sounds exciting and covers exactly what one would want to have in an API in this industry:

“In our upcoming releases, we are going to have a lot more fun things. APIs such as “What are the most popular products right now”, “What was just bought in my city in the last 5 minutes”, etc. But we also want to hear from you all on what features you would like to see. So keep the feedback flowing.”

Warren Knight thanks www.optaros.com