Social media marketing is another hot topic right now. With around 600 million users signed up to Facebook and another 200 million on Twitter, not to mention the more business-oriented LinkedIn and various other smaller and/or locally based competitors, the sheer scale of social media interaction is phenomenal. Many businesses are using social media platforms for marketing, increasing brand awareness and customer service, but few, it seems, are combining the two areas of localisation and social media marketing.

Econsultancy’s 2010 Social Media and Online PR Report reported that 83% of marketers were planning to increase their spending on social media in 2011, yet only 26% were planning to run campaigns in more than one country.

So are they missing an opportunity? The answer has to be that, potentially at least, they are.

So what’s the point of social media marketing?

While social media marketing can be used for direct sales or customer service, it is probably more widely used for more general PR. ‘Background’ activities such as building and maintaining brand awareness, monitoring and responding to criticism and gathering feedback from customers can obviously have a major effect on your sales and overall success – even if it’s not always as easy to see a clear return on investment, as you can for localisation.

In a survey conducted by market research company Ad-ology, the owners of 1,100 small businesses described their ability to generate leads, to keep up with developments within their field, and to monitor online conversations about their business, as being the greatest benefits of social media marketing.

Social media should be used as just one part of an overall strategy but, given the popularity of social networks and their capacity to span borders and cultures, they can be invaluable when it comes to reaching foreign markets and territories.

What are the best sites to use?

The global nature of major players like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mean that they can all be used to reach different markets and cultures. Last year, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish were the fastest growing languages used on Facebook.

(Source: www.insidefacebook.com)

To a large extent, these figures are representative of the worldwide growth in internet usage, and take-up rates in general throughout the vast potential markets of South America and the Middle East. It’s entirely possible to reach many different markets through the social media platforms you’re already familiar with, such as Twitter and Facebook, but some countries are dominated by local networks that are unknown elsewhere.

In China, for example, Qzone claims to have a staggering 380 million users. It’s thought that many of these could be dormant accounts, but it’s still a massive slice of China’s estimated – and still growing – 400 million internet users. Renren is another big player in China, with an estimated 120 million users.

In Japan, Mixi has a market share of around 80%, amounting to some 30 million users, while Sonico is popular throughout Latin America and Orkut, despite having started life in California, is now the most popular social media site within Brazil (and until recently was the most popular in India, now overtaken by Facebook).

As well as these general social networking sites, there may also be a number of sites dedicated to your particular industry. These sites often have their own active communities and it might be worth establishing a presence within groups on these niche sites. The key is simply to identify the markets you intend to be active within and then research the popular social media platforms within those countries. Depending on the resources you have available, it may be enough to concentrate on the most widely used sites, or it may be worth dipping into smaller or niche sites as well.

Effective translation and communication

Once you’ve decided on the most appropriate social networks to target, you still have to communicate with your customers, and likely across languages. Translation widgets such as Babelfish and Google Translate may give decent literal translations in some cases, but they can be prone to the sort of contextual and cultural errors that are marketing kryptonite.

Ideally, you’d be able to hire native-language speakers to run your social media campaigns in every language market, but if you don’t have those resources available, you can always outsource the translation and localisation of your content and make use of machine translation software to get the gist of online conversations.

The world’s biggest brands have already realised that to continue competing, they need to be across social media in every one of their target markets – the good news is that, with the right skills and knowledge, the smaller players can compete on the same playing field.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over sixty million words for businesses in every industry sector. Follow Christian (@l24ca) and Lingo24 (@Lingo24) on Twitter.

To all my mates, who dont believe me, this was a true story. Swear.

I wish this old fella was my grandad.  I’m dead impressed.  He would be great craic in the pub. (Language ALERT for any who don’t like to hear it like it is!)

WordPress GPL

WordPress, developed by Matt Mullenweg has a General Public License (GPL) which means that it is distributed freely to all and as such it has allowed development from 1000′s of people who are part of the user base and community. With 11.4 million users out there hosted on WordPress and an estimated 12 million more on self hosted solutions it has established itself as one of the top platforms to use for a blog or website.

Thesis Theme

The Thesis Theme by Chris Pearson has been developed and sold as a separate entity (164 dollars for an unlimited license) but it is based on the WordPress platform. It has an estimated 27,000 users and is NOT under GPL (apparently it is as of recently but I’m still seeking confirmation on this.)

Chris as a business person is arguing that he isnt beheld to WordPress, the license and is resisting the GPL. Have a listen to the debate, arranged by Andrew Warner in the vid and see how you feel on the two sides to the story.

Personally I think Matt came across as more convincing and with a stronger basis for the “correct” thing to do in this particular situation. What do you think?

The final aim = To convert visitors to consumers.

If they do not become consumers then they should be converted to one of three things if possible beginning with the most important.

Primary Goal

• Purchase and item or order

Secondary Goal

• Email subscribers on the blog
• Facebook Fan page members
• Twitter followers

The Company Blog

With the inclusion of the blog we must look at it as the hub of the social media efforts.  It is the content provider that is used to compliment current promotional campaign efforts and as such is the focal point where visitors are sent.

Currently we are discussing sport as the next marketing effort.

To begin with, content about sport should be created in the generic form.  Rules about the sport or competitions and some history of the sport and its development are good areas to cover. Then, content should be aimed towards more up to date news about the current leagues, teams or individuals and their standings and form. Eventually and if possible, interviews are an excellent form of content from players or teams as human interest pieces are the most “sticky” and also it is the easiest content to produce as the players themselves fill in the blanks.

While being exposed to the content then visitors should also be exposed to the opportunity to choose one of the three options listed above AFTER they have been offered the possibility to purchase and item or make an order on the company site.

This is achieved by the placement of text or attractive graphics at the end of content articles linking to the necessary product order pages on the main commerce site. Should this option not bear fruit then the secondary options should be available for consideration at little to no effort for the visitor via floating sidebars or unmistakable icons placed on the page and linking to the relevant profile.

The FaceBook Fan Page

Once this drive of content is in place we must begin the social media effort of talking about sport on the FaceBook Fan Page (not exclusively but enough for it to be a major subject).  This can be achieved by adding in the content form the blog automatically to the Facebook page and asking the current fans if they are involved in a sport or know anyone that is.

Of course, much more of a response is forth coming the more fans the page has, so I would strongly recommend that the mail shot to the current client base be completed at the earliest opportunity in order to establish a base and solid foundation to work on in the FaceBook ecosystem.  Having this available allows more depth and feedback to be gathered and more reaction to different promotions and campaigns assessed quickly and honestly from the user base. Indeed, it can be an excellent way of helping to generate sales as old clients are reminded of the excellent service and quality provided by the company though simple conversation.

In regards the administration of the page one person will responsible for this at the initial stages.  By administration we mean that conversations will be monitored and keep in the realms of decency and on point and of course, members that single themselves out to be particularly abusive or have little or now positive input can be removed.  allow this may sound ominous, due to the members on FaceBook carrying their own names and faces, this rarely happens as it did in the past on anonymous forums whereby users posted on fake or unidentifiable names.

Other FaceBook Groups and Fan Pages.

In conjunction to this the company then need to source and join some sport or sporting related groups and engage these groups in conversation about the sport.  the engagement should not be overbearing or pushy at this stage.  It should be a process of listening, engaging and assessing the groups nature and context by reading the information already available on the wall then asking a series of questions such as:

“How are the team doing this year?”

“Who has the best average score per game?”

“When is the next match?”

“Are any matches local to my area (put the specific area)”

Gradually this may lead onto things about the team and its events commenting on the team strip and mentioning how the company have supplied other sports teams and showing the results of this service via photos or links to the product itself on the company website or blog.

This whole process can take seconds and be done in a single burst if the group and users are active or it can happen over several days as comments and replays are made and the company react to them. Several groups can be run at once of course and by several it can be two or hundreds depending on time and resource and if those groups are exist.

The group sourcing aspect can be facilitated by searching or asking your direct network for advice but the actually conversational process must be completed and maintained by the company are it is the company that are most familiar with the product, service and price.

Beginning with Twitter

At this early stage twitter must be considered a fall back option.  It is an excellent tool for networking and locating individuals to connect with so it should be available and maintained to some extent at this stage in order to gather and increase its natural follower count.

The account can be maintained via the blog as the content created there, much like Facebook, can be automatically feed into the Twitter profile updating the status and increasing the visible content.  Twitter should be monitored on occasion for information requests (all of this will arrive via email regardless) until such times as the the company account can be run effectively and in a more hands on manner.

Basically, when two websites start sharing revenue to sell a product or service, it is known as affiliate marketing. Amazon was the one of the world’s first recognised and trusted sites to start large-scale affiliate marketing with affiliates get paid anywhere between 4-50% for sales generated through their own websites. Payment is typically recorded and made at the end of each month on the number of registrations, leads or sales or as a combination of the above depending on the method agreed between the merchant (the supplier) and the affiliate (the vendor).

Affiliate marketing works by cookies.  Not the type that have little bits of chocolate embedded inside them but rather, a small file, with little titbits of information that store essential data relevant to a person who clicks on the buy button on a vendors website .The cookie is saved in the person’s computer and this facilitates the tracking. When a sale is done then the vendor gets paid the amount of commission agreed and the whole record is stored in a CRM (Client Relationship Manager) available 24 hours a day to the vendor.

Incorporated into the CRM for affiliates get their daily statistics and reports on the number of clicks, sales, leads etc. Affiliate marketing connects buyers and sellers. This is how online marketing works. The amount of money spent online is increasing day by day. E-commerce is picking up at a very fast rate worldwide.

Britons spent a record £14.7 billion over the web last year – up 35 per cent, or nearly ten times the rate of growth of the total retail market. The number of people who bought goods online also increased by 24.7 per cent to 22.6 million, research shows. And they are spending over the internet more regularly – an average of 16.9 times in 2007, up from 14.2 times in 2006. Cheaper broadband and better availability of the service also lead to the increases, analysts Verdict Research claimed.

Affiliate marketing in the UK grew by 25% during 2008, taking the total value of online sales generated by this channel for that year to £3.82 billion*. The same report found that UK merchants involved in affiliate marketing drive 12% of their online sales via this channel and that despite the recession the affiliate marketing industry was worth well over £4bn by the end of 2009 and is expected to be even larger by the end of 2010 overall.

Valueclick, the owners of the affiliate networks Commission Junction, shopping.net, PriceRunner along with MeziMeida who operate Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com made their financial and fiscal data available.  Market watch reported:

In the fourth quarter of 2009, revenue in the Media, Affiliate Marketing and Technology segments exceeded the Company’s expectations, and all four business segments exceeded the Company’s expectations for operating income.
The breakdown, rounded up to the nearest thousand and based on affiliate marketing specifically is listed below:

Year 2009
•    Revenue total – $111,903,000
•    Cost of revenue – $15,617,000
•    Gross profit – $96,286,000
•    Operating expenses – $38,165,000
•    Segment income – $58,121,000

Year 2008 (for contrast and comparison)
•    Revenue total – $121,972,000
•    Cost of revenue – $19,374,000
•    Gross profit – $102,598,000
•    Operating expenses – $43,143,000
•    Segment income – $59,455,000

Not very impressive right?

They are only down 5 million on the year before and this can be attributed to the economy and the state it is currently in today.

Spokesman Malcolm Pinkerton said “As the cost of broadband falls, consumers become accustomed to internet shopping and retailers continue to enhance their online propositions, the channel will find itself extremely well placed to capitalize on the falling consumer confidence and lower levels of disposable income currently impacting the retail market”.

In light of these statistics and predictions it is clear that affiliate marketing should form part of an integrated and successful digital marketing strategy.

There are many affiliate marketing websites through which you can choose the products you would like to promote through your website. Commission Junction, Click Bank, E-junkie and Linkshare are some of the well-known affiliate marketing websites. Quite literally, thousands of publishers join affiliate marketing daily and while merchants join at a slower rate, it is increasing in velocity ensuring a much wider range of products or items are available.

Beginning to work as an affiliate or indeed using the networks mentioned earlier to have other people sell your products is a pretty simple process and in many cases the processes and opportunities are severely under estimated and under utilised, hence the reason for this article.  When I explain what affiliate marketing means and consists of and the benefits associated with this type of selling most businesses cant wait to get involved.

That’s when I need to explain the bad side.  Its not a major issue and it is handled well by the affiliate networks but its one that many have to consider before offering their products to other affiliates and its all about brand protection and reputation management. When other people sell your products you have little or no immediate control over how they approach the matter. While the likes of spamming are not permitted under the membership agreements of the affiliate networks, it wont stop people trying to take advantage and hope they don’t get caught.  If caught of course they and their details can be permanently banned from the network.

So, the question remains, what have your affiliates sold today?

* The eConsultancy Affiliate Marketing Merchants Report 2008

I immediately tell people to STOP and think before I mention the words “project brief” or “design brief” as this can be scary as it involves writing and some dedicated time.  Stopping and thinking for a few minutes can save everyone a lot of wasted time and heartache. Once you have thought about things, then think about reality and consider what the project will, in all honesty, cost in terms of services, products, skills, time, and effort.

This does not mean that you can put a website on line for 200 dollars and expect it to be a thriving multi-million dollar business in 2 weeks.  Get real.

Now lets say it together.

Get REAL!

I don’t blame  people thinking this with all the insane stories floating around about startups from their garages turning into billion dollar companies but it only happens once in a life time, to one person, and in your lifetime, its already happened to Google, so get over it.

Right, now thats out of the way lets look at how we can address the issue of a project brief, from the top and what we should consider.

Photo Credit: Poportis

How To Write An Effective Design Brief

A design brief is a written explanation – outlining the aims, objectives and stages of a design project.

A thorough and articulate design brief is a critical part of the design process. It helps develop trust and understanding between the client and designer – and serves as an essential point of reference in order that all parties may understand these objectives and a more accurate and realistic time frame, deployment schedule and quote can be generated.

Above all, the design brief ensures that important design issues are considered and questioned before the designer starts work.

Below is a guide as to what any design brief should possibly incorporate..

Describe your Company

Start your project brief with a short, honest synopsis of your organisation or company.

Don’t take this information for granted, and don’t assume that other people will necessarily know anything about your industry sector.

Tell yourself:

• What your organisation does.
• How long you have been established and how many staff you employ.
• What your desired niche/target market is.
• How you fit in to your industry sector.

Describe your Aims

Good ideas can have a huge influence on the success of a company’s marketing strategy – but in order for success to be ensured, clear goals must be set so set these goals in stone by writing them out.

For example, do you want to:

• Generate sales?
• Encourage enquiries?
• Gain newsletter subscribers?
• Obtain information from your audience?
• Encourage them to tell a friend?

If your aims and objectives are not this clear, then your design brief has already achieved another purpose… One of most rewarding parts of actually sitting down and writing a project brief is that it helps to clarify your thoughts and can indirectly help to find flaws in what you initially thought was a solid idea.

Who will buy your Product or Service

Detail your primary, secondary and tertiary audiences. Explain if you are looking to consolidate your existing client-base or appeal to new markets.

Detail any demographic figures about your audience that may be useful to the designer. These may include:

• Age
• Sex
• Income
• Occupation
• Location

Mind your Language and stick to the points

Currently we only accept project briefs in English so check how it should or could be accepted (that goes for the bank as well when you aim for your loan or your VC funding).

Due to the variety of different languages both our employees, our associates, our affiliates and indeed our clients speak, it is not constructive to focus on producing briefs in another or in a variety of languages so English is used as the “universal” language of the internet.

In regards to the way the brief is detailed, whilst you should write in clear, concise way – there is no reason why you cannot use emotive language to emphasise exactly what you are trying to achieve.

Stick to the facts, and do not attempt to make the brief contain flowery language or adopt terms that you are not 100% familiar with, try to stay away from jargon or industry specific terms in the initial stages unless otherwise unavoidable.

Examine the Competition or give Examples

Providing examples of what you consider to be effective or relevant design can be a great help in writing a design brief.

Make sure to include samples of your company’s current marketing materials – even if their only purpose is to explain what you don’t want from your new marketing materials!

If there is a design style that you particularly like or dislike – then explain why in the brief. If you’re not entirely sure why you like a certain design style, then good starting points include:

• Colour
• Imagery
• Quantity and quality of text
• Typography
• The atmosphere that particular designs create

Don’t feel that you have stick to the medium that you are designing for when giving a list of inspiration and influences. If a television advert or music video creates the atmosphere that you want your project to create, then that is a perfectly reasonable statement to make in a design brief.

The more clues you give about your design tastes, the more likely the project will be able to deliver close to your aims. Expecting others to second-guess what you require rarely if ever produces the best results.

Budget, Budget, Budget – Establish one or forget it

Even if you can only provide a ball-park figure, a budget expectation will give the project a more realistic feel and a good idea of the type of solution that will  be provided.

It has been our experience that clients will refrain from stating a budget as a certain amount of trepidation is inherent as these projects are not easily quantifiable, hence prices can range from the incredibly low to the the extraordinarily high.

A ball-park figure allows us all to set the parameters within which we which to work and indeed allows us to recommend specific solutions and you can then expect feasible results with the price range.

Not establishing a budget can have dire consequences and we ask potential clients to seriously consider budgets at the very initial stages of any project. That means you!

Remember that when providing solutions to any given issue there can be multiple options associated with it. these themselves will vary in price and if you want the best solutions in the most efficient time then you have to establish guidelines on the budget allocated to that particular issue otherwise you end up with 100 options and are no closer to making a decision.

Budgets help allocate funds to specifics but they are also the starting point for the whole project and allow the funds to be spread to the areas seen as requiring more focus. Depending on the project described in your brief this will never ever be the same on two occasions.

And that about wraps it up.

This may not seem like alot of work in the list above but believe me, once you start asking more questions and thinking about ways and means of developing, more and more questions will present themselves.  Take it seriously and focus on it with the project brief and everyone will benefit and indeed succeed.  Otherwise, its all just wishes and dreams, and they don’t put food on the table.

Bob Parsons set up the company GoDaddy.com (you might have heard of it, love it or hate it) and with its success has continued to expand his business interests across various other areas.  In this clip he knocks out some of the reasoning he has about getting on in life and making businesses succeed.  Its all done in a very tongue in cheek manner but that doesn’t dilute the real message in any way at all.

Have a watch at it and let me know what you think about it below.

I love the way it shows the movement of the “blank” message across different mediums, from phone calls and word of mouth to blog reviews and opinion based comments to car stickers and mico blogging formats and helps us get a grasp of the Big Picture that effective marketing has become. Hat tip to the guys at 22squared.com for such a good job.

Enjoy and as always, comments are always welcome.

Most of us in the industry knew this was coming and there was speculation as to the effect it will have on the results in both relevancy and of course with Search Engine Optimisation. Many people joined the initial google testing experiment that allowed them to gather data on social search and allowed us to see what the results where of doing various searches under different conditions, such as when your logged into your google account and when your not, different geographical locations and of course trying to account for your particular social network and the influence it will have on the results but from the information in the post I think Google have went even further. (I can see some SEO’s starting to scratch their heads right now).

Google Social Search

According to Google (and aside from suffering a minor baby boom in their offices) they have been enjoying the creation and integration of social search as they see it as a major way to increase the accuracy of results for individuals due to the trust factor involved with a social network.  For example, when you perform a search, traditionally you count on Google to return the most relevant results for that search but once that process is complete, you are basically at the “mercy” (for lack of a better way of putting it) of the resulting website, its information, content and brand.

Once you establish that the website is authentic, something we do very quickly if the brand is recognisable such as Amazon, E-Bay or similar, we continue the decision making process about the host site and whether we wish to continue the transaction, book the flight, make the enquiry or contact them by phone etc. and now social search brings a whole new aspect to this process.

Social Search Consequence

By including your own social network in the results, effectively Google are increasing the need for a good quality brand, integrity and high level of service from businesses as we can see references to the products, the recommendations, the complaints or the company name from a group of people that are on line, connected to you and whom you already know and consequently trust (to varying degrees of course) and the experiences that they have had with the subject you are searching for.

Having found someone who has already experienced something first hand, and whom you have a relationship with, you cna then gather feedback and information about the matter at hand directly and on a much more honest and reliable level.

Basically, companies (and indeed individuals) need to be on their toes now if they want to maintain standards in their every day business practices and this will mean offering much more personal, polite and direct customer service.  Not a bad thing in my opinion!

Social Search Setup

Their is no Opt in or opt out of social search it seems and Google have said that results will appear whether you are signed in with your Google account or not.  This in itself has annoyed some people as it means the standardisation of results, where the number 1 result for “Product A” is he same for both you and me, has effectively been disrupted (but not removed yet) as depending on the size of the searches social network and their activity, the social part of search will serve to produce different results for each and every individual and this cannot be managed or manipulated by any third parties in the same capacity as a website can be created and coded or grown to place for specific search terms in results.

This will in itself make for a very interesting year ahead and a very different view of search engines.

Anyway, have a watch at the video below to see what other features social search will include and if you feel like it, don’t be scared to pipe up and leave your opinions on social search and what it means in the comments below.  I would be very interested to hear another point of view.