Develop a social media marketing plan that is built upon the strategies of social media's top publishers...
Join us at the McGraw Hill Conference Center in New York City on August 16th for a Day of Social Media
A program designed exclusively for content publishers
Dear Publishing Colleague,
Social media is a collaboration of all the tools that the consumers of today use on a regular basis. Blogs are being written and read more often than print media, and user-generated content is being produced for free, every second of the day. People are building digital relationships with those of similar interests via giant social networks and turning them into real-life friendships and business relationships.
The line that was previously drawn between digital media consumption and everyday in-hand media consumption is blurred, as are the relationships that cross from digital chatter to real-life hand shaking.
The point? There was a time when a fancy building and representation from movies like "The Devil Wears Prada" is all that the general public expected from you. Fortunately, those days are over, and we're all expected to take off our Gucci sunglasses and instead, coming out looking like it's laundry day.
The walls have come down. So it's time to strategize exactly how these new relationships will grow and prosper with social media. Until now, you've been watching what everyone else is doing, and crossing your fingers that they did their research. The truth is that most publishers dove so fast into social media that they skipped that part, and in most of the industry, it's like the blind leading the blind.
After watching these misinterpreted strategies ping pong back and forth, we've decided to pull together a blueprint, based only on the strategies that have worked and continue to work in our industry. No theory, no hypothesized best practices, just case studies followed by strategies that you can immediately implement in your own publishing business.
On August 16th, 2011 the Mequoda social media strategy team will be in New York City at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center. If you are a publisher, editor, or online marketer who has never sat down to construct an actual social media plan for your business, I suggest that you join us for the exciting agenda of our Social Media Workshop:
- 9am - 10:30am - Content Marketing for Publishers
- 11am -12:30pm - Blogging for Buzz
- 1:30pm - 3pm - Twitter for Editors
- 3:30pm - 5pm - Facebook for Editors
Content Marketing for Publishers: Using Content to Sell Advertising, Products, Subscriptions & Live Events
Traditional marketing is not as effective as it once was. Especially now, as consumers are experiencing content marketing first-hand and have received valuable content for free - before ever being asked for any money.
Tricks and traps presented by interruptive marketing are quickly becoming obsolete. Customers have grown weary of those old tactics and are looking for a method of communication that resonates with them.
These same consumers expect transparency. They do not want to be taken advantage of and they refuse to waste their hard-earned money.
Content marketing has brought new life to the customer-marketer relationship. The following open content standards define the essence of Mequoda Systems. Mequoda Group is the organization that moderates, documents and promotes these standards.
In 2011, the Mequoda System Open Content Standards have been updated through extensive research and testing to provide a solid foundation for starting and running a successful special-interest media business. These standards allow online publishers to build audiences while catering to the customers' needs and desires.
#1 - Content-Driven: Is your site a robust content destination? Is your audience likely to find answers to their most pressing questions on your webiste? Do you publish new articles at least 5-7 times per week? Website content could include the latest news and/or evergreen reference material. Learn tactics for creating additional, high-quality content and balancing the free-to-paid content ratio.
#2 - Google-Friendly: Google is often the largest source of traffic for Mequoda publishers. You must first commit to doing extensive keyword research and to architect your site around keywords. Writing your daily content with keywords in mind is also a must. Discover how to improve the quality and findability of your content. Learn how to create SEO campaigns that meet the searcher's needs while adding to your bottom line.
#3 - Subscriber-Centric: Mequoda System editors aggressively encourage site visitors to follow their web updates via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and RSS. These social communities allow editors to build relationships with audiences in their preferred formats. Learn how to maximize opportunities for increasing conversion rates and optimize the publisher-subscriber relationship.
#4 - Multi-Platform: In order to be successful online, publishers must remain profit-minded. Is your content available in multiple platforms, at least two of which are geared toward profit? This may include online platforms (articles, downloads, videos), offline platforms (books, DVDs, collectables) and in-person platforms (events, seminars, consulting). Discover how best to transition customers from being free-content loyalists to happy paid customers.
Discover 28 New Ways To Become a Power Blogger
It's understandably hard to create content on a daily basis. You and your writers may feel the stress of consistently covering the same topics week after week. These are concerns all content creators have faced at some point and surely will face again.
You will learn 28 sources for continually creating blockbuster content that is guaranteed to keep your blog fresh and your content interesting. We'll also go into these three types of blog posts that every high-traffic blogger uses:
Email Blog Post - Your email blog posts will be published online and sent to your email list. The editorial content should tie into a preexisting product that will be the feature or sponsor of the email. The best email blog posts will deliver valuable, often times actionable, editorial content that shows how your product will further help solve problems for your audience.
SEO Blog Post - These posts are designed to help audience members find your content long after the article is published. SEO blog posts are based off a specific keyword phrase, which needs to be used in the headline, subhead, body copy and meta data of the post. A proper keyword density will help the article get reviewed and ranked by search engine spiders more quickly.
Buzz Post - These posts are created to educate audience members on industry news while creating content perfect for social media fodder. To create this content in the most effective way, an Online Market Audit should be conducted to find the content most relevant to your audience, while helping you discover the competition in your market. Buzz posts typically have an engaging headline and link to the original article.
These main blog types plus 28 blog sources will be discussed as you learn how they can help you and your staff create blog posts frequently and effectively.
From magazine article reviews, to author interviews, chapter posts from books, live event transcripts and inspiration from other media websites, there are dozens of sources to help you create unique and interesting blog posts. You'll learn specific examples for each source and start discovering how you can start creating blog content more easily.
Tweet Like It's Your First Language
The largest publisher Twitter accounts today are the ones who didn't wait for someone to give them the "go ahead"-they just dove into it. The New York Times boasts the biggest Twitter following of any publisher on Twitter and has been tweeting since March 2007, less than a year after Twitter launched.
Let's be honest, email marketing is far from dead, but there is still a considerable amount of people who prefer RSS feeds to read content, especially when they read a lot of blogs.
You can re-capture these busy-bees through Twitter, where it only requires 140 characters to push a message, and a few seconds to read it.
Take your email copywriting skills, and put them towards writing eye-capturing headlines that link back to your blog and product promotions. As with any medium, FREE is a fast-moving buzzword, but on Twitter it can spread like wildfire.
Sending out a promotion for a free webinar or special report on Twitter can take all of a minute to write, and be instantly published and passed on to tens of thousands, even millions of people within the hour.
Twitter makes it incredibly easy for people to re-tweet content. If you thought your "forward to a friend" link in your email newsletter was powerful, you ain't seen nothin' yet!
During Twitter for Editors, we will show you how to write better tweets, converse with followers in a more meaningful way and track your time to make sure it's being well spent. We'll begin with the most important elements of a successful social media policy and go on to display the 10 habits of highly successful publisher Twitter accounts:
Performing Twitter Audits - There are so many online tools that you can use to build and develop your Twitter presence. We'll show you the steps for finding your competition as well as your potential followers. You'll then discover how you can use this information to build your own Twitter strategy.
Learning Your Lingo - Twitter lingo was built by its users, so it's no wonder that there's not a style guide or definitive list of acronyms used on the platform. We'll briefly review the lingo that will define the tweets you'll be seeing throughout the presentation.
Writing Better Tweets - We'll dive into the depths of Twitter tweets to show you how some of the top twenty publisher Twitter accounts construct their tweets. We'll reveal the most common best practices from Time to Sports Illustrated to the New Yorker to Harvard Business Review and People.
Using Twitter Search - For any publisher, even those not yet using social media, Twitter Search can be a valuable asset. We'll show you the best ways to use this tool in order to organize events, watch your brand reputation, find new followers and join discussions.
Participating More - Rather than leaving Twitter to those minutes in between everything else you're doing, we'll show you how to use it a little better. We're not talking about simply having conversations with those who reach out to you, we'll show you the techniques for getting more people to mention, retweet and talk about you.
Making Lists - Twitter's list feature is becoming more and more useful for any marketer on Twitter. We'll show you not only how to create lists that are useful for your users, but also how to join lists that will build your followers and reputation.
Tweet Organization - Even the most productive marketer can't use the Twitter.com interface for administering a Twitter account. That's why we'll show you which apps (both paid and free) you can use to more effectively spend your time. You'll learn the magic of scheduled tweets and working with several accounts all in one interface.
Getting More Followers - Every business wants more followers. How precise can this metric really be? You don't get control over who follows you, but what you do have control over is your exposure. We'll show you the one thing that every top publisher on Twitter has in common. Here's a hint - it has nothing to do with what they're tweeting. One of these publishers actually has more followers than they do unique website visitors every month!
Trying Automation - Even the more organic social media experts use some form of automation. We'll show you the most "accepted" tools for businesses looking to cut a little time out of social media every day.
Tracking Everything - So you spend two hours on Twitter everyday... now what? How ever will you be able to prove that those hours you spent commenting on one person's posts resulted in a three thousand dollar sale? Well, you won't be able to without the tools and strategies that we're going to divulge in this seminar.
Twitter is a group of the most loyal consumers on the planet. Market effectively to this audience and you'll master word-of-mouth marketing.
Build Loyal Communities with Facebook
There are seven main items to think about when deciding whether or not Facebook will work for you and your company. During our 90-minute presentation of Facebook for Editors, we'll start by going over what your goals and objectives are. Are you trying to drive more traffic? Build a community? Sell more products?
This presentation is divided into 10 noteworthy sections:
Deciding Whether to Use a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group - The first order of business is setting up your Facebook page. Do you have an identifiable brand figure in your organization that can be linked to your company page? Should you even have a company page, or should you build the contacts that already exist with your brand figure. Or, is your business model more suited to be successful with a Facebook Group instead?
Getting the Most from What You Share on Facebook - The goal of Facebook is to nurture a community outside of your website, but to eventually send them back to your own URL. In this portion, we'll go over the strategy that should be behind every thing you post.
How to Write Facebook Posts That Elicit Comments and Drive Traffic - Surely you can't help if someone's tastes change and they lose interest in your brand. However, you can be proactive when it comes to content and frequency. You can do this by creating a publishing schedule for your brand's Facebook page. Be sure to stick to the schedule, whatever you decide the frequency should be. Making updates too often or too infrequently can both be issues, so find a happy medium.
How to Build Your Fanbase and Grow Your Community - One of the biggest talking points when it comes to Facebook is how you will deal with customer comments. Great comments and questions are always encouraged and can be used as testimonials, but how should you deal with negative feedback? We'll show you how to turn negative comments into positive interactions that make you look good. We'll also go over how to elicit comments and more involvement on your page, as well as why disabling wall comments is a bad idea.
What You Can Learn from Non-Publishers on Facebook - Think we know it all? Wrong. Big worldwide brands have taken on some pretty impressive tactics for getting "likes" and garnering hundreds of comments on their posts. See which strategies can also apply to any publisher on Facebook.
Getting Familiar with Using Facebook's New Custom Tabs - Facebook makes it easy to create custom tabs. If you are giving away free products using landing pages on your own site, it's just as easy to duplicate those landing pages using custom tabs in Facebook. We'll show you how to set up these custom tabs and also some examples of how other publishers are using them.
Posting and Promoting Facebook Events - You can also use Facebook to casually solicit guests to your webinars and live events. You can make them both public and private and monetize your existing contacts while building new leads with new contacts.
The Purpose and Practices of Facebook Ads and How They Might Benefit You - We'll discuss how you can use Facebook ads to drive people to your profile and much like Google Adsense, what types of ads attract the visitors you're looking for, including how to write compelling copy and choose a picture that entices a click.
Measuring and Identifying Facebook Analytics - Luckily, Facebook is one of the few social media platforms with robust analytics built in. We'll also show you several other external tools for finding out how your competitors are doing and who's been talking about your products across the network.
Defining Everyday Goals - At the end of the week, what are the metrics that you should know off the top of your head? How many boxes should you have on your Facebook checklist? This wrap-up portion of Facebook for Editors will offer you a complete guide to your everyday Facebook marketing efforts.
Join Us in New York on August 16th
This full-day Social Media Workshop, being held at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center in New York City is designed for editors and audience development professionals as well as CEOs and Publishers, as an in-depth workshop on developing your company social media policies and strategies in all levels of your organization. It's the only way to be truly successful in the digital age.
In addition to companies realizing the value of content marketing and social media, consumers are noticing the trend as well. They appreciate the transparency of social media, the lack of deception associated with it and the free samples (blogs) that show the quality of an organization's content.
Our one-day comprehensive Social Media Workshop will not only introduce you to the principles of social media as a whole, it will illustrate how specific companies use this strategy to become more robust, attract more users and generate more revenue.
The time to learn, implement and execute upon a social media and content marketing strategy is now. You do not want to wait until your biggest competitors have adapted a successful social media strategy, or you will be left trying to gain market share.
Join us for our Social Media Workshop so you can begin getting more influential eyes on your website, resulting in more revenue, while striving towards greater penetration in your market.
We look forward to seeing you then.
Kim Mateus
Chief Content Officer
Mequoda Group
PS: For those of you who plan on registering, doing so early will save you money! Be sure to take advantage of our Early Bird Pricing when you sign up for the Social Media Workshop now. The longer you delay, the less you will be able to save.
Your seminar leader
Don Nicholas, Chief Executive Officer, Mequoda Group
As Mequoda Group Executive Director, Don works directly with member organizations to help them each build and operate their own unique Mequoda Content Marketing System. He leads more than 50 educational programs each year, writes dozens of Mequoda Daily posts, and works tirelessly with other publishing service organizations to help the industry make the transition from print to digital publishing.
Don began his media career as a writer and producer for AFRTS in 1976. Over the next 30 plus years, he has worked in every major communications medium with hundreds of media brands. Don has founded six successful media service companies, three magazines, and more than 50 newsletters. He has guided the launch and development of hundreds of successful media properties. In 2000, Don founded Blue Dolphin Magazines to help more than 1,400 magazine, newsletter and newspaper publishers sell print subscriptions online. In 2004, Don and his partners founded Mequoda Group to help all publishers master the Internet and its power to revolutionize the communications industry. Today, Mequoda Group's 18-person team services more than 21,000 members in more than 130 countries.
Mequoda Systems Consultant
Don serves as the lead consultant for 34 Mequoda Group member organizations including Aspire Media, Business & Legal Resources, Capitol Information Group, Cultural Assets, Harvard University, Group Publishing, Guideposts, The Pohly Company, Time Inc, and TSI Network. He works with each client to discover their strategic goals and then helps them build systems and organizations to realize those goals.
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