Rapids new vocation

This post is just to ensure my trackbacks are working properly bus shelter

Get your business into the Media!

IRUN are pleased to provide a ‘pre-announcement’ that we are partnering with pr2go because the IRUN business coupled with a PR service is a perfect match.

Pr2go is a virtual PR agency that specialise in writing and distributing press releases and is an ideal service for businesses to communicate news stories to existing and potential customers but in a very cost effective way, no longer will you need thousands of pounds to get your message to your audience, Pr2go coupled with the back up of IRUN will make sure you get heard.

There are multiple packages to make sure that you get all the exposure you need, from just a few press releases a year to a few a month the choice is yours and of course you can tap into the wealth of the team to make sure you know what makes a great story.

pr2go

This provides a very compelling service to all SME’s in the UK who want to take advantage of having great news to share through traditional channels but also the newer social networks that can magnify your reach.

So for as little as £49.99 you can get you story, written by a journalist, in front of 100’s of editors all within a couple of days.

Interested in getting your business in the news? Contact your local IRUN internet marketing consultant today

Why LinkedIn?

When asked by our clients which social networking tools should they use it always comes down to, in our opinion, the 3 core sites that every social media strategy should utilise and that is

• Twitter
• Facebook and
• LinkedIn

We have already spoken about the value of Facebook and Twitter so what about LinkedIn? what does that bring to the Social Media party?

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has always been positioned as the business networking sites to link with other professionals that you have met along the way based on education, employment history and professional interests, indeed it has over 60 million professionals listed and it is growing rapidly.

However its absolute unique feature is the ability to ‘see’ the contacts that you don’t know just now but really would like to know, and LinkedIn will tell you how many degrees of separation there are between you and them.You can use this knowledge to get introductions to people from your network you are already connected too and this is the ticket to building your network.

LinkedIn is also great for your own personal SEO – have you googled yourself lately? If you’ve got a linkedin profile it will be near the top…

So what can you use linked in for?

1. Stay in touch with professional colleagues you know, as they update their status you will be alerted
2. Find experts and challenge ideas, sometimes your own business circle won’t be able to help but if you search the ‘answers’ page or the search button with keywords you will find someone to help you
3. Explore opportunities, the obvious one here is job opportunities or recruiting, but you might like to research for joint venture partners too.
4. Find people, you may not be able to connect with them directly through LinkedIn (if they are too many degrees away) but you might find them on Twitter!
5. Join (or start) special interest groups and grow your network
6. Answer other peoples questions….become the expert

Other great features of LinkedIn

1. You can re-order your profile page so that you decide whats important for visitors to see first.
2. You can add Twitter to your profile, just remember in your Tweet to include #in to include that post, if its not relevant don’t put it in LinkedIn (you’ll need to go to your settings to make sure this happens)
3. You can also scan what people are saying on Twitter about your company by loading company buzz… quite useful for business reputation

Great Applications you can include:

1. You can include your blog as part of your profile
2. You can include presentations in your profile
3. You can include a reading list that you recommend
4. You can use ‘huddle’ a workspace application to collaborate and share documents
5. You can use a trip application to show when you’re travelling

All of these add to your overall profile (do make sure its 100% complete) why use LinkedIn?
Well we think you’d be foolish not to.

Do you need more than a website?

These days having a website is just not enough, with the proliferation of smartphones your customers are spending a lot of their online hours on a device they can hold in their hand. The reality is that consumers are now spending time using smartphone apps instead of the search engines and are using social media sites to interact with each other to discuss what restaurant they might visit tonight before they book to see a film (on their smartphone of course?)

So consumer behaviour is changing – radically, and you need to make sure your business is changing with it, or you might be swept away in the tide. Nowadays the traditional two way conversation between business and consumer has a third dimension to it, and that is the consumer-consumer conversation, you may not be able to make an ‘app’ for your business but you should be able to take part in the conversation, and actually isn’t it vital that you do so that you understand their exact needs and wants to enhance your product or service offering – and it doesn’t matter what device your customer is using to interact as long as you can respond!

So can you get involved in interacting in a mobile market – well the answer is yes, some ideas to adding value in to your clients in the mobile world are:

• Acquire new customers through mobile booking (could you create an app?)
• Improve customer service via social networks and improve consumer experience
• Enhance loyalty for your best customers, can you use text to message to them?
• Create mobile campaigns that integrate well with other marketing efforts

Mobile marketing is only going to get bigger as more smart phones are sold….take time to think about how you can harness this new sales channel for your business.

iCMS – Shared Content makes it easy to manage

A lot of our clients have more than one branch, maybe a Regional office with lots of local offices, or a franchise set-up with many local operators. This can cause a problem for the management of the corporate website. Should you have one website, with perhaps a page per local office, – easy to manage but not good for local search engine optimisation. The best way forward is to have multiple websites in every local location, the difficulty with that solution is that there are so many more websites to manage, who is going to complete that task every month?

Well we have the solution to that problem with our IRUN Content Management System

Using our technology you can produce a ‘hub’ website which can then deliver pre-defined shared item contents to all of the other ‘spoke’ websites. So if as a company you have a great case study that you want to appear on every page, you can upload it once and the system pushes that content to all the other websites you have pre-defined, and you can also put together sets of rules to ensure that the most relevant content appears at the top of the articles in each area. (so if you’re based in Oxford your Oxford case Studies would appear higher than others from areas further away from your location)

So one person can easily manage all of the websites, almost as if they were just one. Of course you can have ‘local’ pages that the local operator can make changes to so that each website can have a slightly different personality.

If you want to have a look at this in action, you can either take a look at our own websites which deliver this functionality to our network… or take a look at The Abacus Network, a forward thinking accountancy firm who have taken this approach to optimise their online marketing system. Two of their ‘spoke’ websites have gone live already (aldershot and Bromley) with the rest to roll out over the coming days and weeks.

Could this technology help in your business? call your local IRUN consultant to find out.

How to drive targeted traffic with Twitter

The whole purpose of using Twitter for your business is to gain new contacts and find new target markets, but how do you make this tool work for you? How do you get the right traffic and followers?

Any form of marketing takes effort and commitment to an end goal, social media is no different, and in fact has the highest rewards in the shortest time for those who master it. Generating incoming traffic has to be your number one priority as this provides you with: 

1.  A stream of prospects and subscribers
2. New customers and increased sales
3. Branding opportunities
4. Broadcasting your message to mass markets

So how do you get the right kind of traffic and followers to your site? Here are a few ideas to consider.

1. You must know who you are looking to attract – know your ideal audience. Just getting followers is almost pointless. You need to know what kind of people want and need your service and then use tools like search.twitter.com to find those people. You also can’t just launch into a pitch; you must follow and engage with them. Remember the basics; nobody wants to be pitched to when first meeting you.
2. Get the right type of follower – it’s not really a numbers game. Quality not quantity is the key. You want people to read and be interested in what you are saying, this way they re-tweet to their contacts and so the opportunity grows.
3. Add a “Follow me on Twitter” button everywhere, on your website, your email footer, any marketing info you send out, invoices etc.
4. You must engage with your followers. Re-tweet, DM (Direct Message), reply to their tweets by asking questions, encourage feedback and then hold conversations – you are trying to build a relationship one to one so don’t be a robot – show your personality.
5. Tweet out some valuable links. You need to be seen as a giver and so if something interests you, shrink the web link and send it to your followers – they almost certainly will find it interesting too.
6. Measure performance of articles and tweets sent. Vary the times and see if this has an effect on response. Good times are between 8am and 9am, lunchtime and 6pm – 8pm. Change the time and see when your followers and tweeting as well and try to map this pattern.
7. Once you find a formula that works, keep doing it but more. Always test and change headlines, calls to action and style to see if any results improve.
8. When you publish an article, always add a TweetMeme button to make it easy for your followers to share your content – again you are after your followers, followers too and making it simple to share will increase your popularity.

 By doing these few things, your following will increase with the right type of follower and improve the results you will see. The main thing is to get a strategy formed and action it. Do not just give up on this valuable marketing tool. Better still contact your IRUN representative and let us provide a strategy for you and help you achieve the goals you want.

Why you should have a Facebook Page

With all the hype about social media, is it just a fad or are there real business reasons to have a Facebook Page? The answer is undoubtedly yes.

Why is that? Put simply, social networking is fast becoming the thing that consumes more time than any other online activity, and in some cases all spare time. It is a massive marketing opportunity to the smart players. With over 400 Million users and rising daily, and on average a user spends an hour per day on Facebook, can you afford not to be on there?

So do you have a business page and a personal page – absolutely.

Facebook must be incorporated into any online marketing strategy. Your online presence must integrate into not only Facebook, but Twitter, You Tube, Linked-in. For example, nearly 100,000 use Facebook Connect (a powerful set of API’s allowing developers to interface much more closely with Facebook) which is proven to deliver significantly more leads and traffic to those businesses.

Facebook fanpage

One of the key elements is the Fan page. This allows your customer to become a fan of your product or service, showing their contacts that they approve of you – this is like a personal reference for you. This is very powerful as on average each Facebook user has approximately 130 friends, who could become your next client.

Another major development of Facebook is their news feed capability. This gives the ability to feed relevant content to fans, friends and users based on posts you have made in the past on topics Facebook thinks they will like. This makes it very important that the posts and comments made are relevant and what works best for your brand. Facebook Analytics provide data on your content engagement scores for you to monitor and adjust messages.

Real-time searches are changing in the marketplace. With the likes of Twitter and WordPress making its streams public, Facebook has also moved to do this (unless you mark the content private). Bing and Google are now incorporating this data into search results as well as normal web content searches. This has a major effect on search engine optimisation and brand management – both positive and negative. If you get good reviews on Facebook, then your reputation will increase, however bad or negative comments about your organisation or brand can also be reflected at the top of search engines too, having a detrimental effect to your business.

So now you have a Facebook Page or one that is not performing – how do you make it better and promote it?

Unfortunately, most companies start off with a bang, but get disillusioned as it does not seem to be performing, then drop it for more important things. Having a Facebook Page is much more than just having one – you need to make sure it is constantly updated with relevant content but not just a few wall posts; it has to be video, images, links and of course loads of great articles and content.

Here is a few tips on promoting your Facebook Page:

• Get a link on your website and make it prominent
• Get a Fan Page set up
• Add other Social networking profiles to your Fan page
• Create a Google profile for you business and add links to your Fan page
• Add the link to your email footers – make sure the link works too!
• Add to your business cards

All this takes time to learn and making mistakes is not an option, so why not contact your local IRUN Solutions account manager and discuss how we can ease the pain, set it all up for you, train you and advise on any new developments as they arise.

A new feature in Google Local

If you’ve got premises in your local area then making sure your listing on Google Maps is accurate will reap rewards for your business.

As the search engines focus more and more on mobile applications and users of mobile become more sophisticated, Maps will come into there own. Users will be able to use the maps function to find the ‘nearest coffee shop’ or the hairdresser that is closest to where they stand, very powerful indeed.

You need to make sure your business is one that is found and stands out from the rest of the crowd, we have spoken previously about

1. Do verify your business listing if you haven’t already
2. Make sure your listing has got some reviews
3. Keep your profile 100% complete
4. Do alter it

Now Google have put another little feature in the Maps section, you are now able to put in ‘real time’ information. So if you have events running or discount vouchers or have launched a new product or are looking for a new employee then this is the area you can type this information in (its like a tweet with only 160 characters available)

This is the easiest way to keep your Google maps current and might just tip the balance in your favour!

Google Buzz

If you’ve got a GMail account with Google you might have seen a new item appear in your list… ‘Buzz’

So what is Google Buzz, well basically its a way of starting conversations with your GMail friends about things that you find interesting, so you automatically follow the people you already connect with in GMail.

The features of Buzz include

1. You can publish your updates privately to your close group of friends or publically
2. You can get all your messages integrated into your gmail inbox and reply directly from there
3. It connects with other Social Media Sites
4. You can see thumb nail photos and videos and browse full screen photos from popular sites

What else will Buzz do…. well we think the best application for this is actually from your mobile, using the maps functionality you can see what people are ‘buzzing’ about in the location close to you.

Want to know more? this short video might help:

Testimonials are you collecting them

We touched briefly on testimonials on our post about your online brand, but it is really important for you to have a mechanism for collecting client feedback, testimonials and case studies.

Why are they so important?

Well prospects would love to read how other customers of yours found your service, what they feel about you and what the overall experience was of their interaction with you. It allows the prospect to build truct in you and your organisation and also builds your credibility in your field.

Good feedback from your clients will enable new customers to feel less skeptical about doing business with you, especially if they have common problems that your products or service solve.

Here are a couple of testimonials that we have received in the last week (demonstrating different sides of our business)

Firstly, Tangible Intelligence specialises in helping clients win sales through the application of direct  communication to their market.  Our primary means to reach our clients’ customers and prospects is via telemarketing coupled with online and offline written communication their Managing Director wrote:

“In the highly complex world of online marketing we were looking for a company with which we could partner, that could offer us the toolbox to provide the tools to enable us to provide a completely integrated solution embracing website design and hosting, CRM, auto-responders and SMS.

With IRUN we have much more than that.  Not only do we have the tools we need to implement the communication programmes we design but we have a full back-up team completely in sync with our way of thinking and able to extend the reach of what we are able to offer.  Furthermore as a team we are able to keep up to date with new advances in marketing and internet technology to a far greater extent than we could have on our own.

If, like me, you are looking for a credible organisation to partner with and who can extend your resources in the areas of effective marketing and internet technology, I would strongly recommend that you take a look at IRUN.  Their training is second to none and they embrace the latest technology, bringing on board experts in the field to ensure they stay ahead of the game.”

and for our online workshops we got this email from our support desk

“Phil Chatterley who attended your workshop today was more than impressed and gave you a glowing report. Found your presentation really informative a easy to follow. He is now revising his website he is building with us – thanks”

Please do have a mechanism for collecting these valuable sales aids, you won’t regret it!