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Inbound: The Future of Marketing (#mesh12)

Hubspot co-founder Brian Halligan (left) with mesh organizer Stuart MacDonald.

The Fruition team is live blogging from the mesh conference, May 23 and 24 at the Allstream Centre in Toronto. Here’s the latest installment.

The gatekeepers are long dead, and everyone’s a publisher – what’s this mean for you? Brian Halligan – founder and CEO of HubSpot, one of the web’s fastest growing venture backed companies and the author of Inbound Marketing – helps us navigate content creation as a driver of your growth, and the future of corporate media.

What is inbound marketing? The opposite of traditional outbound marketing – advertising, cold calls, etc.

It’s origins? Brian Halligan was working as a traditional marketer and found that his traditional playbook was broken – people were tuning out the interruptions of traditional marketing.

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Understanding your WHOLE social media audience (#mesh12)

Andrew Reid (left) and Alexandra Samuel at mesh12

The Fruition team is live blogging from the mesh conference, May 23 and 24 at the Allstream Centre in Toronto. Here’s the latest installment.

Do you really know your social media audience? Social media monitoring can tell you about people who post and tweet. But how do you get to know the lurkers who aren’t tweeting, liking or sharing your content? Gain insights into your invisible online audience in this first look at the largest-ever survey of social media users. Drawing on a recent survey of social media users in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., Andrew Reid and Alexandra Samuel tell us what’s different about lurkers, and what you need to know about reaching them.

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The business case for your blog

Blog Post Lead Generation Graph

A big part of our work as a digital marketing agency involves talking to clients and prospective clients about creating quality Web site content on a regular basis, or what a lot of the world calls “blogging.”

And we get challenged on it. A lot. “We don’t have time to write that stuff,” “I hate writing that stuff,” “nobody would  read our blog.” These are all common objections that we hear.

But you should make time – or hire someone who’s good at it who has the time – and people will read it if it’s done right. In fact, according to HubSpot, companies that blog generate 70% to 90% more leads than comparable companies that don’t blog. And I’m going to guess, although I don’t have hard statistically  valid data to back it up, that companies that blog convert those leads into sales at a higher rate, too.

Here’s why…

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Not sure when to tweet? Check out this handy chart

A key to getting the most from Twitter is:

  • getting the most click-throughs to your content
  • getting your community to amplify your message through re-tweeting

And for this, as for so many things, timing is key. Download our handy chart to find out when the it’s the best time to send out your message. It’s what we’ve got posted on our walls here at Fruition.

Download PDF: When To Tweet Chart

 

[ctaw]

 

 

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Why most marketing fails

Belvedere Marketing FailAs the owner of an online marketing company, I get to sit in on a fair number of advertising agency pitches and briefings with our clients. And more often than not, the pitches are a variation on “clever creative spots” or “bold brand ideas”.

It’s not surprising – these things have been marketing agencies’ bread and butter since before Don Draper strapped on his first Brooks Brothers’ suit.

But it is less and less convincing.

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Why Every Smart Startup and Business Should Act More Like a Digital Media Empire [In the Making]

Citizen Kane 1941 by Orson Welles

Sometimes I feel as though I sound like a broken record.

But I’m on a mission, so forgive me if you’ve heard this all before, but it’s worth repeating.

According to a recent study conducted at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, blogging is on the decline as social media tools [like Facebook] are on the rise among Inc. 500 companies.

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Measuring Social Media ROI

Quick, what’s the ROI of email?

How about your laptop, cell phone, or business card?

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know, and really don’t care. But not having email in your business could do more harm than good. Its “benefit” is not so much a measurement of return but an implicit cost of doing business (and cheap I might add).

Moreover, depending on your role, it also represents “potential.”

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5 Key Things About Google Plus Pages for Your Business

Google+ for Business Google+ Page

This week Google announced that they’re opening up their Google Plus social network to let businesses join the party, through something they’re calling “Pages for Business”.

Businesses need to think carefully about results before they commit to a new social networking platform. If you’re a business owner or marketer, here are the things you should consider before deciding to set up your Page or to give it a pass.

Read the rest on Technorati.com…

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3 Reasons to Relax About Your New Klout Score

Angry Twitter post about new Klout scoring algorithm

Klout, the online tool that tracks your social media activity and claims to rank your influence there, retooled the way they calculate those rankings last week. The change resulted in a reported thousands of Klout users seeing major drops in their Klout scores. And that has many of the site’s users freaking out.

The concern is misplaced, though. Here’s why.

Read the rest at Technorati.com

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How Google+ changes (almost) everything for businesses (part 2)

Last week I wrote about how Google+, Google’s new social networking platform, has the strong potential to be a game-changer when it comes to how businesses do search engine optimization for their sites.

This week, I want to talk about how Google+ could change the landscape of the online advertising world.

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