All posts tagged Twitter

What Does Location-based Marketing Mean for Businesses?

by JFung on June 23, 2011 in Other with No comments

In the past several years a new standard has developed in social media and smartphone usage. It has become entirely commonplace for us to share our daily activities and whereabouts on social media networks using GPS-aware phones. The ability to connect the dots between what we are doing and where we are doing it is the result of location-based apps like Foursquare, Yelp, Twitter, Loopt, Gowalla and recently, Facebook.

Location-based apps allow users to “check-in” through a desktop or a mobile web browser using Global Positioning Satellites (GPS). GPS-aware phones locate a user’s position and determine which “venue” they may be at. If you’re a social media user, this allows the friends in your network to know exactly where you are at any given time.

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Introduction to Storytelling on Twitter

by JFung on May 4, 2011 in Social Media with No comments

The concept of storytelling on Twitter may seem a bit peculiar to you. However, at last month’s SXSW, there were some really interesting ideas that a lot of digital marketing strategists were expressing exactly on this subject. You can review the basics in a previous post– here.

Stories, in themselves are essentially as old as we are, and before the written word, stories were transferred to future generations orally. This is why symbols are so important: they are able to capture a lot of information in a single representation.

The basic component of B2B relations is communication. It is our ability to propose to our audiences a product of value that can somehow improve their life – make it easier. The only way that we can achieve this is if we transfer our knowledge to them in the best way so they can see there is in fact great value in our offer.

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2 Ways To Track Your Social Media Effectiveness In Eloqua

by Mike MacFarlane on July 14, 2010 in Other, Social Media with 3 Comments
social_media

Social media has become an integral part of many B2B/B2C marketing organizations. Whether it be Tweeting, creating fan pages on Facebook or posting information in LinkedIn groups, most B2B companies have begun to embrace this growing medium.  But like any channel, marketers want to be able to track the effectiveness of it.

Utilizing Eloqua, here are 2 simple ways that can help you better track your social media effectiveness:

1. Creating Unique Landing Pages For Each Social Media Platform

Utilizing Eloqua Hypersite PURL pages, a simple way to uniquely track page visitors via various social media channels is to copy existing campaign landing pages that you have created to generate “new” ones.  The reason for this is that when you copy a page, you are generating a new URL that you are able to use specifically on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  With this, you can uniquely track how many visitors (both known and unknown) are visiting your landing page through specific social media sites by campaign and by channel.

2. Tracking Conversions/Net New Names Through Form Submissions

In some cases, the landing page that you have copied may also have a form on it, which gives you a perfect opportunity to track how many conversions you are generating through a specific social media site as well.  However, there are a few things that you should consider with your form:

- If your form has many fields on it, you will want to consider limiting the amount of information you ask for.  Social media is meant to provide an easy way for people to access information, so start by only asking for a few pieces of information, such as email address and first name.

- A best practice for form configuration is to have a process to capture the Lead Source of names who enter into your database.  In the past, I have typically created a hidden HTML field on my form that has a value of “Twitter” or “LinkedIn”, so that when I run an analysis on a database, I can easily segment and report on those who were added via a social media site (*note – your company may have a specific naming convention for lead source, so incorporating the name of the social site into that will also help with reporting/segmentation).  Even if the conversions generated are not related to net new names, form data reporting can assist with showing how many submissions came via a social media site in relation to the lead source of the submission.

By capturing the source of these net new names, there are many types of ways that you can report on them over time:

- If you have a lead scoring program in place, you can determine the quality of the names you are generating
- What is the basic profile of a person created through a social media site (ie. what sort of titles do they have?)
- Within your CRM, you could track these names against any opportunities generated

By utilizing these two simple methods, you will be able to get a better sense as to how big a part social media is playing into your marketing efforts.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter

Happy sharing!

Twitter Tools: Leverage Eloqua, Microsoft Outlook and RSS feeds

by Carey Copeling on January 25, 2010 in Marketing Automation, Social Media, Twitter with No comments

Checking in with Twitter multiple times a day can be tough and time consuming; most likely there are only a few people in your organization that have been assigned Twitter detail, but there is a good chance there are others in your organization that might want to see what’s going on without having the time to check-in themselves.

We recently recognized a need to keep the team here abreast with relevant tweets, but not everyone has the time to login to CoTweet to check themselves. We utilize the SearchPad function in CoTweet to save common and relevant search results, but if you don’t login, you can’t see these results. The solution was to do one and/or two things: Enable RSS feeds for specific search results in our Microsoft Outlook instances, and also setup a daily Eloqua email sent to an internal distribution list with RSS feeds enabled to display desired search results.

Microsoft Outlook RSS Twitter Feeds:

This may be a no-brainer for some of our readers who already utilize RSS feeds with Outlook, but we’re going to go through the process of finding the feed and adding it to Outlook.

Determine which search query or queries yo uwould like to include in your RSS feeds by logging into Twitter (or your Twitter management application) and running a particular search. In our example below, we searched for the term “CouchAssociates”. Near the bottom of the control panel on the left hand side, you should see a link (highlighted in blue) entitled “RSS feed for this query”. Clicking that link will take you the RSS version of the query results.

 

The URL (highlighted in red) is the location of this particular feed. Copy this URL, as it will be inserted into Microsoft Outlook in the next step.

Open Microsoft Outlook and locate the RSS feeds area in your Mailbox area.

 

To add a RSS feed to this area, right-click on RSS feeds and click ‘Add RSS Feed’. Paste the URL from the query feed you copied from the previous step.

     

You will see that this feed has now been added to the RSS section. It will continue to refresh and mark new Tweets as Outlook sends and receives data normally.

Again, this is a great way to stay on top of relevant Tweets without having to login or have access to any Twitter-related accounts.

Automate Twitter Feeds with Eloqua:

To all of our Eloqua customers, this is an easy win for sharing Twitter search results with key stakeholders within you organization. **Note: This particular method requires the use of Eloqua’s Program Builder (Eloqua subscription required: Eloqua Express, Eloqua Team or Eloqua Enterprise)**

Create a simple template email, using the wizard, leaving the content section(s) blank.

Once the email is created, select the Main Content section, and using the toolbar located at the bottom of the frame, select Insert Feed.

Using the URL of the search feed (see step 2 of the section related to Microsoft Outlook RSS Feeds), add the URL using the Add button on the insert feed menu. You can also set the number of items you want to insert into the feed – for our example we are pulling all new tweets within the last 24 hours. Other options available here are feed format (we are using Heading Only), the feed style (we created a custom theme) and also the update option (Auto update feed is the best option here as it doesn’t require any manual efforts to update the feeds).

Once you have added all of the desired feeds to the email, name it appropriately according to your naming convention.

Using Eloqua’s Program Builder, you will need to quickly create a simple three step program:Step 100. is a holding entry step that uses a feeder that adds members of a contact group (in our case this is our internal contact group of all C&A employees that was built using filter criteria Email Address is equal to *@couch-associates.com) and executes at 9:00am EST, Monday through Friday.
Step 200. sends a batch version of the email you created in the previous step.
Step 300. removes the contacts from the program so they can be added using the feeder at 9:00am the next (business) day.

The result? A daily email sent your list, automatically, that keeps your team and stakeholders up to date and informed as to what is being discussed about your brand, competitors and industry-related topics on Twitter.

6 Ways to Start Social Media Marketing Today; Results Tomorrow

by Carey Copeling on January 4, 2010 in Other, Social Media, Twitter with No comments

Social media this, social media that. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, today’s marketer can’t help but feel the pressure of leveraging social media with your marketing efforts. Everyone has an opinion of where to start, what to use, why some channels are better than others and what is working or not working for them. Often, different markets will enjoy success from different social avenues, but there are a few solid choices that should be implemented as part of your initial SMM strategy that apply to most, if not all, organizations. I came across an excellent case study on BreakingPoint out of Autin, TX, provided by Marketing Sherpa that outlined 6 steps for leveraging social media that is generic enough that most companies can replicate the processes.

To provide a high-level overview of how BreakingPoint got their SMM efforts going, we will briefly review the 6 steps while adding our professional two cents as we go:

1. Create a blog and start online conversations – this is often a fairly tough one to start, as you need content and content providers, but we have found internally that one or two people will tend to take the lead on this, and then as the adoption of blog-mentality will take effect and you’ll begin to hear things like “…and that would make a great article.” Encourage others to share their wisdom, especially if they have a particular area of expertise or regarded knowledge on specific products or services.
Recommendations – Again, the task of getting going here can be daunting, especially if you aren’t a daily follower or reader of existing blogs. Most modern marketers enjoy this type of read, so getting started should be as easy as visiting wordpress.com or blogger.com and go from there. Leveraging your internal IT team with the template, look and feel can also separate you from the generic appearance of most blogs. If you are using marketing automation software, such as Eloqua, you can easily integrate your Eloqua tracking scripts with your blog right away, and begin to leverage reporting on page views, and whether particular contacts/leads/accounts are visiting your blog, and which topics seem to be of interest, and much, much more.

2. Establish a Twitter account – 24 million tweets a day, and growing. You can’t take too many steps in any direction before you’ll hear someone promoting their ‘discovery’ of Twitter, and chances are, the person standing next to them ‘doesn’t get it.’ This will be a common theme, but hopefully one that will start to move in a positive direction. If you have already completed step 1 above, this is a no brainer when you post new articles on your blog. Tease your audience with the title and brief snippet on why your article is a must read and link back to the article – easy stuff.  BreakingPoint used ‘scanning’ tools to put a little more gas on the fire and pull out the information from Twitter that was most relevant to them. They used TweetScan to achieve this, and this is really side B of Twitter-based marketing; side A being your outbound communications. The ability to create alerts and custom search results based on what others are saying about you, your brand, partners and competitors is really valuable stuff. Some of the examples that BP mentioned were: industry-specific catch phrases, their brand name and negative word associations such as ‘sucks’, as well as negative verbiage surrounding their competitors.
Recommendations – BP has done a good job of leveraging the Twitter space in general, but also added some firepower by using third-party add-ons to help sift through the swamp of random posts. We have implemented a very similar solution here at C&A; we leverage CoTweet to help us identify our customer’s Twitter communications using Twitter’s List functionality, saved searches (such as Eloqua, Marketing Automation, Marketo, etc), integrated Twitter handles/username’s into our SFDC and Eloqua install, utilized query string values on our re-direct URLs that are posted in a given tweet so we can use Eloqua to track our lead sources by tweet, and obviously to keep an eye out on our competition.

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