While I was searching in Google for the term ‘social media marketing’ Google Suggest gave me the term ‘social media marketing for dummies’. And that means people are appearantly searching for that.

Social Media Marketing Dummies

Google Suggest is a really handy tool to get a grip on long tail searches and it is also a source of inspiration for blog topics. And that’s why I am now writing this post for  ‘social media marketing for dummies’.

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Twitter 101 Guide offers insightful case studies

Twitter is one of today’s most successful social media channels. Having said that, many marketers and companies are skeptical of Twitter. They find it hard to understand how people use Twitter, how active people are and why people use it.

Some useful data on Twitter usage and stats can be found in this report [PDF] from Hubspot.

Still, however skeptical you might be, it is a fact that some companies have successfully used Twitter for their business. Recently the micro blogging platform itself launched Twitter 101, which is a special guide created to explain how companies can use Twitter for their business.

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1 + 1 = 11

The last few posts, especially the ones on Dell made me realise that engaging in online communications on the social web is not something you do on a late Friday afternoon. It takes effort and commitment.

Steve Seager, my colleague at we do communications, recently wrote a post called ‘The Power Of Scale’ that touches on this topic. Check out his analogy between a painting of Isaac Israel and messaging in online business.

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Social media and direct revenue…

Hmmm. Still talking about Dell. And this time it sounds like a Harry Potter title. The only difference is that this actually happened!

The company that initially got engaged in social media to repair the Dell Hell reputation damage, has now produced $1 million in revenue directly through Twitter! Dell’s Twitter followers receive messages when discounted products become available in the company’s Home Outlet Store.

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Or why brand building beats crisis communications…

Now here’s a company that learned about engaging in online communications the hard way. This is a classic case study that dates back to 2005/2006.

What started with a blog post of one person, caught fire on the Internet and ended up with ‘Dell Hell’ as the most highly ranked Google search term associated with Dell for some time.

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Creating buy-in through education…

Last month Ad Week reported on the departure of Dell’s Social Media Chief Bob Pearson. He left the company to take a position with the Blog Council, an industry group focused on social media.

In the article he says: “The biggest challenge is what I call the antibodies. Every organization has them, and the larger ones have more. These are the people still trying to do things like they’ve done the last 10 or 20 years. They tend not to say no but not to say yes. They have lots of ways to stop progress with a smile.”

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