Social media marketing engagement heart and arrowMost of us marketers, aged 30-ish plus, were professionally born and bred in the age of mass communications. So, it’s not strange that many marketers enter the social media arena with a mass-marketing headset.

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On Page SEO. Image of a little King. The King of Niche.As an online marketer, you may well be asking, why is On Page SEO so important? And how seriously do you need to take it?

Well, On Page SEO is a great way to work your Keyword Strategy. You can take the keywords that are most important to you and apply them to SEO tags and attributes on your page. This means you will get found by the people who are searching for you.

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A personal little story about customer service…

I’m constantly amazed how many companies are still living in the old world.

A few days ago my HTC S740 phone broke down. Pretty good news, because I wasn’t happy with it at all. The thing is running on Windows Mobile 6 point something, and well… it just ain’t working.

Since I’ve been a client at Vodafone for many years, I called them up to renew my contract and get a new phone. I had my eye on the Google Nexus One with Android operating system. Unfortunately Vodafone couldn’t deliver that phone.

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How to pro-actively manage your online reputation…

Recently I was talking to a rather large brand who had just been sold on an Online Reputation monitoring system. They were looking for a solution to start responding to people’s questions online.

The first word that came up in the conversation was ‘web-rep’. These are folks who go online and respond to comments on behalf of the company. But as you get more visibility, more market share of voice, it’s not economical to keep scaling up the number of web reps.

Plus, this is reactive rather than proactive. Instead of passively responding, you need to proactively manage your online reputation. This goes beyond a one-off response from a web rep.

So how can you do that?

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Break it down into easy chunks…

Many marketers are hesitant to start investing in social media, because they struggle with the metrics. Before they start they would like to know what the potential ROI is of their Facebook group, Twitter chats, blog posts and activities in forums and discussion groups.

Activities in social media build relationships and trust. As such it is a long stretch to connect social media activities directly to a sale. And that is what ROI is.

That can be a problem. But it’s the same problem that traditional mass communications has: if you air a TV ad or publish a print ad, can you link directly to a specific sale in a retail outlet? Not really: you need to look at the sum of your activities and your overall results.

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McKinsey change the purchase funnel!

Everyone knows the purchase funnel gets narrower towards the end, right? The entire marketing process has been aligned to this principle for more than forty years.

Well, now we can think again. McKinsey’s recent global study shows a definite change in the way consumers research and buy products. And that opens up ways of smarter marketing.

McKinsey have replaced the traditional purchase funnel with the ‘Customer decision journey’. At the beginning of this journey, the consumer begins with an ‘Initial consideration set’ of brands or products. So far, so much the same.

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