Content + Email = Conversations & Conversations = Sales.  Now you can create those conversations with LinkedIn Groups.  Curate great content from the groups, post content that you created to the groups, and respond to all the comments you want in the groups.  Then facebook, email, and tweet about it all. From one elegant dashboard.

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“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be…”

- Isaac Asimov

As an early Facebook user and observer, one thing I can consistently say about Facebook is that it is always ready for another change. Whether you are a Facebook Application developer, a Facebook marketer, or a Facebook user – all of us have learned to adapt and roll with the punches. We have also learned to look ahead and watch for new changes that fit the longer term Facebook vision.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same”

- Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

What is also true, is that despite all of these changes there are certain core principles and strategies which remain the same, and if anything, have become more important to recognize.

Facebook = Personal Profile + Newsfeed + Apps

In its early days Facebook looked hardly like it does today. The personal profile, newsfeed, and apps were co-mingled on the same page in separate boxes. The user had the opportunity to move and customize these boxes, making their page quite unique based on their interests.

Facebook Circa 2007-8

Rise of the Newsfeed

In its next major iteration, Facebook introduced and prioritized the newsfeed as a user experience. The personal profile became less important, and all of those apps were pushed into tabs and eventually removed altogether when tabs were phased out of personal profiles. Fan Pages followed the same design path only they kept tabs which could be used to customize the user experience and add special functionalities and promotions.

Facebook Circa 2009

Facebook Circa 2010-11

NOTE: You can see more screen shots of Facebook through time, including the ones from 2004 when it was called “thefacebook”, by going here: http://devilsworkshop.org/facebook-design-20042011-timeline-screenshots/

The Personal Profile Becomes a Timeline

Once the newsfeed focus became established, re-design attention turned to the personal profile.
This resulted in the Timeline which was announced in 2011 and has since been rolled out to all users. The timeline is ultimately an expression of ones complete social life on Facebook – and if you are real fanatic, a documentation of your life from birth to death – and all your friends (old girlfriends/boyfriends included) and the activities in-between.

Facebook Circa 2011

Timeline: The Story of Your Company or Brand

Now Facebook’s attention has turned back to Fan Pages. Just like the personal profile, Fan Pages will use the Timeline and can provide a full history of your company or brand (see Red Bull http://www.facebook.com/redbull for a great example). While for some they may have a history they would rather forget, for most companies the Timeline offers an opportunity to tell the larger story. The tabs for your Apps have been re-configured, allowing a few to be highly visible as “chicklets” along the top – but others are hidden almost completely.

So What Do These Latest Changes Mean?

The new Timeline approach to pages has been generally welcomed by opinion makers, however here are some further thoughts on what this change means to a marketer in an article we post to Chief Marketer this past week:

READ: The Marketing Potential of Facebook’s Timeline

Using Constant Contact API, Butterfly Publisher™ integrates with Email Marketing to easily add social digests and promotions to marketing campaigns

Needham, MA – March 20, 2012 – Socialize Your Stuff today announced that it has developed an integration between Butterfly Publisher and Email Marketing from Constant Contact®, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTCT) , enabling Constant Contact customers to produce and maintain high-quality social content and push social content to their email list in the form of social digests. The integration will be featured in Constant Contact’s MarketPlace, an online resource that connects small organizations with tools and services for growing their business.

“This integration with Constant Contact’s Email Marketing reinforces the importance that email plays in successful social marketing initiatives,” said Jeffrey Mesnik, President. “Now, any business that uses Constant Contact for its email marketing can easily produce and distribute a social digest.”

Social Marketing is about engaging people in a conversation online, and then transforming these people into your army of sales people. By interlacing social promotions in this dialogue, you start to see a conversion from conversation to sales. Each social network has a real benefit to offer, and a Constant Contact mailing list is essentially another social network. By contacting people with email, it reminds them of the conversation and directs them back to that conversation for further engagement.

“Marketing today is all about using relevant, timely content to drive engagement,” said Rick Jensen, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Constant Contact. “And while social media is a great place to have that engagement, email continues to be the key way that businesses deliver content and get their message heard. It’s really the combination of email marketing and social media marketing that produces powerful results.”

Butterfly Publisher is a social content management system that organizations can use to aggregate multiple content sources (such as RSS and Twitter feeds, Google and Bing search results, and custom libraries) to easily create and promote social marketing messages for their brand over a wide range of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as blogs like WordPress and Blogger. In addition to these social networks, Butterfly Publisher sees email marketing providers like Constant Contact as another type of social network that brings email subscribers into social conversations. Connecting to Constant Contact is as easy as clicking a button, granting permission, and choosing the email list.

Businesses ranging from technology resellers to online retailers have used the Butterfly Publisher promotion engine to expand awareness of their brand and build their marketing database. In a recent promotion, one online provider saw a 2% sharing rate yield a 300% increase in referral impressions. This added thousands of new email addresses to their email list.

For TurnOnDynamics (a Microsoft CRM reseller), Butterfly Publisher provides the aggregated content they need to maintain a social conversation with their customers. “The ability to go to one place and filter all my different searches, scan through them, re-post content to where I wish and then track the results made it a very low-key process”, said Peter Joeckel, president and founder of TurnOnDynamics. “Now I can use my email list so that none of my customers will miss this great content and the conversations it generates.”

About Socialize Your Stuff, LLC
Socialize Your Stuff introduces direct marketing to your social media efforts. We start by helping you produce and maintain high quality social content. Then, we push your social content to your email list in the form of social digests. Along the way we add social promotions in the form of time and quantity limited group deals that harness the power of social referrals. This combination of social media + email allows your business to drive social interactions regardless of how many current fans and followers you have. Our goal is to grow your followers, promote social interactions, add new contacts, and obtain tangible business results.

Butterfly Publisher and the Butterfly Logo are registered trademarks of Socialize Your Stuff, LLC

About Constant Contact, Inc.
Constant Contact is revolutionizing the success formula for small organizations through affordable, easy-to-use Engagement Marketing(TM) tools that help create and grow customer relationships.  More than half a million small businesses, nonprofits, and associations worldwide rely on Constant Contact to drive ongoing customer dialogs through email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online surveys.  All Constant Contact products come with unrivaled KnowHow, education, and free coaching with a personal touch, including award-winning customer support.

Constant Contact and the Constant Contact Logo are registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All Constant Contact product names and other brand names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

Please direct all press inquiries to:
Socialize Your Stuff
Jeffrey Mesnik
jeff@socializeyourstuff.com
http://socializeyourstuff.com
781-444-7000

The social equation:

Contact + Content = Engagement and Engagement = Sales

What is the number one over looked social network? We have heard time and time again, that companies are posting content into the social universe and it feels like they are yelling in a forrest where no one is listening.  And these organizations tend to not incorporate email into their social communication mix.  Not only does email still sustain the largest click rate, but surround it with social sharing and it goes up.  

"Twitter, Facebook Social Sharing Buttons Boost Email Click-Throughs By Up To 115%"

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-facebook-email-marketing_b17586

So our argument is that the power of social is getting people to engage in a conversation, and that conversations can lead to new sales opportunities, specifically for b2b companies. So use email as a social network, drive people towards a conversation using a weekly social digest.  This is not new, it is being done everyday by LinkedIn for their Groups.  

Now once you have started to understand how email is a viable part of your social strategy especially for initiating the engagement, we need to insure that we have strong regular content.  

At Socialize Your Stuff we deal with many small to midsized technology companies, who often re-sell larger brands products.  These companies struggle everyday to sustain and grow their business, but without strong content they will continue lag behind their competitors. 

They are looking for easy way's to publish engaging content, so they too can have high value conversations that will lead to sales.  We work with these companies and their vendors to provide original or sourced content with the specific objective of helping people get engaged in socially with the brand.  

Here is an example of a program that has been specifically helpful for technology partners who sell Microsoft products.  

http://community.dynamics.com/b/dynpartnercommunity/archive/2011/08/05/microsoft-dynamics-marketing-professional-community-call-nurture-butterfly.aspx

For Julie Fuller, marketing manager at Pennsylvania-based Dynamics partner Cargas, the Nurture Butterfly program helped her company establish a social media presence. "Without a consistent source of valuable content, we were nervous about adding social media marketing." Fuller said, "Now that we have reliable content and can interconnect the systems with an incredibly simple tool — it's beyond easy.” (Redmond Channel Partner, Barb Levisay)

So we have the two parts of the equation.  We use email to contact then we add strong content and that starts to create the engagement.  And as we know people who are engaged with a brand are more likely to purchase from that brand when a need arises.  

Contact (w/ email) + Content = Engagement

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1. How do I create and sustain engagement
2. How do I increase message impressions
3. How do I build out my database

The challenge most organizations seem to have is that they put Social into a box, where it tends not to interface with other marketing area’s.

For example we ran a program with an organization that sells software to students and educators. We started posting content and programs on just their Facebook page and got a very limited response.   The next time we decided to send out the social content via email, and the email asked people to share with their friends on Facebook.

The results:

• increased engagement,
• increased impressions by over 100%
• Not only did they grow their database, but they saw an increase in product sales.

So the lesson that was learned is that integrating your social and email helps to create a much better result.

But, lets be clear on something – just trying to socialize a typical email campaign is not as affective as emailing a social campaign.  What we mean by this is: if the main thrust of the program isn’t thought of as a social program first, you will not achieve the full power of what a social program can do.

A real example of the difference is as follows:

Provide a gated offer where people need to share information about the brand on social networks in order to qualify for it.   By doing this with a properly constructed program you will get:

1. The information about the person who qualifies for the promotion
2. Your brand messaging to a larger audience
3. New opportunities from the people who found you through their friends

We ran a program like this for a major oil brand. They gated an offer with a requirement to share the promotion online.  As a result, they received 3,000 registrations, 1,500 new leads, and over 100 new sales.

Social is a powerful mechanism for improving your business. You just need to have clearly defined objectives to leverage the true power of the medium.

A Q&A with Rusty Warner exploring the latest tactics for email marketers attempting to combine their email efforts with social media sites.

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Steve Jobs built out an amazing army of marketers!  From the beginning Steve Jobs new that it was content that led the way, followed by the “wow” of the product.  This commercial was aired only once, but its impact was felt for many years to come.

What campaigns can you do? If you have thoughts and ideas, feel free to submit them here.

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