The Crunked Badge on Foursquare

The Crunked badge on Foursquare is unlocked by checking in four times in one night.  Now go get crunked!

Click here for a complete list of Foursquare badges.

If you’re a business, here’s some articles on Foursquare marketing.

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The Foursquare Bender Badge

The Foursquare Bender Badge is unlocked after 4 consecutive nights of check-ins.

That shouldn’t be too difficult for our uber social and borderline drinking problem readers.  Go get it gang!

Click here for a complete list of Foursquare badges.

If you’re a business, here’s some articles on Foursquare marketing

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3. How to Unlock the Explorer Badge on Foursquare The Foursquare explorer badge is unlocked by checking into 25...

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The Superstar Foursquare Badge

The Superstar Foursquare Badge is unlocked after 50 different check-ins. These are a piece of cake so go get these badges based on number of check-ins quickly.

Click here for a complete list of Foursquare badges.

If you’re a business, here’s some articles on Foursquare marketing .

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The Foursquare Explorer Badge

The Foursquare explorer badge is unlocked by checking into 25 different places.  Pretty easy to achieve, now go get it!

Click here for a complete list of Foursquare badges.

If you’re a business, here’s some articles on Foursquare marketing

Related posts:

1. How to Unlock the Adventurer Badge on Foursquare The Adventurer Badge on Foursquare is unlocked by checking-in to...
2. How To Unlock The Crunked Badge On Foursquare The Crunked badge on Foursquare is unlocked by checking in...
3. How To Unlock The Foursquare Bender Badge The Foursquare Bender Badge is unlocked after 4 consecutive nights...

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The Adventurer Badge on Foursquare

The Adventurer Badge on Foursquare is unlocked by checking-in to 10 different places.

Click here for a complete list of Foursquare badges.

If you’re a business, here’s some articles on Foursquare marketing

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Newbie Foursquare Badge

The Newbie badge on Foursquare is unlocked by checking into your very first place. Pretty simple.

Click here for a complete list of Foursquare badges.

If you’re a business, here’s some articles on Foursquare marketing

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*This is a Guest Post by Greg Digneo*

When you ask someone with a successful social media presence how to build your own audience, the answer most often is, “Write a blog post, Tweet it to your following, and share it on Facebook and LinkedIn.”   But what if you do not have many followers on Twitter or Facebook Fans?

A few weeks ago, my company decided to start a process to answer the question:  “How can a business that does not have many hits on their website, has no followers on Twitter, and no Fans on Facebook, generate sales leads using inbound marketing in only 30 days?”

Here’s our story about how we’re building our own buzz in 30 days.

Create a Story

The web is a crowded space and you are in constant competition to earn your target audience’s attention.  We have come to realize that your competition does not just reside in your industry, but is everywhere.  Think about what you read – whether it pertains to your business or not.  What stories resonate with you the most?  It can be a blog post on how to grow your business, or news relating to your favorite football team, or the heartfelt story of a mother reunited with her child.  All content producers are competing for your time, and no matter how you spend it, you only have 24 hours a day.

Before writing a blog post, and before building your social media plan, you first need a story that will resonate with your ideal customer.  At Cloud Marketing Labs, we want to be known as the firm who can deliver sales leads in 30 days using Social Media.  We feel this is something our audience can wrap their hands around, and will help us stand out from some of our marketing firm competitors.

Focus

You cannot join every network and be successful at all of them in 30 days.  You need to focus all of your time and energy on 2 or 3 platforms.  We chose blogging, public relations, and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Blogging

After writing great content pertaining to your story, you need an audience to read it.  In order to grow our audience, we would share our most helpful posts with friends and customers by emailing them a link to the post and asking them to share it with their friends.

The key here is not to abuse your contacts.   Only send a few posts, otherwise, you risk becoming a bit of a spammer and annoying.    Even if you do not have a large following on Facebook, Twitter, etc., chances are someone who you are in regular contact with does, and will be happy to share helpful information with their network.

Public Relations

We found many blogs, such as Real Time Marketer, looking for guest posters and fresh content.  If your story is compelling and unique, chances are they will allow you to leverage their network and help you grow your audience and expand your reach.

By pitching our “Sales Leads in 30 Days Using Social Media” story to various blogs and friends, we have been able to set up a few guest posts over the course of these 30 days.  We get the benefit of expanded reach, and they get the benefit of new voices.

We are also going to submit a news release announcing a webinar where we will share this story with small and mid-sized business owners.  However, instead of emailing the news release to journalists, we are going to use the online distribution service PRWeb.  This will help with our search rankings and increase the visibility of our story as it gets picked up by various news aggregation sites.

Pay Per Click

Our final focus is on PPC advertising.  However, instead of using Adwords, we decided to use Facebook’s advertising platform.  There are two main reasons for this.  First, it is cheaper.  We are in a competitive space, and Adwords clicks would be well over $1.00 per click to get onto the first page.  Second, Facebook ads will help you develop your buyer persona.  You have visibility on things like age, gender, likes, and job titles that you are unable to see using Google Adwords.  This will help us target our ads more precisely, increasing the efficiency of our campaign.

So far so good, our straregy is currently working.  We’re offering a webinar where we will share this marketing plan in more details and our learning’s from it.

Below is a link you can click on to sign up.

Greg Digneo is founder of Cloud Marketing Labs, a marketing service that helps small and midsized businesses generate sales leads in 30 days using inbound marketing.  He is hosting the webinar “How to generate sales leads in 30 days using social media” and is co-author of the Cloud Marketing Labs blog.

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Is Your Social Media Marketing Working?

Social media marketing is apparently all about engagement, engagement, engagement.  Did you hear that you should be using social media for engagement with your customers or targeted customers.  Just get more engagement on your social networks, and your business dreams will come true.

Great, it’s about engagement…so what the hell does that mean?

I am certainly one to promote more interactions between your business and your audience. It’s vital.  But I try to distinguish myself in this cluttered space just a little bit by pealing back the onion and digging into the meaning behind the activities.

Engagement is worthless if you don’t know what kind of interactions lead to achieving your digital goals and objectives.

What does your WIN look like?

If you’re trying to get more sales, how much traffic leads to a trial of your product.  How many trials lead to a sale?  Which networks lead to the most traffic, why?

Creating engagement for the sake of interaction doesn’t achieve much more than more work.  Dig deeper to establish a list of interaction criteria that you are aiming for.  What types of engagement signal more interest in your business?

Yes, ReTweets on Twitter are important.  It means your network is actually reading your Tweets.  But do those RT’s lead to an increase in traffic?  Do those who ReTweet you on Twitter ever ReTweet anything else?  Are you even measuring for that?

Understand the digital steps and actions it takes for you to be successful…then focus on getting more of them.  The techniques and actions will be different for everyone because all of our goals are different.  But if you don’t understand what your WIN looks like, you’ll never know if any of your activities are really doing anything.

I’m happy to help your business peal back and dig deep to set your WINS up, shoot me an email to scott@realtimemarketer.com and we can dive in.

Happy digging.

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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How To Create a Successful Social Media Strategy

Here is a presentation on the business strategy of social media marketing.  I presented this at The Business of Social Media Conference just outside of Chicago, IL. My talk was dedicated purely to strategy as it relates to social media marketing.

The presentation include steps your business should take before diving into social media marketing.  If you have already been engaging with folks through business profiles, these strategy tips should be taken immediately.

Feel free to email me with any questions about getting your business on the right track. Email: scott@realtimemarketer.com

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Big Business VS Small Business: Who Wins?

Both big and small businesses are wading through the murky waters of social media, trying to get a handle of how success is achieved. Both wanting to be the other guy.  Do big or small business have a better opportunity to succeed in social media?

Big businesses are desperately trying to act small in the social space and gain a true connection to their customers.

Small businesses wish they were big and had the brand recognition and what seems like unlimited amount of fans or followers.

I posted this question on Twitter, and spoke about it last night at Social Media Club Omaha. The results seem to be about 50 / 50. Here are my quick list of advantages of both sides.

Advantages of Big Business / Brands

Brand Recognition:

Large brands and companies come with the luxury of instant recognition.  I doesn’t take long for a well known company to rack up thousands and sometimes millions of fans and followers quickly.

Resources:

Social media is not free.  Most of the tools may not cost any money to use, but it’s extremely time consuming and requires resource allocation.  Fortunately, large businesses often have big marketing teams or budgets in place to hire or outsource talent to drive social initiatives.

Built in Conversations:

Engagement is the buzz of buzz words in social media.  The nice thing about a big brand is that, conversations are most likely already going on about them.  That makes engagement much easier than trying to create those conversations from scratch or just listening about your industry.

Advantages of Small Business

Low (close to customers)

The connection to a sale for a small business and a customer are often small.  Many customers are literally walking into a business or buying direct.  This puts them at an advantage using social media because they can directly connect with customers quickly.

Flexible

Being small allows for flexibility.  If a business tracks social numbers correctly, they can react and change direction on a dime.  There are no meetings that need to be scheduled.  There are no national television campaigns that need revision.  They can react.

Social media can provide instant feedback on anything from product or feature recommendations to new marketing campaigns.  Small businesses have the ability to listen to that feedback and apply it rapidly.

Lack of corporate b.s.

Nothing drives me more nuts that going through 7 different people and a legal team just to get an ok to send out an email campaign.  Large corporate cultures are the jokes of movies and sitcoms for a reason.  Small businesses can just do.  If you have an idea, implement it.

Easy to Identify a Win:

Small businesses can easily identify if there strategies are working.  It’s easier to track where sales are coming in from and if awareness is truly being built.

It’s Cost Effective

Without large ad budgets, social media may be one of the few options.  It does take time, but if done correctly, the move to social media marketing can return a nice ROI.

Can Appear Bigger:

Transparency in social media is an absurd notion.  We post the content we want people to see and read to help shape our brands.  In a digital space, you can appear to be larger than a 5 man / woman operation with no central office.  We are our own wizards behind the curtains.

I think the real answer is that like all things in social media…it depends.  The point is that regardless if you are big or small, get in the game.  Quit waiting on the sideline and pouting because you’re not the other team.

Regardless of the advantages one has over the over…without focus, objectives, and an execution strategy both big and small businesses alike will most likely fail in the social space.

What are your thoughts / opinions?

Get the Real Time Marketer Directly to Your RSS HERE

Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a marketing strategist with a specialty in social media.  He is an avid blogger and active across the net.  He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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