Archive for January, 2009
lemmings. you heard me.
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on January 30th, 2009
Lemmings are great. All those cute little green-headed guys marching obediently to and fro, digging, building and hammering their way through creepy looking worlds. And sometimes… marching blissfully to their deaths one after another while you scramble to save them!
Don’t try to deny it, you loved this game back in the day. And in fact, you still love it, you just didn’t know you could play all the levels online for free! Follow this link! Happy Friday everyone!
rethinking media outreach
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on January 30th, 2009
Dear clients,
You don’t need to be on TechCrunch.
Sincerely,
Anya
Am I out of my mind? TechCrunch is one of the holy grails of media hits, every PR person’s nightmare/dream come true, and one of the first sites cited by tech companies and others when listing where they want to get covered. Think you want it bad? Some people have committed some serious acts of crazy weirdness for one coveted little post.
But this great post from HubSpot points out that despite the traffic spike you’ll see from a hit on TechCrunch, you might have missed the mark in terms of target audience. It doesn’t matter if all those people visit your site if they don’t end up converting to lasting customers! And for a great many companies, even those involved in the tech space, reaching viable customers in smaller but more valuable niches is a much better idea than shooting for the moon with TechCrunch. In the time that it takes you to finally get through to someone over at TechCrunch so they can tell you to get lost, you could have achieved several posts in smaller, more relevant publications and blogs, and lo and behold, achieved higher conversions as a result!
The lesson… think about your target market, not your site traffic. Think about your conversion rate, not just site visitors. Broaden your horizons and don’t rely on a few big media hits to make you a success. As I talked about in my last post, think smaller community, more targeted niche, more relevant people, more success!
Check out the Hubspot post for some great graphs and stats on this topic.
10 ways social media will change in 2009
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on January 29th, 2009
Great post today on Read Write Web talking about what we can expect from social media in the coming year. One of the things they discuss is something we talk about a lot with clients. That is the idea that social media is moving away from advertising and marketing, and evolving toward the expectation of truly personal interaction.
Social networks as a whole, like Facebook and Twitter, have grown too large to manage as one community. Instead, populations gravitate and congregate around meaningful conversations and issues pertinent to their lives, whether that is business interests, family, shopping, sports, technology etc. Many people also bridge personal lives with business purposes on social networks, and expect the same degree of personal interaction with corporate entities as with friends on these platforms.
So what does this mean for us? It means we focus on creating relevance, value and rapport with community members. It means we need to focus on the people, not the platform, create ways for people to interact across, within and without any number of social networking communities, and we need to redefine goals to realize that quantity does not equal quality. More eyes does not necessarily mean success, it just means you need to realize you niche and create more value in smaller circles.
Check out the article for an expanded look at predictions for 2009 and let me know your thoughts on where this is headed.
how to increase your twitter followers
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on January 28th, 2009
This is a quick and succinct post from Kevin Rose that gives some great tips on increasing your audience on twitter. Perfect to consider when starting a personal or company twitter account.
I particularly recommend getting involved in conversations and trending topics, especially if you’re at a large event or tradeshow in your industry. Great way to increase your audience with valuable followers.
