Mediaboss Marketing

Baked nachos served right inside a Doritos bag? A burger sandwiched between two quesadillas instead of a bun? How about a Caesar cocktail containing a skewer of jumbo shrimp and other garnishes, meant to be a meal in itself?

If you've ever wondered about the quirky and bizarre concoctions sometimes served at Milestones, Montana's or Kelsey's, Dave Colebrook is happy to explain.

Colebrook is the vice-presidentof marketing for Cara Foods, the conglomerate that owns all of those restaurants, along with Harvey's and Swiss Chalet. When he and his associates sit down to sample new menu items these days, they don't only consider the taste, cost and value of the dishes.

"We want to see the wow factor," says Colebrook."We ask ourselves, is it Insta-worthy?"

In other words, the dish needs to be so visually striking that diners can't resist taking a picture to post on Instagram orSnapchat, Facebook or any of the other popular social networks.

"Whenever we launch something, we always track it on social media to see if it's creating buzz,"Colebrookexplains. "Usually when you create buzz, you create traffic and sales, and it all works."

Cara is just one of many Canadian companies embracing a new form of promotion, where special products and experiences are created with social sharing in mind. Not only will happy customers do that for free, but it can attract more attention than traditional advertising.

The simple truth is that these days, people are much more likely to look at a post from a contact in their social networkthan they are to look at a sponsored ad.

And customers are always searching for Insta-worthy material themselves, according to marketer Tony Chapman, who helped clients create viral campaigns during his years as CEO of his own firm, Capital C.

Marketer Tony Chapman says Starbucks recent Unicorn Frappuccino was a strategy to attract social media posts and attention for the brand. (Starbucks)

"Consumers every day are meeting at campfires and those campfires are happening online," he says. "They need stuff to put online, they need logs to put on that fire. They need to talk about how interesting they are, what they discovered 'I heard this incredible independent artist, or look at this picture of me, I'm hanging off a tower, I'm riding a bike around the seawall in Vancouver.'"

While having lunch at a Montana's restaurant in a Toronto suburb, Crystal Hunter explains why she decided to take a picture of her Los Doritos Nachos.

"It's fun to share," she exclaims, adding that novelty is a factor, too. "I haven't seen something like that before. And also it's so colourful. What I like about social media is it's very visual."

Doomies, a vegan restaurant in Toronto, hasn't spent a cent on print advertising, yet it does a bustling business with hour-long lineups out the door on weekends, says director of communications Cara Galloway.

"We have over 10,000 Facebook followers, over 15,000 on Instagram," she says proudly. "We've really capitalized on social media to get the word out there about the restaurant. We'd be paying upwards of tens of thousands of dollars to advertise, but really we've just gotten that free."

Two customers take a picture in vegan restaurant Doomies' specially designed 'selfie room'. (CBC)

The restaurant has even constructed what it calls "the first selfie room in Canada," decorated with vegan-themed cartoons, as yet another way to encourage social media posts.

The effort appears to be paying off. Several Doomies customers who spoke to CBC News said they had learned about the restaurant from a post on Instagram.

"Once you see the picture, you are really attracted to the place and you want to check it out, hop on the trend," says Carl Jarentio, while enjoying a late lunch with a friend.

Other businesses, such as ax-throwing club BATL and ice cream shop Sweet Jesus, have created special areas on site that feature their logoand are designed to be a perfect backdrop for a selfie or photo.

It's not surprising that marketers would make every effort to leverage social sharing. The glory days of advertising, when brands and companies could reach the mass market with high-circulation newspapers or weekly television series with tens of millions of regular viewers, are long gone.

The internet and an explosion of television options has fractured the media landscape, scattering audiences far and wide.

These days, businesses have to use every type of media availableif they want to send a message to consumers.

But what happens if people realize their fun-loving posts serve another, corporate purpose?

Tony Chapman says marketers risk a negative reaction from consumers if they're too heavy-handed in their approach to social media. (CBC)

"When consumers feel they're being used or abused by marketers, there is a push back," warns Chapman. "They're very negative on your brand instantaneously and they often vote with their wallet."

He says the trick with social marketing is a gentle touch.

"What you have to do with social media is just plant the seed, and hope that the consumer grabs onto it, waters it, grows it and makes it their own. And when they do that, it's because of their own initiative, it's not a forced initiative."

Dave Colebrook of Cara agrees. "I think people are very savvy," he says. "I think people are smart and they know what they're doing. And we're not forcing people to do it. It's just about being part of the conversation."

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How companies get customers to do their marketing for them - CBC.ca

Kinetic Social will access #HASHOFFs micro-influencer marketing platform to help brands reach out to the right target audiences

#HASHOFF, an influencer marketing platform, has partnered with Kinetic Social, a full-service provider of social advertising solutions, to provide better social media reach and engagement to Kinetics clients.

As part of the deal, Kinetic Social will have direct access to #HASHOFFs opt-in network of more than 150,000 influencers across all social media platforms to expand its social marketing capabilities.

Joel Wright, President, and Co-Founder of #HASHOFF

Joel Wright, President, and Co-Founder of #HASHOFF said Partnering with an industry leader like Kinetic in a complex landscape was a natural fit, bringing together two companies committed to pushing the envelope of whats possible on social. #HASHOFFs managed service solution is a leader in the industry, and were excited to see how this partnership can help bring even greater value to our brand partners and influencers alike.

Wright said that the companys objective is to bring a brands vision to life through the creative voices of influencers, delivering authentic brand engagement and measurement, and providing real ROI.

#HASHOFF will provide the required technology and expertise to enable Kinetic Social to identify and activate the audiences that matter most to their clients.

Our mission is to provide brands the most innovative and cutting edge solutions to engage the target audiences that matter most to them, and influencer marketing is a vital piece of the puzzle, saidJeff Thompson, SVP -Platform Partnerships, Kinetic Social. Influencers are providing a new and exciting way to combine the authenticity of a brand ambassador with the targeted focus of a digital campaign. Our partnership with #HASHOFF is another step toward ensuring our clients can engage us to design and execute all of their social marketing campaigns.

With 84% of marketers planning to increase their spending on influencer marketing, the segment has become the key channel for brands across social media. #HASHOFFs proprietary algorithms combine keywords, geography, and interest and past campaign performance to identify and activate the best micro-influencers for each brand in real-time.

Read Also:How Much Does Micro-Influencer Marketing Cost?

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Influencer Site #HASHOFF Partners with Kinetic Social - MarTech Series (press release) (blog)

Social media marketing has forever altered the manner in which companies can engage with customers. Businesses that include this strategy in their marketing arsenal can have access to valuable tools that can catapult their company to new heights.

On the other hand, social media marketing calls for solid dedication to the tasks. This strategy involves much more than establishing Facebook and Twitter accounts. Instead, its about interacting with consumers and business associates in a welcoming and friendly setting.

Social marketing is an affordable way for small business owners to expand market reach and develop brand recognition. Entrepreneurs often find it advantageous to hire a social media marketing consultant to become educated about available methods and create a marketing plan.

Nearly every type of marketing campaign can be advertised through social networking groups. Consequently, its advisable to learn as much as possible about the various methods and how to promote each strategy through social venues.

Its also wise to spend time researching the different social networking communities. Its good to look for groups that attract a large number of people, as well as niche groups comprised of individuals enthusiastic about what your small business offers. Join a few groups and find out how people communicate and what type of information they are looking for.

The biggest mistake people make when starting out in social media marketing is not spending time developing relationships. Instead of starting out trying to sell products, spend time asking and answering questions. Provide valuable information that helps people with their problems and youll quickly gain recognition as an industry expert.

A soft sale approach is better received in social marketing venues. People dont like aggressive sales people and will quickly block companies that they dont respect. There is no reason to engage in ridiculous promotions or aggressive sales tactics in this venue. In fact, doing so could cause repercussions that are hard to overcome.

One approach that produces favorable outcomes is offering incentives and bargains. A lot of companies that utilize Facebook and Twitter provide incentives such as an informative report or discount coupon when people become a fan of theirs.

Regardless of the incentive offered, it needs to be something that people desire and feel is valuable. If they benefit from the incentive they will eagerly tell others about it. Most business owners realize that word-of-mouth advertising is one of the best marketing strategies, so make certain your giveaway is something others will want to tell their friends or associates about.

Once companies establish a good fan base they can use social media to showcase their advertising campaigns. Almost every networking community provides tools that let members share information with other people within their group.

Countless success stories have occurred because of social media marketing. Most people realize there is strength in numbers. Businesses need to constantly strive to build their social groups so they can expand their reach. This is why its smart to participate in several networking communities.

Since social marketing advertising is still fairly new, it is recommended to have employees participate in a marketing training course. Personnel needs to become knowledgeable about the different types of online marketing strategies and how they work, as well as online etiquette.

Leaping into social marketing without adequate training can be an enormous mistake. Many small business owners fail to realize how far-reaching online marketing can be.

While exceptional ad campaigns can build consumer trust, poorly produced campaigns can turn a company into a laughing stock. Dont put your company at risk. Instead, take time to learn about the pros and cons of social media marketing or enlist help from a marketing agency or consultant.

Online Marketing DNA offers a unique approach to social media marketing to help small businesses expand their market reach. We are a full service SEO company that provides customized marketing packages, SEO consultations, and VIP coaching. Get started today at http://www.OnlineMarketingDNA.com.

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Methodologies For Introducing Social Media Marketing Into Your Small Business - Good Herald

Succeeding on social media requires sustained effort. You're in this for the long haul PHOTO: Angela Franklin

You've made it this far.

You've listened to your audience, you've planned your social media marketing strategy. Over time, you built relationships and trust with your audience. Your leadership set the tone for the rest of your company to follow and as a result, you attracted and retained the audience you wanted, deepening the relationships and trust you worked to develop.

So is the end in sight? Not quite.

Success in social media is an ongoing pursuit, one which requires continuous reflection and refinement. So while this, the final post in our four-part series, offers the final two rules of social media marketing success, it only marks the beginning of your journey.

"What's the ROI from all that social media stuff you've been doing?" your boss asks. One of his favorite questions, right? If you're a small business owner, you've probably heard that same question from your partner or CPA.

Generating reliable performance metrics for your social media activities gathered and reported in an efficient, easily interpreted manner has become a priority for practitioners of social media marketing to help them demonstrate the value from participating in social media and validate their investments in it.

Your boss, partner or CPA wants to compare the investment of personnel, time, money and other resources to the return. But without supplying verifiable ROI data and analysis, any long-term relationships that marketers hope to develop and maintain with their social media communities are most likely in jeopardy.

So how do you go about ensuring that you're deriving value from your social media marketing efforts and that you can accurately measure that value? Obviously, tracking online "chatter" can help expose the bad as well as the good.

For example, your fans and followers may publicly laud your products or suggest improvements to them, giving you the opportunity to respond quickly and address their comments or concerns. Also, a myriad of technology tools are now available to help measure the financial impact of social media on your organization, including lead generation, ecommerce revenue, etc.

The social media monitoring and measuring process is still in its infancy. However, in today's hyper-competitive environment and relatively weak economy, generating measurable, repeatable value from social media is no longer an option for most marketers.

All listening is not created equal. Consider how a physician uses the stethoscope in order to measure the activity of the human heart, or how a mother calibrates her ear to detect the faintest whimper of a newborn, or how a conductor trains the ear to pinpoint the one-out-of-a-hundred instruments slightly out of tune.

Compare these with the ability to tune out a barking dog, or half listen to the rant of a coworker, or subconsciously mix the rhythm of the rain to the precise sleep-inducing decibel. Now consider how we interpret tone, process innuendo, translate vernacular and compose a whole new message all while we (theoretically) listen in the context of conversation.

All listening is not the same.

Listening is done at many levels. But as we become skilled at reactive listening mixing everything we're taking in to a manageable level we're inadvertently contributing to the demise of effective communication.

What's missing? Intentional, proactive listening.

Intentional listening reveals the voice of those with whom we want to connect. And by voice, I mean the cares, aspirations and concerns of your target audience. It's the key to the most basic principle of effective communication that connection takes place in the context of shared experience.

Put another way, intentional listening will identify, outline and define the language of the closest you will ever come to a can't-miss message. And it's the key to the instigation of a whole new brand of experiences, those uniquely shared by you (or your business) and your most coveted customer.

Translation: the shortest distance between where we are today and a relationship that results in the development of stronger brands and better business is less about constructing a long list of capabilities and more about one or two questions that instigate dialogue. It's less about what we do and more about where our clients live each day. It's less about what we know and more about what we can learn if we'll listen first and then build experiences that center on ways to continue to listen.

Game-changing social media marketing plans and strategies, not to mention the path to lifetime customers, just might be less about beginning with a compelling marketing message and more about intentional listening.

A final thought:

"The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations? It's a process, not an event" Seth Godin

Editor's Note: Catch up on all of the rules of social media marketing success here.

Kent Huffman is a fractional/on-demand CMO at DigiMark Partners, which offers strategic and tactical marketing services to CEOs and owners of small and mid-sized businesses. He is a growth-oriented B2B and B2C marketing and branding executive, C-suite advisor, change agent, and published author with expertise in virtually all aspects of the marketing discipline.

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The Rules of Social Media Marketing Success: Value and Listening - CMSWire

Both artificial intelligence and social media marketing are getting a lot of attention nowadays because of their huge benefits and growth potential. They are benefiting both businesses and normal people in various ways. The investment has already been growing in the artificial intelligence, and the investment is further expected to grow by around 300%, according to the prediction made by the Forrester.

Talking about the social media platforms, more than 2.5 billion people are already using various social media platforms as per the statistic. This is nearly a 1/3 population of the whole planet. A marketer has the potential to reach a large no. of potential customers from all over the world with the help of various social media platforms. The artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing a key role in various business sectors, and now its colliding with the social media marketing.

The artificial intelligence has a long way to go; however, its thriving in a very quick pace. The entrance of the artificial intelligence has already revolutionized the social media marketing. Here are the ways how the artificial intelligence is changing the social media marketing.

There are some brands that need to publish huge volumes of posts every day. These brands also employ plenty of influencers by doing some social media outreach to promote their products. They find it difficult to decide which posts to highlight and which posts are likely to perform well among their audiences. Because its a tedious task to analyze huge volumes of contents, its more about guesswork.

The slack bots have been developed to avoid the guesswork. The bots have the ability to predict the chances of success of various contents and they can suggest the pieces of contents which have the highest possibility of doing well. Furthermore, these bots can also find the similar content on the social media and show you the performance of the content.

The Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform in the world today, is focusing a lot on the development of the artificial intelligence these days. They have recently developed the facial recognition feature, and this feature is not only the tool to enhance the tagging function of the Facebook.

This feature can be used in various ways by the brands for developing their social media marketing strategies to further increase the reach and success of their social media marketing campaign. For an instance, the hotels, restaurants, clothing stores, and others can provide the coupons to their followers who post their picture in their place. With the images publishing getting more popular these days, this feature can help the brands to stand out with their posts.

There are many creative social media marketers who are awesome at creating awesome contents. However, its not an easy task for the marketers to release the content, building schedules, maintaining content, and analyzing content. This is another reason why the artificial intelligence is so crucial for the social media marketers. The artificial intelligence can release all the pressure of analyzing and managing the content for the marketers.

Not only the use of AI will take off the pressure from the marketers, but it will also help them to grow as a successful marketer. The machine learning and other AI tools can analyze competitors performance, your historical content and performance, and much more to help you learn. These tools also provide you with the idea of what consumers want to see or want, which will help to make your every campaign an effective campaign. This can also help to publish better sponsored blog posts to reach more people with the content people want to see.

According to the study, the majority of the customers want to interact with the businesses via message nowadays. Its because its very easy to communicate with the brands via a message in comparison to the telephone. Furthermore, the customers also want businesses to respond them as quickly as possible. Its not possible to respond to a lot of customers queries quickly, and this is where the artificial intelligence is playing the role.

The social media marketers have the responsibility to engage with the customers after they are successful in getting plenty of queries regarding their posts. The artificial intelligence can help them to prioritize the queries of the customers, help them to find out whether the messages are from trolls or real users, and much more. All these tools can help the social media marketers to serve their customers in a better way; thus, increasing the chance of conversion.

The social media marketers need to listen to their followers to plan their next posts and also to make an overall strategy. The only way to find out what the customers want, the marketer needs to collect, interpret, and understand the data. However, the problem is that the massive amount of data is uploaded and downloaded each day, making it impossible for the human beings to correctly interpret the information.

The various AI tools help them to collect the valuable insights from the data collected through various social media platforms to get incredible insights on the customer taste and preferences. In the near future, the brands may also be able to find out who among their followers are wearing their brands T-shirt and using their products with the analysis of images and videos. It will help marketers create more personalized marketing campaigns.

By now, you mustve known how the artificial intelligence is changing the whole picture of the social media marketing. You must have also realized that the traditional social media marketing strategies need to be updated in order to get the success of your social media marketing campaign. If you dont combine the artificial intelligence in your social media marketing strategy, then youre likely to fail to get any return from your campaign because the competitor will be using AI to gain competitive advantage.

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When Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Marketing Collide - TNW