I’m told that translators have some interesting challenges when it comes to marketing. Although companies regularly employ in-house translators to deal with localization, a big chunk of the market is handled by freelancers who own their own business. In many cases, the client doing the hiring cannot independently evaluate whether or not the work done is of a high quality, so it isn’t as easy as providing a portfolio of previous work. Often, clients don’t understand that translators have specific areas of expertise – much like marketing and technical writers – and that hiring someone isn’t as simple as finding someone who can read and write the languages in question.

So what works well? Having excellent references. Demonstrating your understanding of a particular market segment (think med tech, or legal, or software). Exhibiting superior communication skills – after all, a translator is hired to communicate on behalf of a client or company.

I hope my presentation can shed a little light on using today’s web tools. While this presentation has been tailored to the needs of freelance translators, I think many of the strategies and action items are relevant to professional service providers.

Social Media 1-2-3

The social media world is still abuzz about Twitter. How can simple 140-character messages help you to inform and interact with your target market?

Here are three steps to get you going with this potentially powerful marketing tool:

Step One: Create your account: It might seem obvious, but you’re going to need a Twitter account (and possibly more than one – even if you plan on tweeting from only one). Head over to Twitter.com and get started. When possible, use your real name as your Twitter handle (the @username part). Then add your real name so that others can find you easily. Use a password that’s tough to break and an email address you check frequently.

It’s a good idea to let Twitter check if your friends are already online by comparing your email contacts. You can also check in with other folks you’re connected to in social networks. It’s your choice whether or not to follow the celebs that Twitter suggests, but might help you get a start following some folks that tweet regularly. Once you’re finished registering your account, it’s time to finish editing your settings.

Click the Settings link. Inside settings, you have six tabs:

• Account
• Password
• Mobile
• Notices
• Picture
• Design

We’re going to edit your account, picture and design. When you get some free time down the road, it would be good for you to check out the others as well.

Under account, check the information and update your time zone (unless you are in Greenland). Add the web address to your site or blog. Add your location and language. For your bio, try to write a short and witty synopsis of you, what you tweet, what you do and why someone might be interested in you. It’s social media, so it’s okay for your bio to be creative – remember, you’re trying to connect with other real people. When you’re finished, click save.

Under picture, we’ll upload a small snapshot of you so people know who’s tweeting. Try and pick a tightly cropped shot since you’ve got a small window to fill. And despite how cute they are, use your picture – not your kids, your pets, or your cartoon avatar. We want to see you. When you’ve added your photo, click save.

Under design, it’s time to get creative. Your best bet is to create a custom background using of the many tools available on the Web. Make sure your background has your Web address – Twitter is even more successful when it’s used as a tool to get people back to your home base on the Web. When you’re finished making changes, click save.

Step Two: Connect with others: Now you’re ready to get going. You can fire off a few introductory tweets, but you might want to try and make a few connections first. Start by finding folks that you know are on Twitter – allowing Twitter to compare your email contacts and other networks is a great way to start. Look for any friends you know are using Twitter. When you find someone, click Follow to begin seeing their tweets in your Twitter stream.

Search for other contacts by using the search field on the right side of your Twitter site, looking for keywords that interest you. Take a spin through the trending topics and see if any tweets jump out at you.

When you’ve got a handful of folks you’re following, see who they’re following and who else is following them – chances are higher that they’re legit (meaning they’re not spammers) and that they may share some similar interests with you.

Tip: Don’t be surprised if you have some followers before you have sent out any tweets. Some might be spammers – if so, you’ll want to block them and report them to Twitter – but others might have found something of interest in your bio, your location, or might have matched their own email contacts with your address.

Step Three: Share great content: Why would someone want to follow you in Twitter? Because you provide a resource, a wealth of information that interests them and that they can share with others. The absolute bare minimum should be a 50/50 balance in content. Half of the time, you need to share content that is useful but in no way self-promotes or references your marketing interests. Half of the time, you can gently lead your audience into articles, posts, or other links that cast you in a favorable light. Anything more heavy handed quickly becomes, to borrow a term from Chris Brogan, social media’s version of carpet bombing. Become the go-to person on the Web for all information in your focus area – whether it’s thought leadership within your industry or reasoned commentary on news events of a particular bent – and you will get followers who appreciate your work, share your links and are eager to interact.

We’d love your feedback on our new series – Social Media 1-2-3 – here on the blog at Pixel/Point Press. Don’t miss last week’s article on drafting a social media strategy. And come back next week when we look at three common Twitter terms explained: retweets, DMs and hashtags.

To read more articles in this series, please bookmark this category.

My husband is a history geek. He just finished his master’s in Middle Eastern History and is now starting a Ph. D. in Political Science. As such, he’s prone to share tidbits of “interesting” information that he comes across during his research.

Husband: “Hey, I just found out what Saddam Hussein did before he became the leader of the Baath Party.”

Me: “Marketing?”

Husband: “No. He was a torturer.”

Me: “There’s a lot of overlap.”

I think I was at least half right.

On that note, I’ll take a minute to share a great post by a true social media expert – Chris Brogan. His post “How to Market an Offline Event Online” provides great basic information for anyone looking to promote a live event. But the real gold nugget we can all take away is something that isn’t said frequently enough:

Without being “that guy” (and never forget, I mean this for either gender), mentioning your event is easy across your Twitter, your Facebook, your LinkedIn status, and all the other social sites that make sense to promote. A word of caution: this gets close to what feels like carpet-bombing, so go gently. In fact, out in front of such a promotional effort, make sure you’re doing your good deeds and promoting others, and sharing other good information. People don’t like a tireless self-promoter, but they don’t mind someone who shares the good stuff, even when some of it’s their own.

Keep an eye on subtlety and make sure your self-promotion is only part of the content you’re sharing. Otherwise, it’s just torture.

86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way.

Social media’s uptake as part of a complete marketing strategy is heartening and reflects estimates early this year that a larger portion of dwindling marketing budgets were being allocated to the social media sphere.

But now, the bad (and in my opinion, it’s really quite bad):

In fact, 84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs. Even less encouraging, more than 40% of respondents said they didn’t even know whether they could track ROI from their social tools.

I’ve already heard several arguments to explain the phenomenon.

• Companies are allocating so little to social media that it’s cheaper not to track results.
• You can’t measure the quality of the interactions, so it’s irrelevant to track social media ROI.
• You can’t measure the impact of branding and thought leadership.

In my opinion, these arguments just don’t hold water. And I think it’s downright scary that companies are investing in tools that they can’t (or, more accurately, don’t think they can) track. Social media marketing ROI breaks down into two basic categories: concrete financial outcome complete with hard numbers and softer trending that may or may not have stats to back it up.

What’s really behind this issue? In my opinion, it’s that most companies, consultants and non-profits don’t have concrete goals that can be measured within a social media campaign. It never ceases to amaze me how many clients we’ve had that can’t specify a goal for their SMM efforts. Common responses include:

• Getting the name out there. (Out where? What’s the target market? What number of new site visitors is considered a success?)
• Driving web traffic. (Unless you make your money off of page views that you sell to advertisers, Web traffic alone won’t make you any money.)
• Engaging our users. (Let’s be specific – is launching a blog and getting readers and subscribers enough? Are comments critical to you? What about how often your users share your links?)

Without concrete goals, there is no way to track your strategy’s ROI. I understand that it takes more time and costs more, but if your strategy is a success, don’t you need to know that? If your traffic comes entirely from LinkedIn, do you need to keep posting in Facebook? If your PowerPoint presentations on SlideShare.net go viral, but your YouTube videos are a flop, do you really want to keep putting time and money into producing video?

Our intial consultations include working through what might appear to be a simple worksheet. After a lot of experience, we’ve found it to be an extremely useful technique that encourages our clients to quantify (or at least qualify) their goals. We cover:

• Campaign goals that can be measured
• Target market(s)
• Other influential sites
• Competition – both direct competitors and others vying for your audience’s attention
• Content
• Media to be generated in house
• Media to be crowdsourced from users
• Networks to be used for distribution
• Resources available for this campaign – financial, people power and time to build a buzz

Are you getting ready to launch a social media marketing campaign? What tools do you have in place to track the effects? What benchmarks will you use to evaluate the outcome? I’d love to hear your thoughts on SMM strategy and the importance of tracking ROI in the comments below.

While I think every brand has to draw their own conclusions, I think the following video by Erik Qualman has some startling statistics that need to be given consideration.

Fan pages are Facebook’s response to marketing. Unlike groups, fan pages are (in theory) created and administered by an official representative of the business, celebrity, etc. Fan pages allow you to share and leverage content created inside and outside Facebook with dedicated followers. And when you’ve got news, it’s easy to send a message to all your followers using Facebook’s interface.

There’s a fine art to making a fan page that works for you. Instead of creating yet another web entity that you must update and moderate regularly, carefully tool your page so that content is distributed automatically and updates regularly.

Here are five tips for making the most of your Facebook fan page:

• Provide usable content: For many of us, the heart of a Facebook fan page is the content we’re producing elsewhere. If you’ve got a blog, you’ve got content: make sure your blog’s RSS feed is loading into your FB fan page automatically. Add to that regular content with occassional Facebook-exclusive updates – otherwise blog readers who have already viewed your writing have no other reason to visit your page.
  

  Involver.com's amazing free tools for Facebook fan page functionality

• Automate: Unless you’ve got a lot of free time to continually cross-post all content in multiple social media outlets, you should take a few steps to automate the process. My favorite tools for sharing content on a FB fan page are created by Involver. Aside from the premium services they offer, there are a wealth of free tools to greatly increase the functionality of your FB fan page.
• Be human: One aspect of social media that is continually forgotten is the importance of presenting a human side to your company. When you get new fans, welcome them – on a regular basis. When people post discussion questions, answer them. You’ve opened a forum for your clients and customers. Most of us know better than to ignore a waiting room full of prospective clients, yet I frequently see pages and companies who fail to respond to clients online. If you can’t (or won’t) respond to your followers, don’t build the page. It will hurt you more than it will help you if you appear to ignore consumers.
• Raid your archives: Content is king – so what to do if you don’t have any content to share? Don’t underestimate yourself. If you’ve got PowerPoint presentations, use slideshare.net and an RSS feed to leverage them on your FB page. If you’ve got screen captures of your interface in action, use them as photos in your fan page. And don’t forget to encourage your fans to submit their own content – blog posts about your company, images of your product in use, case studies, success stories, testimonials – online or not, we’re still taking the marketing basics and putting them to work for us.
• Make a splash: If you’ve played around in Facebook long enough, you’re familiar with the alerts you receive whenever anyone does anything anywhere. The second your publish your fan page and become a fan of yourself, all your friends will know. Your message will spread virally. And that’s a good thing. But consider saving this one-time boost when you’ve got a big event on the horizon – a conference or trade show, a new product release, etc. Even if you don’t have something big coming up in the near future, take advantage of Facebook’s ability to delay publication while you get your ducks in a row. Post content so that your first viewers have something to read – you want to reward them for being first to the fan page and give them a reason to join and share your link.

If you haven’t already, consider getting to work on building your fan page. Once you’ve got one up and running, please post the link in the comments so we can take a look at your work and give you a little traffic – and possibly new fans. And check back next week when I take a look at five fan pages that are generating a buzz – I’ll present case studies so we can all learn some new tips and tricks.

I’ll be presenting on how and why to use social media tools for marketing, as well as a case study of one company in Israel that has had great results in a business-to-business format.

PR Newswire invitation

The presenters look great! I hope to cover the basics of using social media for business:

• Corporate blogging: blog benefits, who should be blogging, what to post
• Twitter: benefits, how to use it, what makes Twitter different
• Web communities: user groups, forums, conditional knowledgebases – how to use them and what the potential benefits are
• All the rest: webinars, videos, newsletters and more

The amazing thing is that one Israeli company is already doing all of this and more – and they are doing it well. We’ll learn about their successes.

My hope is that all seminar attendees will go home with something they can implement, whether it’s one new idea or an entirely new strategy for marketing on the Web. There’s also a question and answer session after the presentations.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Sample from Adobe "Real or Fake" campaign

Facebook, I assume, has motivated some large companies to post their Facebook marketing success stories on the Facebook Marketing Solutions fan page. A case study posted by Adobe is fantastic. From their study:

To do this, we launched “Real or Fake”, a game embedded on our Facebook page that challenged users to determine whether a photo was real or “fake” (edited with Photoshop).

The game lasted for 4 weeks, with 5 photos being posted each week. If a photo had been edited with Photoshop, a tutorial showed how that was done. And, at the end of the game, users were presented with … 3 primary call-to-actions: 1) “Buy Now”, 2) “Play Again” and 3) “Share” the game with others.

Results: This game launched in November 2008 and ran for one month. Social ads on Facebook ran during the first two weeks. About 10% of our page visitors played the game and, of those who played, 6% clicked the “Share” button at the end of the game, and 6% clicked “Buy Now” at the end of the game. Due to this game and media placement, our page received over 6,000 new fans too.

Visit their guest post to learn more about the campaign. While you’re in there, check out what Ben & Jerry’s has been up to.

• HERZLIYA: May 7, 14, 21 from 10 a.m. to noon
• TEL AVIV: April 16, 23, 30 from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.
• MODIIN: April 19, 26, May 3 from 1-3 p.m.
• MODIIN: April 21, 29 and May 5 from 8-10 p.m.
• Classes are also forming in Haifa, Jerusalem, Raanana, Beit Shemesh, Netanya and Beer Sheva

For more information or to register, e-mail us or call at 054-225-7879.

Class outline:

Session 1: An Introduction to Social Media

• Starting a blog
• Using Facebook and LinkedIn for professional networking
• Using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for marketing
• Tips and tricks to get started quickly and effectively
• Three ideas you (and your competition) haven’t tried yet
• What not to do – common mistakes and how to avoid them

Session 2: Promoting your Social Media Efforts

• How to promote a blog
• RSS/Social bookmarking
• SEO – Crafting effective headlines and tags, using XML sitemaps
• Facebook groups and fan pages, LinkedIn user groups, Twitter tweets, FriendFeed

Session 3: Advanced Social Media Techniques

• Creating custom blog templates
• Developing Facebook apps
• Plugins and more – bringing it all together
• What’s next? Staying ahead of the curve
• What to do when that’s not enough to beat your competition

Details:

• Classes are taught in English
• You do not need a laptop to attend
• You will receive a cheshbonit mas

Cost:

• NIS 250 for all three sessions
• NIS 100 for a single session