2010 May | Justin Levy

Honoring America’s Heroes

May 31, 2010 By Justin Levy 3 Comments

Thank you to all of the men and women who have paid the ultimate price to keep us safe. Also, let us not forget the families of those in our armed forces who have to learn how to cope with the sacrifice that their father, daughter, sister, husband or other family member has decided to make on behalf of their country.

We shouldn’t only remember the fallen members of our armed services on Memorial Day because they didn’t choose to only protect us one day out of the year. Ensure that you’re always keeping these folks in your thoughts, memories and prayers.

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Photo Credit: nukeit1

Filed Under: Holidays, Miscellaneous Tagged With: Holidays, military, Miscellaneous

Not Responding to Alarms

May 12, 2010 By Justin Levy 21 Comments

Early yesterday morning while walking my dog, Sasha, I noticed a vehicle in my parking lot had been vandalized. The car was sitting on two slowly buckling milk crates and it was missing all four of its wheels. As I walked past that vehicle I realized that another vehicle beside it had one of its windows smashed. I called out management offices as I was heading into the office to alert them and get the police en route.

Towards the end of the day I ended up running into the property manager and inquired as to what he suspected happened and whether or not there had been other problems reported on the property. He told that me that it appeared to be targeted to the main vehicle because it had expensive tires and rims. I was surprised that my wife or I hadn’t woken up during the night when the vehicle’s alarm, presumably, went off while the car was being jacked up and the tires were being stolen. The property manager explained that the resident reported hearing his alarm go off but had just silenced it from his apartment figuring that it had been accidentally tripped by weather or an animal. Had he actually looked to see why the alarm was going off, it is possible that he could’ve interrupted the crime.

Besides ensuring that there was nothing left in my vehicles that could attract criminals, I began thinking about how oblivious we are to car alarms nowadays. We have become so accustomed to hearing alarms buzzing that many times we won’t even glance in the direction of the alarm while walking through a parking lot. Have you ever done that? I know I sure have. Now, related that to your marketing program. Are you ignoring the alarms going off all around you? Do you even realize that alarms may be sounding crying for your attention?

Identifying the Alarms

Being able to identify the alarm and knowing what you need to be listening for is the first step. What types of alarms should you be aware of? They can come in a variety of formats but some of them may include:

Declining responses to a marketing campaign
An increase in spam complaints
Continued lack of engagement from your community
A decline in RSS or email subscribers to your blog
A lack of growth in followers, fans, or subscribers

These are just a few of the many alarms that could be sounding that you continue to hit the silence button on. Your alarms may be different than those that I have listed. Exactly what the alarms are really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you identify them so that you can properly respond to them before it’s too late.

Responding to the Alarms

So, you’ve identified the alarm, now what? You should develop both a strategic and tactical plan to address the issue and respond to it. The level of the response will be dictated on what the alarm actually is and based on how long you might’ve ignored it. Much like a progressive disease, the longer it goes untreated, the harder it may be to correct. What are some ways you can respond to the alarm(s)?

Switch up the day and time you send your email marketing
Review your site analytics over a period of time. Identify where the decline began or where it started to level off. What were you doing (or not doing) during that time?
Did you recently update your blog and forget to add the “Subscribe” button back? Yep, I’ve done that before.
Have you ever analyzed what type of content you produce? Is it one-way push? Are you promoting others? Do you only retweet others work?

What’s Next

The next steps are to continue monitoring the changes you have implemented and track whether or not they’ve been successful. Always monitor, evaluate, experiment and adapt. This will ensure that you’re staying alerted to alarms before it becomes too late. Much like the resident who lost all four of their tires, when you realize that you shouldn’t have hit the silence button, it may be too late. Worse case scenario is that you’re so blind to the alarms that you slowly bleed your entire community or customers and have nothing left. Just a hint: try to avoid that from happening. It’s usually not healthy for your business.

Do you silence the alarms going on around you?

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Photo Credit: wallyg

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: Business, Marketing, Social Media

The Joint Chiefs of Staff 2010 Social Media Strategy

May 10, 2010 By Justin Levy 16 Comments

One of my areas of interest continues to be how social media is being used by government, at all levels (Federal, State and local), military, and politics. We have seen plenty of examples of how government and politics (sometimes one of the same) are using social media. We have even seen how some branches of the military, such as the Air Force, are using social media. But, what we don’t usually get to learn about is how these groups organize their social media efforts. Following the social accounts is helpful but gaining insight into why and how they’re engaging in social media begins to allow us to shape the way that we can measure their success (or failures) online.

Two main documents will usually provide you with the needed information to begin to form this basis: the organization’s social media policies/guidelines and their social media strategy. The first step is finding out if they even have either of those 2 documents. The next step is exploring the documents to find out what their constraints are, why they’re getting involved with social media and how they hope to benefit from it.

While there are an abundance of social media policies floating around online (check out Coca-Cola’s, for example), it becomes harder to find published social media strategies. That’s why I was surprised and excited to find that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had published the Chairman’s 2010 social media strategy. You can check out the full social media strategy below.

Don’t know who the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Chairman is? Wikipedia defines the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “a group of military leaders in the United States armed forces who advise the civilian government of the United States.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff are the Chiefs of each of the four military branches and are overseen by the Chairman who is appointed by the President of the United States and is, by law, the highest ranking military officer and principal military advisor to the President.

Now that we’ve had our short history lesson, did you know that the Chairman, Admiral Mullen, is actually active on multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube? Not only is Admiral Mullen and his staff active on a variety of social networks, but their involvement is being guided by, according to their strategy, four main goals:

ENGAGE – Begin engaging in interactive conversations with our followers and post more personalized content about the Chairman.

ALIGN – Align the content creation process for social media with Chairman’s Top 3 Priorities, assimilate social media content creation into existing Join Staff processes and products, and involve the entire public affairs shop, speech writers, editors, CAG, and Aides.

DRIVE – Use social media content to get in front of events, trips, and testimony to lead the discussion and focus questions.

EXPAND – Continue to grow the Chairman’s online audience and identify new social media platforms to engage from.

For each of these categories they have identified a list of objectives and, where appropriate, a list of goals to achieve. One of the objectives that caught my eye was under their goal of providing “social media business cards at all events as a source of more information.”

I think it’s great to not only know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have a social media strategy but that they have published it online for all of us to peruse, share and discuss.

What say you about their strategy?

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Filed Under: Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: military, Social Media, Social Media Strategy

Email Marketing and Social Media: 2 Peas in a Pod

May 9, 2010 By Justin Levy 15 Comments

This was originally posted over on the New Marketing Labs blog. I thought you’d find the upcoming webinar useful too so I wanted to share it here. I hope that you can join us!

Are you desperately trying to figure out where your email marketing and social media efforts come together to form a seamless digital marketing strategy?
If you’re nodding your head up and down as fast as you can then we’re here to help! On Wednesday, May 12th at 2:00p EST I’ll be hosting a webinar along with DJ Waldow of Blue Sky Factory to yap about new media strategy and how social media and email marketing can work together.

During the webinar you’ll:

Gain an understanding of the new media market and its benefits
Learn why email marketing is the digital glue and how it easily integrates with social media
Take away strategies and tools for measuring results and using them to optimize future campaigns
Have access to examples of real-world marketers using these channels effectively
Walk away feeling EXCITED about email marketing and social media

What makes me so excited for this webinar is how passionate and knowledgeable DJ and the entire team over at Blue Sky Factory is when it comes to email marketing. Every time I chat with anyone from their team or hear them speak at our events or other conferences, I always learn something new.

So, will you join DJ and I from the comfort of your office, bed or local coffee shop for our webinar on 5/12 and come chat all things email marketing and social media?

Make sure you bring your questions, problems and confusion with you to the webinar and we’ll do our best to deal with everything you can throw at us. Let’s just make sure it’s about email marketing and we’ll be fine. Deal?