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Category: Marketing / Comunicazione

“Increasingly, the mass marketing is turning into a mass of niches” [Chris Anderson, Author of The Long Tail]

The content marketing schizophrenia and how to solve it

While preparing my speech for Yaşar University in Izmir about “How to create  Contents that rocks“,  I was searching some insights about the most used tactics in B2B and B2C. Looking at the “B2C Content Marketing 2014“ and “B2B Content Marketing 2014” by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, I found two interesting charts about the preferred tactics used by marketers and the most effective tactics according to industry users. Comparing the two charts I guessed that it exists a deep gap between the tactics used by marketers and the ones considered effective by them. Often the ones they are investing into are not the most effective. For example, 74% of B2C marketers consider in-person events as the most effective, but only 65% of them are using this tactic. Not only, while 88% of B2B marketers  are using social media as main tactic, it seems no one consider this as an effective tactic. In this post I’m going to show you how  B2C and B2B marketers are living a dissociate world; then I’m going to show you that this depends on a excitement about the trend more than a rational motivation. Finally I’m going to give you 5 steps in order to avoid to waste your time and budget. Lets go deep! The confidence gap in B2C   Comparing the adoption rate with the confidence one, we can see that if Social Media ranks as the preferred tactic by marketers, it is considered effective by the 63% of marketers. More, Blogs are used by more than 70% of B2C marketers but just 45% think they are effective. Mobile contents, Webinars, on-line presentations and case studies are consider much more effective than the usage rate could show. We can observe a similar gap when we look at the Social media platforms used, comparing them to the effectiveness rate. Facebook, for example, is used by 89% of marketers but only 62% consider it as an effective tool. Twitter is used by 80% of marketers but just 50% consider it effective. It’s interesting to highlight that, even if more than 40% are confident about Vimeo Effectiveness, less than 20% of B2C marketers adopt it. The confidence gap in B2B The B2B industry reveal a similar gap between implementation and confidence with some, but important, differences. First of all: B2B marketers use social media, but they don’t consider them effective at all.  Research Reports and ebooks register an higher rate of confidence but a low rate of adoption. Even in B2B industry we can observe a deep gap between platform adoption and the confidence in their effectiveness. Linkedin, for example, is largely adopted but the confidence is low. At the opposite, Vimeo – as well…

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5 new linkedin features you probably are missing

LinkedIN pays a lot of attention in enhancing services in order to incentive people to subscribe Premium accounts.In the past days Linkedin has stared to roll out new features aimed to enhance the visibility of the profile. The main ones are related to: Profile design, a support system to optimize the profile summary, a better outstanding in search results, an “open profile” option and more enhanced “Who Viewed Your Profile” Profile design The profile design has 2 significant changes. The first one is the opportunity to set a “background header image”. Following the major trend in social media tools design, a premium member now can set an header background image to customize the profile. You can choose your custom header from a set of preloaded background images or upload your own. The second one is the larger profile photo and the expanded profile header. Is it really necessary? Until people don’t reach your profile, probably it doesn’t. Anyway if you are used to share your Linkedin Profile link on your email signature, business card or other social media profiles, a customizable header can be helpful to enrich your personal or business brand. Companies paying for the employee’s premium account can ask to their employee to upload a branded header in order to aware their brand. Summary Optimization Summary is among the most important parts of your profile because it is used by LinkedIN Search Engine to discover you when people is searching by keywords. Now LinkedIN Premium Users has an assistant helping to find out the most suitable keywords to use while writing the summary. How It Works? Linkedin finds out profiles similar to you and looks at the most effective keywords used suggesting  you to include them in your Summary. About my summary, for example, LinkedIn suggests to use some keywords such as Media Planning, Marketing Communication, media communication and so on. In choosing which one to include, it must be kept in mind what is your positioning statement and which one of the suggested really fits your skills. Don’t be seducted by the siren inviting you to “appear”.  It’s important but it isn’t enough. You must be consistent with your real competences. Better outstanding in search results When you will appear in search result your profile will outstand better than non premium member. The listing will be twice as big as other results and offer more tidbits from your profile: Past and Current Jobs and the latest education degree. Open profile As a Premium Member your profile is Open. That’s mean that anyone, even who is more than three degree away, can message you for free without the need to be connected to you or to use a InMail Message.…

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4 lessons learned about networking being an expat

Moving to a foreign country is a deep change of life; not only because you’re leaving your relatives and friends (skype and social media are good tools to maintain such relationships)  but also because you have planned to set your entire social and professional life in an “unknown” environment where you don’t know people and people don’t know you. As in any situation where you’re going to reinvent yourself, you have to analyze you starting point and, hereby, to develop your “strategy”. When I moved to Turkey, I had no real job opportunity or contracts. Also, in the private sphere, I had just few connections with just a couple of my wife’s friends. Here there are some lessons I learned from my experience Attend a language school To know the language of the country where you live, obviously, It’s the first step to improve the possibility to establish personal and professional relations. Attending a language school (even if you already know the language, it wasn’t my situation :)) is for sure the first step to do. Going to the school language was my first opportunity to start to networking. The main advantage is that many foreign people like you don’t know the language, so if you know at least English (that is the most common language worldwide) you can start to make your connections. During the four months I attended at the school I met a lot of persons, even others Italian that temporary or permanently moved to Turkey. I met my firends “Paolos” (yes, it was the most common name among Italians :)) and German, American, English,  and other persons from different nationalities. In the very first month I got a network of 20-30 local connections composed by foreign people living in Izmir. Most of them were married with turkish people so, my “second degree” connection reached about 40-60 people. How to get value from these connections? People moving abroad have almost the same problems: how to get resident permit and how to find a job are the most popular and urgent questions. So, if you are able to help them they will help you. Try to be valuable in giving the information they need. Be open and listen to their problem and always try to help to solve. When you’ll need, they will help you back. Connect with institutions of your Country If you live in a main city, probably there is at least a Consulate. Usually Consulate’s employees are both “diplomatic” (sent to the country from the Foreign Ministry) and “administrative”, usually local people employed. So Consulate has a deep knowledge of the local environment and can help you in understanding how to approach a business or…

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How internet censorship impacts directly your business

From ethical and personal freedom’s point of view, internet censorship is the worst adoptable policy for a Country and this would be enough for engaging a fight against it. Ethic and freedom, anyway, are just the fingertip of the censorship’s impacts on a Society. Indeed, thanks to VPNs, OpenDNS and proxy servers the censorship can be bypassed and contents can be easily reached by users, reducing the problem of information access. The heaviest impact is related to the business and, especially, in the internet business strategy. A user using a Proxy or a VPN is able to reach and use a content, but his/her identity is twisted by the IP and user agent’s info transmitted by the browser once she/he reaches the websites. You can ask yourself “How could it impact my business? His/her reaching is more important than his/her surfing profile”. The answer is quite simple: your website stats are false and you’re no more able to understand who is your target audience and which is your target market. Censorship wastes the online advertising investments Normally online advertising tools, even Google Adwords, show ads recognizing some elements from your connections such as the IP Address. For instance, try to connect to a website with your real IP address and then through a VPN. You can see that the shown advertisements will be different according the network you are using. That means that someone is paying to show you ads created for a target that you are not. They are wasting their money because you are using a VPN to avoid a censorship. What if you are that advertiser? Censorship affects your website analytics Since YouTube and Twitter has been banned in Turkey, the number of VPN connections are increasingly gone up. One of my projects, targeted to Italian speaking Turks aims to reach this segment especially in Turkey. Comparing the Country Source before and after the banning, I registered a different distribution that let me supposing an increasing use of VPN software. The number of sessions from Turkey were used to be about 50% of totals. In March Twitter and YouTube have been banned, the incoming session from Turkey went down to 23,9% in April from the 44% in February. Looking at other countries, I observed that visits from UK, Switzerland and UK grew up. Especially UK in April generated more than 2% of total visits when it was used to represent the 0.7% in previous months. Furthermore looking at “New Visits”, the 80% of UK visitors were New Visitors in February. The percentage fell down to 28% in April, showing that more and more users virtually connected from UK has been becoming returning visitors. Censorship generates uncertainty and…

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