Community Marketing Blog

5 1/2 Things I Am Not Going To Tell You About Social Media

	By Andrew Jenkins October 31, 2009 Volterra Consulting, Founder Biography	Connect.Follow.Network.

There has been so much written and recorded about social media in historic and social media channels.  The coverage in the various blogs and tweets runs the gamut between opportunism and relevance. You’ll find the 3, 5 or 10 things you need to know about twitter etiquette, making the most of twitter, how to drive traffic to you blog, how to get thousands of followers in a matter of days or weeks and, most importantly, how to make money using social media. 

5 Criteria For Qualifying Social Media Consultants

By Andrew Ballenthin October 20, 2009 President, Sol Solutions Biography

Connect.Follow.Network.

Despite having a time line that stretches over a decade it seems that it's only over the past few years that social media consultants and guru's have become popular new job titles. How is one to measure what their level of expertise is if their is no national or internationally standard for measuring quality standards and professional competency?

6 Tips for Creating a Successful Marketing Plan

Writing and implementing a marketing plan is essential for the success of any business. There are many resources available that define the basic elements of a marketing plan such as those provided by SCORE  and the SBA so this article does not attempt to review these elements. Rather, the author seeks to outline 6 tips for creating a successful marketing plan and impress upon the reader the importance of taking the time to plan and monitor your marketing efforts.

Social Networking for the “Too Young To Retire (TYTR)” Generation

Chances are that you know someone who is “Too Young To Retire (TYTR)” and by extension, may be considered, “Too Old To be Hired (TOTH)”. This unenviable but common status has the capacity of becoming more common as long as the economy is stalling.

Plenty of reasons for people being at this stage and age is a symptom, the key reason is our ever increasing dependency on technology and the rate of technological evolution. The direct consequences is judging present and future employees for their mastery of technology, hence associating youth with newer skills and making life experience redundant at an ever-increasing rate.

An Understated Hero: How LinkedIn Is A Global Village Of Goodwill

By Andrew Ballenthin October 20, 2009 President, Sol Solutions Biography

Connect.Follow.Network.

Free: job posting, surveys, networking, search engine profiling, news posting, supplier and client matching, group discussions and much more. Where? LinkedIn. For who? Over 50 million members. Wow... when you think about it LinkedIn has an online population greater than Australia or Spain all engaging in "free trade". That's a huge amount of commerce with no strings attached.

Is The Enterprise Ready For Social Media?

	By Andrew Jenkins October 19, 2009 Volterra Consulting, Founder Biography	Connect.Follow.Network.

I was at a Salesforce event last week where they demonstrated the integration of their platform with Facebook and Twitter. The more impressive of their two examples was Twitter.  With it a tweet could be captured with a customer profile to initiate a trouble ticket or sales lead. While this was interesting it still seems to be lacking something.

5 Reasons Why Nobody Comments On Your Blogs and Posts

By Andrew Ballenthin October 14, 2009 President, Sol Solutions Biography

Connect.Follow.Network.

The other day I was surprised to find a number of multi-billion and mega-million dollar companies that did not have much dialog on their blogs while I was doing my book research book on social media monetization. It was quite stirring to see companies that put effort into having a social media presence not having huge engagement. It's not what you would expect right?

A Community of Game Changers

This post is not about social media or marketing. It’s about community.

I have had the pleasure of being a part of an online community of game changers defying outmoded business models and testing new ones.

It began with the sharing of a doctoral thesis and turned into a community of 470+ people from 45 countries sharing ideas and contributing to a book on business models entitled Business Model Generation.  

To Tweet or Not To Tweet - Part III - How Do You Define Success

    I hope you enjoyed my last two Twitter Articles.  Based on the emails, feedback and comments you did…  In case you have not had a chance to read them, here they are

To Tweet or Not to Tweet - http://bit.ly/B3Zc1
To Tweet or Not to Tweet-Part II- Do Not Jump Ship Just Yet - http://bit.ly/tWtpk

A lot of questions were based around success of social media and obviously Twitter.  I have gotten several new clients that MAY of started from Social Media.  The old adage it takes 13 touches to get prospects comfortable and in a position to trust you.  Well Social Media can accelerate the touches and they count.

Website Optimization and Conversion Rate Killers: 4 Avoidable Mistakes

More and more businesses are realizing that to stay ahead of the competition they need to pay attention to, and devote resources to strategies and tactics for “website optimization.” The goal of website optimization is to ultimately drive more traffic to your website. However, I learned of some recent research which indicates that certain techniques of website optimization can also influence click through rates, conversion rates, and campaign response rates.

On October 5th and 6th, I attended MarketingSherpa’s  Annual B2B Marketing “Summit,” a gathering of some of the best and brightest minds in the marketing industry. One of the speakers, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of a company called Marketing Experiments, was a particularly engaging speaker. I found his presentation entitled “More Revenue for Less Money-The Top Five Ways To Increase the Performance of Your Lead Generation Program” very informative, so wanted to share some highlights.