So, here’s a guide to inbound marketing …

Apparently sales of records by hat-fan Jay Kay have flatlined over recent years in quite a few countries, so the band is naturally keen to stimulate their fan base into more sales action. By monitoring Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, YouTube Insights, Last.fm, Alexa and Social Mention its digital minders have built up a huge amount of data for Jamiroquai‘s record label and booking agent.

“We know where people are, which pages they look at and for how long and their demographics,” says the chief digital minder. “Jay Kay has just played two festivals in South America, partly because the Facebook analytics demonstrated that there was an enormous fanbase over there.

“If you were looking at CD sales alone, the level of piracy in some countries would mean you wouldn’t know where half your fans were.”

It’s clear that it pays big dividends to be a digital hunter-gatherer. You know exactly where and who your target audience is – IF you’re prepared to spend the time doing the digital donkey work.

I’m amazed at how many people won’t commit time to this sort of groundwork, but they’ll happily spend large chunks of cash on outbound marketing with no clear idea of who’s actually at the receiving end. These days you get a far better return by putting in the time.

Harnessing brand ambassadors
Talking about the power balance between bloggers/end users and brands, she says that brands need to wake up to the fact that they don’t own their brand any more. They now need to find out the best ways to select and nurture their ambassadors among their fans, not only to make the most out of their love and criticism, but also to focus on their products and not just their “name”. That way they’ll achieve broader impact.

Crowdsourcing
Collaboration with end users not only solidifies the bond a brand has with its customers, but is also provides valuable insight on what matters to them. Don’t be scared of asking their views.

GenY
If you don’t cultivate the younger generation, you’ll turn your brand into a museum. (Scotch Whisky was sooo close to doing that until a few years ago.)

To blog or not to blog
Having a blog is a waste of time for a brand. Instead they should focus on their Facebook page and work with bloggers.

What about your store?
A store is a place you train people to love your brand, look at Apple stores with their Genius Bars.

Think relational not transactional!
The transaction is the result of everything else, not the aim.

And just the day after I wrote this I came upon a brilliant example of a luxury brand getting it so right. Jimmy Choo’s treasure hunt  campaign using Foursquare is just inspired – AND it produced sales transactions as well as engaging with its target audience. Classy stuff.

When I read that statement I wondered what on earth the blogger was talking about, but I’m beginning to see. Let’s put the scale of Facebook and social media in context first.

The other day I attended a seminar on Social Media and, even though I don’t need convincing that it’s a phenomenon that’s here to stay, I was completely amazed by this short video “Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think”. Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the stats.

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network

Years to Reach 50 millions Users: 

• Radio (38 Years),
• TV (13 Years),
• Internet (4 Years),
• iPod (3 Years)
• …Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months
• …iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth

People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

Only 14% trust advertisements

Like I said, amazing growth that’s changing the internet and the way we use it. And here’s the little plug-in from Facebook that’s going to change it even more.

Facebook has now given Web publishers the ability to include a “Likes” button with each post or article on their site, like the one I’ve put at the foot of this post on my other blog (WordPress isn’t letting me add one here). When you click “Likes” for the article, a link to it gets published to the news feeds of your friends on Facebook, so this little feature has the potential to drive a lot of new traffic to your content. Clever, innit? Especially when apparently we’re all now so keen on peer recommendations.

You’ll find the “Likes” plug-in featured on YouTube and Google, so they clearly think it’s a good idea. With that amount of internet muscle on its side Facebook can inject itself into just about every part of the web.

There’s lots more coming from Facebook to enable its world domination, but much of it too geeky for me to understand. If you want to know more, here are some good blogs to start from.

Right now I’m off to add “Likes” buttons to more of my blog posts and watch for the extra traffic rolling in.

Sure, the little ads that appear in the right hand column of your Facebook profile (and always seem to be targeting me with tooth whitening services or vitamin supplements) can be very efficient at reaching the right market for a product. I’ve even succumbed to their insistent messaging and got my tooth whitening sesh booked with the dentist this Friday! But until today I hadn’t seen anything in promotional terms that really took me by storm.

Now that’s all history. This gem came to me via Twitter. The tweet in question came from Maisa Dabus, a lady who works in PR and marketing in Sweden and she always seems to find interesting stuff, so when I read this I followed the link and I thoroughly recommend that you do the same:

IKEA’s brilliant Facebook campaign – How did I miss this? So creative! http://post.ly/DOhh

If you’re not inspired by what IKEA has done on Facebook using only its available features, you need to go and talk to some teenagers -they’ll explain to you how people use Facebook and how clever this is.

Right now I’m letting this fine viral marketing example bubble at the back of my mind while I tinker about with my invite to Google Wave and try to work out just what can be done with it before I get left behind.

LinkedIn 

Uses – recruitment, credentials check, source of useful advice, get access/intro, find target customers, build awareness, promote events. Results are measurable and trackable. 

Complete your profile – aim for 100%, include a picture 

Summary and experience – include prior jobs – this gives searchability, displays your roles and talent 

Recommendations – ask people to recommend you, but not too many or it’s not believable 

Public profile – change it from a number to your name – e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/in/christinegupta

 Websites listed – in EDIT choose ‘other’ and enter description or title of your blog or website

Status – update it regularly and it will elicit direct responses to what you say you’re working on

Groups – join a few to give more of an idea of who you are, your business focus. This can add credibility – terrific mining source for new customers, partners, employees, beta testers.

Questions and Answers – Qs can yield good results e.g. finding Amiando online ticketing saved a client £1100, also good for general marketing advice. Answers can help build your profile and don’t forget to rate other people’s.

Paid account – gives you 15 introductions a month, 3 in-mails (these are like getting a courier delivery – you’re more likely to open them), OpenLink service, get featured in searches

Apps can be added to profiles to promote events, offers, news, services, products – events, buzz, Slideshare

Company profile – use it as a shop window, area of influence

Twitter – useful links

100 Twitter tools

5 top Twitter presentations

How to Twitter like a pro

Uses – promote events/news e.g. new web site or feature, attract web traffic, find useful contacts, complain

Twitter clients let you better exploit/organise Twitter your way – TweetDeck, Twhirl, Tweetie for iPhone

Profile – make sure you include good info, link to blog, customise it with background photo

Retweet -  use RT to spread messages wider and always thank anyone who retweets one of your messages 

Links – shorten them via www.tiny.cc and provide a description so that people know what they’re linking to 

Tweet Burner – use it to see how many people follow your links

Use # tags – reach new followers in certain areas by inserting # in front of terms e.g. #cloud computing. That way your message shows up in their Twitter alerts.

Search – use it to find new people to follow or if there’s a interest in a particular topic that you should be watching out for

What made it a good story is that our turnover has doubled in the last year and it’s still growing. Not bad for a two person partnership in a recession. So you may be wondering how we managed that … 

We can’t claim that it’s all come about through good planning, but our decision to become more focused on particular technologies has certainly played a major part.

In fact, I can pin it all down to my first visit to First Tuesday away back in 2000. I was amazed by the spirit of collaboration and sharing that prevailed between IT entrepreneurs, vendors and VCs – proper networking was bringing positive results, giving good karma definitely paid off. We were introduced to a whole world of new technologies – knowledge management and rich internet applications were the first for us. Since then we’ve developed our technology networks at every opportunity and now Cloud Computing is the hot topic – with me organising CloudCamp and helping clients to bring new cloud platforms to market.

2000 was when we also got our introduction to electric cars – I drove the Ford Think electric car for over a year – and that opened our eyes to the future for the auto industry. We’ve been evangelising for electric cars and sustainable transport ever since and that has also given us valuable connections in the world of sustainable technologies.

Our focus now is not just on sustainable, but on disruptive technologies too – that includes anything that shakes up the current business model, like cloud computing, LED lighting and micro-generation of energy. You can see that reflected in our updated client list. Most of our current clients produce services or products that address the growing needs of today’s business world – saving energy, cutting costs and CO2 emissions, improving performance, managing credit. Working on all of these has made it an incredibly busy year, but very rewarding with our networks for each technology starting to overlap and cross-pollenate each other.

These days when I’m introduced to a new contact my refreshed elevator pitch gets them hooked immediately.

“So what does the Gupta Partnership do?”

“We’re marketing and PR specialists in sustainable and disruptive technologies.” And we’re loving it!

For a social networking fan like me, 61 out of 415 is not exactly a terrific ranking, but even at this modest level Twitter has been able to produce results for me. In my online persona of Mrsboogie I’ve been able to start dialogue with some bloggers and industry figures who would otherwise be far too high-falutin’ for a marketing hunter-gatherer like me. I’ve also managed to get myself onto a list of ‘people to follow on Twitter’ if you’re interested in the topic of Cloud Computing and that’s quite some achievement for a self-confessed non-geek. Admittedly it’s not the gateway to everything, but it means that any time I tweet about something cloud-related, it’s picked up by a group of the very people I want to reach. So even if my followers presently number but a mere 80+, that’s a good core group to be able to contact instantly and I’ll put in some work on growing that group when I start organising CloudCamp Scotland for 25 March this year. In fact, I’ll report on the growth of my followers by the time that event comes round.

Having explained how Twitter works for me, I’m amazed by the figures in this US marketing study which finds that 37% of small businesses don’t use social networking, so they’re not even using Facebook or LinkedIn or any of the other online communities. But as a friend of mine observed, “I wouldn’t blame the actual companies that are not aware of it. How can you if you are in retail or manufacturing and busy to keep your business afloat against the slowdown of the economy and the threat of China?” Fair point.

Encouragingly 25% say that they plan to use it more for online marketing, a higher percentage than for any other online marketing format. When most businesses are short of money it makes so much sense to leverage these free global services, especially when you can measure the effects so quickly and instantly establish dialogue with the people who are interested in what you have to say.

If you want to see Twitter in action, follow Mrsboogie and I’ll show you how to make it work for your business.

When Nick Kellet got in touch with a former co-worker through LinkedIn, he was interested to hear that she was teaching Chinese to the inventors of the board game Cranium to help them work with their factory in China. Kellet had recently left his job to publish a board game of his own, called GiftTRAP. His friend arranged an introduction to the factory owners in Shanghai, and soon Kellet had a manufacturer for his game. Next he turned to photo-sharing site Flickr and found images from more than 500 different photographers that he could legally use for his game. Once GiftTRAP had been produced, Kellet used social networks to find buyers at Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us. “It’s not easy to get into those places,” he says. “You get stonewalled at reception.” Then he plugged into BoardGameGeek to connect with influential players in the tabletop-gaming community and get his product into the hands of reviewers. The long hours online paid off. Games Magazine declared GiftTRAP the best party game of 2008; it has been translated into eight languages and is now in its third print run. Kellet isn’t done with social networking, either — he’s just developed a Facebook application that lets people play his game online.

This event doesn’t sound funny in itself, but what happened then has been a surprise to Nick and many others. Living in Ibiza Nick relies on his online network to bring in work. He began to blog about his first sacking experience and is amazed at the amount of attention it has received, not only via the Guardian and other ‘mainstream’ media, but also through online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The result is that his level of awareness as a blogger and journalist has risen enormously – and in case you’re wondering the vast majority of the audience are on his side. This will probably turn out to be a highly successful publicity campaign for Nick and he’s certainly learned how to leverage Web 2.0 connections to make the most of it.

If you’re a bit of a Web 2.0 virgin I urge you to embrace Facebook and Twitter – ask your kids, as it’s too long to explain here how to use them. At a recent business dinner I sat next to a market analyst who specialised in IT and hadn’t tried either of them – that’s like a hi-fi expert who hasn’t tried using an iPod. I think I managed to get him enthused enough to go online and have a go on Facebook. If he does he’ll see that tonight Ash is running a musical jam at Voodoo Rooms and he could bring along his guitar if he fancies joining in – he can even hear samples of Ash’s band … but maybe that’s just taking him too far in one step