From Yahoo’s official statement, it seemed that the latest collaboration is a win-win situation for both parties:

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” said Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands – established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

Tumblr creator, David Karp, pocketed whopping $1.1 billion from the purchase. Aside from the official statement, Yahoo’s CEO revealed the announcement by posting a GIF on her own Tumblr account and wrote, “We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently.”

Karp, the newest tech billionaire will remain the CEO of Tumblr. He reiterated on his own Tumblr post that these changes will not affect the overall mission of the blogging site he started in 2007 from his mother’s apartment in Manhattan.

“Let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing,” Karp mentioned on his blogpost.

I give it a year!

What are your thoughts?

One of the fastest growing social networks these days is Google+. Google+ has now firmly established itself as one of the main social networks. In Trendstream’s Global Web Index, the fourth quarter of 2012 ended with Facebook having nearly 700 million active users, with second place going to Google+ with 343 million active users. But what makes Google+ different? Google+ is not just a single social networking site like facebook, but rather a social “layer” that covers many Google online properties like Search, Youtube, Google Drive, Google Play, and Google Local. In other words, if you want to feature high in the Google search engine result pages (SERPs) without having to pay for it, you can’t afford to miss out on Google+.

During our Social Media Blueprint workshop I do talk about Google+. But I now strongly believe that the time of talking about Google+ is behind us. The only option you have now is to be using it. Given Google’s positioning of Google+ you can no longer afford not to be on Google+ for the following reasons:

1. Since Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet, Google will give search preference to pages, posts and profiles with high social presence and activity on Google+.

2. With the ability to drag and drop people in Circles, you can segment the contents you want to share with your customers, partners, colleagues and others without sending irrelevant messages to other people in your network.

3. Google+ is Google’s social layer over all Google products. It follows you across Reviews, Maps, Chrome, Ads, Hangouts, YouTube, Drive, Calendar, and Wallet. That’s why they call Google+ Google 2.0.

Plenty of reasons for you to start digging into what Google+ can do for your organisation. To help you with this, we will be hosting a series of one-day Google+ workshops that will give you everything you need to know about how to set yourself up on Google+ and how to maximise the use of it for your business. The dates we have set for these workshops are Tuesday 28 May in London, Thursday 11 July in Manchester
and Thursday 18 July in Glasgow. Feel free to contact me if you would like to attend any of these workshops.

In the meantime, why don’t you read this fantastic infographic with 20 reasons why you should switch to Google+. Happy switching. And if you have any additional reasons for switching, do share them with us in the comments section.

As you’ve been reading in my recent blog posts, FLIRT is Love Social Media’s 5 step acronym that assists you in setting yourself or your business up for Social Media. So far we talked about Focus, Listen and Integrate. In this blog we will cover the next letter in the Acronym, R for Reaching out. This is a fundamental step in your social media deployment. If you consider your web site as your castle, and your social media networks as your embassies, you reach out into your markets to create as many outposts as possible. In these outposts your prospects and customers will experience your content, to be lured to your social media sites (your embassies) to drive them back to your castle (your web site) where you can transact with them.

Consider these outposts as link bait. You give people a teaser of your blog post and if they like it they will go to your blog to read the full post. Reaching out is critical in the social media engagement process. Here are the key steps in reaching out:

1. Tell the key search engines that you have a blog so you will increase the chance that you come up in the search results. To do this, you register your blog at Google Webmasters, Bing Webmasters, Technorati and BlogCatalog. Here’s a site with a list of many more places where you can register your site.

2. Use Hootsuite to send out your content as linkbait on your existing social media sites like facebook, Linkedin and Google+. You will now understand why your blog title is so important. Its the teaser that will make people want to read the full blog post.

3. Repurpose your content on other social sites. For instance, turn your blog posts in 3 slides and upload this on Slideshare, capture your slides in a video and upload on Youtube or Vimeo, and turn your blog post in a podcast with Podomatic and share via twitter etc.

4. Run campaigns to promote your content and get your followers to create content for you via competitions, promotions, events etc. Here are my a few of my favourite social media campaigns:

Burgerking Whopper sacrifice: Getting your facebook campaign talked about in the newspaper and on TV is a great way to get more people to like your page. Burgerking maximised this by launching an app where people would get a free whopper voucher for every 10 facebook friends they deleted. They challenged the fundamental concept of Facebook. It didn’t take long for Facebook to change the functionality of Facebook so the app wouldn’t work anymore. Too late for them. It gave Burgerking a tremendous boost in likes.

Volkswagen Fox – Twitter Zoom Campaign: Volkswagen launched a great campaign in Sao Paolo to launch a new model car at the Planeta terra festival. Volkswagen hid secret tickets across the entire city, and then displayed them on a microsite using Google Maps. The catch was, the map was zoomed all the way out and the only way to zoom in was to have the community band together using the #foxatplanetaterra hash tag, and the more tweets made, the more the map would zoom in, ultimately revealing the pinpoint location of each ticket. At which point it became a foot race in the real world to find them, day and night for 4 days.

Blendtec – Will It Blend? A viral marketing campaign consisting of a series of infomercials demonstrating the Blendtec line of blenders, especially the Total Blender. In the show, Tom Dickson, the Blendtec founder, attempts to blend various items in order to show off the power of his blender. The phrase Will it blend? has become an internet meme on sites such as Digg. Blendtec has said the campaign has been a great success, saying that the campaign took off instantly and the company has increased sales.

In my workshops I cover many more case studies of great examples of reaching out and campaigns. If you know of any good campaigns, don’t hesitate sharing these with us in the comments section.

In Love Social Media’s experience when working with clients we immediately get to work on assessing their current online voice, brand chatter and present ability. Once the prognosis is made, we’ll get started immediately building a quality, relevant community around your brand.

In the meantime … Here a few things our most successful clients do to maximise our efforts:

1.       Email Marketing Campaign

Caution: Not as tricky as your usual campaign, don’t worry!

Simply email your subscribers, client list, inbox contacts, etc. and ask them to visit, like or follow your new updated Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page

2.       Company Email Signature

Add links to your Social Media channels to your email signatures

Easy How To: Save these icons to your ‘Documents’

Next pull up a new email on Outlook, across the top click ‘Signatures’, then ‘Signatures…’Either click ‘New’ to create a new signature specifically to include your Social Media buttons or ‘Select Signature to edit’ from the box to the left

Across the top of the ‘Edit signature’ box there are icons to change font, size, colour etc. Look for the ‘Add Picture’ icon – then find each Social Media icon added to your Documents and add into your signature

Next add a hyperlink to each icon, linking them to the corresponding Social Media Network:

On a separate Internet Page – go to your Company Twitter page and copy and paste the URL

Now go back to your edit signature box and click on the Twitter icon

Now click on the ‘Add Hyperlink’ icon next to the ‘Add picture’ icon on the edit signature box

In the box which says address, copy and paste the URL, and click ‘OK’

Repeat for all Social Media icons

Finally click ‘OK’ – you have successfully added Social Media buttons to your email signature! Or you can just get your tech guy to do this!

3.       Add your Social Media Icons to your Website

Surprising how many companies forget this – It’s the simplest way to achieve a seamless online presence!

Ask your website designer to add Social Media Buttons to the top right hand side of your website.

This is all about neuro-web design – think about where your website viewer’s eyes are initially drawn!

Advanced: If you’re currently laughing at me and buttons are already on your website – what about adding a Live Twitter feed! I guarantee viewers will not be able to resist a quick scan of what people are tweeting about you!

4.       Add Social Media Sharing buttons to all Blog Posts

Allow readers to ‘like’, ‘tweet’, and ‘+1’ your latest blog post

This is essential in increasing your online reach and elevating your status to thought leadership level

Use ShareThis or AddThis – Follow step by step instructions to attach sharing buttons to blog posts

5.       Install a Facebook Like Box on your website

Of particular use when running a Facebook campaign, promotion or advertising drive

Check out Diana Urban’s blog post: How to Add a Facebook Like Box to your Website for a step by step guide

6.       Suggest Facebook Page to Friends on Personal page

Really simple way of increasing followers, and showing off your new skills!

Go to the admin panel of your Company Facebook and click ‘Build Audience’

Click ‘Invite Friends’ – scroll through your friends and invite them to become a friend of your company profile

Have your colleagues do the same!

7.       Post a Link to your Social Media Networks on your Personal Accounts

This is all about driving traffic to all of your Social Media Platforms, as they all have different functions

E.g. Tweet from your personal Twitter account a link to your new company LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook pages

Have your colleagues do the same!

8.       Ask your Friends, Connections and Contacts to suggest your Social Media Accounts to their Networks

Pick influential friends or followers and get them to Tweet, Suggest, Like or Follow your company pages!

9.       Add Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and any other Relevant Icons to All Existing and Future Marketing Materials

Make sure you always share links to your Social Media Networks – even if it’s in print form

Consumers will regularly fish out a company leaflet to find a Twitter handle!

Calling all Directors, Marketing Managers and CEO’s: is Social Media Strategy your top priority? Or do you leave 5 minutes at the end of a strategy meeting to discuss online networks? Have you assigned anyone to take charge of your brand chatter and online brand awareness? Do you have a twitter handle? What is your company hashtag?

If you’re thinking ‘I don’t need Social Media Strategy, it doesn’t apply to my niche, and my consumers aren’t online’ – chances are you’re wrong. Even if you’re a one man band who runs a garage in the middle of nowhere, even you need Social Media!

If you’re wondering why your competitors have a higher annual turnover than you it’s probably because they have more leads, leading to new contracts, a better sales team and stronger brand awareness. Social Media is a largely untapped playground thriving with hungry decision makers ready to choose your business. It needs to become an integral part of your entire marketing strategy designed, implemented and reviewed regularly. As Michelle Carvill put it “we all need to become publishers” (Internet World, 23^/04/2013).

Never before has it been so important to get your brand, company, services or products online to not only promote them but to promote yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Before embarking on your social media journey, you first need to clarify what you’d like to achieve from an increased online presence:

If it’s to showcase your products then YouTube suit your needs.

If you would like to increase B2B leads, then LinkedIn is your new best friend.

If you need to speak directly to consumers and answer queries, then Twitter is your perfect Customer Retention Management tool.

Whatever your business needs, there’s a social media network out there for you!

Most businesses need to begin with a strong and recurring presence on at least Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Make a company page for each. But think – this is your shop window to your company – don’t leave a profile unfinished!

Once you have reached profile optimisation it’s time to post. Think about content – blog posts, pictures, videos, news, articles, infographics, events, tweets etc. What is going on in your industry that you are interested in, chances are your consumers and competitors will also be interested? Once you’ve posted engage with responders, retweeters and re-posters, thank them for their engagement, ask questions and challenge them. This is the beginnings of a Social Media Community and Marketing Strategy. Once you’ve accomplished the seemingly daunting first steps into the online world, the door opens and the real strategy and campaigning can begin! Unleash an online campaign using all your social networks as a platform to promote your desired outcome – traffic to website, sign up to newsletter, entrants to competition, or an online purchase.

If this has wet your appetite for the effervescent world of Social Media – you should consider meeting our social media trainers and the Love Social Media team.  We’re exhibiting at

SMP Live – Excel 6^th – 7^th June 2013  Stand.999

+ The Business Show – Excel 6^th – 7^th June 2013 Stand.666

After recently reading an article titled “11 reasons a 23 year old shouldn’t run your Social Media” I thought it only appropriate I blog about working for Love Social Media. The above article describes 23 year old’s as immature, self- centred, uncontrollable, and fundamentally unreliable Community Managers. On first glance I should find this article insulting, as I’m currently 23 and working as a Community Manager, however I see the underlying issue here and to be honest it benefits me. This article is telling you not to hire someone inexperienced to run your social media – quite right! But this has nothing to do with age. Don’t let a 50 year old run your social media strategy for exactly the same reasons. Essentially this article is highlighting that companies need to outsource their Social Media services, training and hire consultancy. Excellent news for me!

Social Media for business is very different to how you are probably currently interacting socially. The majority of us have a Facebook account, used for stalking old school friends. We’ve probably all got a LinkedIn page scattered with the highlights of our CV, an inbox full of messages from old work friends and dodgy messages from recruiters. Perhaps some of us even have a twitter handle floating around cyber space, rarely used and never retweeted. For many of us this is the height of social interaction – job done – we’re ‘out there’.

But in a business sense; where is the strategy, the engagement, essentially the increase in leads, discussions and contracts?

Without giving away too many tricks of the trade Social Media for business begins way before you put your company name next to a twitter handle. Because let’s be honest there’s nothing worse than a company twitter page with no pictures, no URL link and no tweets. This looks like you tried and failed! You need to execute and deploy a Social Media Strategy largely based on what you would like to achieve:

• Do you want to drive traffic to your website?
• Do you want to deal with customer queries?
• Do you want to promote your products or services?
• Or simply keep an eye on the competitor.

Whichever combination you wish to achieve Social Media marries your business with your target market. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Twitter are now your perfect CRM tools.

Irrespective of age you need someone with the intellectual sustenance to devise and implement your Social Media strategy. Of course if the ever-conscious online social sphere is a hurdle too high for your company, seek help! After all you’d get help with your website wouldn’t you?

One of the revealing sections of my Social Media workshops is when I talk about the power of listening through social media. That’s why the second letter in FLIRT is dedicated to the L of LISTENING. A fundamental part of developing your social media strategy. Here are just a few of the benefits you will get from online listening:

- You learn about your stakeholders
- You better understand their needs
- You know what they say about your brand
- You know what they say about your product or service
- You know what your clients are talking about
- You will understand what your competitors are talking about
- You will know what people think of you
- You will know if this is positive or negative

So plenty of reasons to listen online. The benefits are tremendous. The salesman can find leads, the marketing manager can find new partners and identify trends, the recruiter can find passive job seekers, the job seeker can find jobs, the blogger can find inspiration for his next blog post and the social media manager can find exciting content to share with his communities.

So here are my 4 key tips for listening on social media:

1. Listen to find out where your customers are. Or in social media terms, where do your tribes hang out?
2. Listen to find your key influencers. The influencers of today are the bloggers. Who are the top 10 bloggers in your industry?
3. Listen to your keywords. What are the keywords of your business and make sure you get alerts every time these keywords pop up on the web. These keywords include your spokespeople, your customers and your competitors.
4. Listen to your industry. Make sure you listen to what’s happening in your industry so you can relate your content to what’s happening today.

There are lots of tools on the web that can help you in this. To begin with, here’s a nice graphic to give you an idea on what social networks your clients can hang out:

To find relevant bloggers, you can try Google Blog Search or Followerwonk. Followerwonk allows you to search Twitter bios so if you add in the search “your topic” and “blog” you will get all twitter users who have “your topic” and “blog” in their biography. You can then check their twitter profile and click on the link to their website which will then take you to their blog.

One of my favourites to listen to news is Newsmap. A full screen tag cloud that will give you the latest news (with links) according to your settings (by country, by industry and by time).

If you have any more interesting and useful tools which help you listen then please share!

Stands were full of sophisticated online programmes incorporating CMS systems, Social Media management, and complete online marketing control. Programmes designed by ektron, Squiz and Kaliop enable businesses to map out and analyse all of their online activity. Predominantly to track and report their engagement with consumers, measure trends, and enable for future strategy.

Wandering around the endless stalls with free sweets, coffees, pens, smoothies, stress balls and even yoyo’s what becomes clear is these businesses are selling, and hunting for their next client. As you cross their threshold an eager eye scans your torso for your name badge;

Who are you?

What company do you work for?

Are you a decision maker?

Coming from an agency myself, I wanted to not only gain competitor insight, but to find out what tools were on the market, and whether an appropriate partnership could be made to benefit our clients. So I perhaps wasn’t their desired clientele but talking through their software, including useful demonstrations really helped visualise the future of online CMS systems

Please follow @Ektron @squizsuite  @Webtrends

Content and social media management tools cut time, and provide a simpler template for producing reports and ultimately increase ROI (which is everyone’s goal, right?!).

I attended 3 seminars held at the Mobile and Social Media World Theatre, one which stood out as particularly useful was ‘Developing a Content Road Map’, held by Michelle Carvill. As I am in the social media industry myself, much of what she described wasn’t news to me, but I enjoyed her enthusiastic pragmatism at how to get the job done. Social Media now needs to be integrated into all companies daily, weekly, monthly and even annual marketing strategy. She described us all as editors developing our own content to publish, through our Social Networking sites. This resonates in today’s online climate as Social Media dominates and we not only have to be cautious of what we publish, but also mindful to keep it humanistic and humorous, leading to ultimate community management.  All in all an interesting day, the Trade Show ran for 3 days, I’m afraid I only managed 1!

Now the pressure is on us to prepare for the business tradeshow in June, at Excel London. The Business Show is where businesses like yours find the next gear. It’s free to attend and offers a wealth of opportunity, advice and information crucial for ongoing business growth within a challenging economy. Come and Network with us: http://www.greatbritishbusinessshow.co.uk/exhibitors/social-media/love-social-media/ @thebusinessshow #TBS2013

Marc Campman our social media trainer will be talking on the day, next to the SMP conference about social selling http://www.smplive.com/speakers/marc-campman/ @MarcCampman @loveandtweeting

Join us at The Business Show on the 6th – 7th June!

The best way to kick start your social media strategy development is to watch the first 3 minutes of this video from Simon Sinek, posted on TED, about how great leaders inspire action.

Social Media is all about finding and developing your niche to position you differently from your competitors. This video puts this into perspective. Those companies that start from the WHY have found this niche and are in a better position to compete. So your key task in your Focus section of FLIRT is to find your niche. And translate this into a powerful positioning statement whereby you describe your target market, their needs, your offering, the features of your offering, your competitors and your key differentiators. In my workshops, I use Geoffrey Moore’s positioning statement as presented in his book “Crossing the Chasm“. Check this link with a good overview of his approach. The more passionate you define your niche, the easier it will be to create exciting content for your social media engagement and the easier it will be to grow your communities.

Another big benefit of this approach is that by defining your positioning statement, and actually writing it down in one paragraph (also called your elevator pitch), you automatically create your keywords. And as we all know, keywords are the basis for developing your online reputation and your organic search results. Keywords that must be used in all your content; your blog posts (titles), social network profiles, videos, infographics etc. To find out more about how to find and analyse your keywords, read our trainer Marc Campman’s previous blog post about this subject.

So now that you’ve done your homework you can decide your overall social media objectives. Here’s a good infographic in case you still have doubts that you can’t set “Lead Generation or Increase Sales” as a social media objective.

Why social media can help benefit your business?

So have you defined your social media strategy? How did you create your elevator pitch? And where did you check the strength of your keywords? Share this with us in the comments.

Tip 1. Subject Line

The subject line is important, as it is the first thing that the readers will notice, and the content of the subject line will be what will make the readers open the email. The key thing to remember for the subject line is to make sure that it is valuable to the readers, as they will be more interested in reading a topic that they can see themselves within, helping to keep the audience interested in your brand and topics, ensuring that you keep your audience. If they subject is relevant this will guarantee that your email is reader orientated, not purchase or brand orientated, meaning that they will feel involved in the email, and not as though you’ve just sent a template to every single person trying to sell your product, as long as your email fits to the ideology of your brand at the same time. Make sure that your recipients know what is going on, don’t be too vague, but don’t be too information filled, a short simple eye-catching subject line will ensure to pull the audience in! If you’re unsure of what subject line you prefer and what tactic is best, try A/B testing, by sending out 2 versions of the same piece of content with a different subject title, to an equal number of recipients, and measure which one will perform better, a key way of showing what tactics are more appropriate for your audience.

Tip 2. Engagement through Personalization

-          Specific action the subscriber has taken

-          Personalized to the readers behaviour

-          ‘if you don’t take this action you’re going to lose something’ approach

-          ‘going negative’ with prospects

-          Tell them you’re no longer going to contact them; more will respond “let’s talk!”

Tip 3. Content Consumption Customization

-          Multitude of options (days, how often, content, notifications, to receive) making the readers feel in control

-          Giving options means they’ll stay around longer rather than opting out

-          Will be able to find out more about the readers

-          Can send more specific emails to readers based on the information you have about them through more options

Tip 4. Don’t Be! Aggressive! B-E Aggressive!

-          Makes you stand out in an overcrowded inbox

-          Readers will be more interested to find out what it is about

-          Being different will make audiences engage

-          Most readers will have mastered what emails to open and which to not, if you’re different to the typical emails they receive they’re likely to open the email and engage with you.

Tip 5. Make your email social media friendly

-          Allow your audience to share and comment your email content

-          Always embed social media info-graphic buttons in your email

-          Link the buttons to your social media profiles to promote your social media networks in a new tab

-          Ask for recommendations through social media

Let us know what you think, is this helpful?

Over the last few months we’ve been looking hard into how we can simplify this process and bring it more in line with our Love Social Media branding. Finding an acronym these days isn’t easy because many words have already been picked for as many topics. But that didn’t deter us. We set ourselves in a room a few weeks ago and we just let the creative juices flow. Everything was allowed. We bounced dozens of words around the room but nothing connected. Nothing inspired us, until my business partner Mark dropped the word “Flirt”. What about “Flirt” he said. That would fit perfectly with Love Social Media.

And then the incredible thing happened. Mark mentioned the letter, and as an answering device, I filled in the word.

F for Focus
L for Listening
I for Integration
R for Reaching out
T for Track

The whole thing fell in place within 30 seconds. After that we looked at each other and said: “Did this really happen”? And yes it did. We came up with a great platform for the way we take our knowledge into the market. From course materials, videos, ebooks etc.

Watch this space. In my next few blog posts I will expand on FLIRT and show you how social media in fact is all about flirting. Flirting to build that ever so important relationship (call it love) with your customers.