Monica O'Brien is the author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. The book is a step-by-step guide for small and mid-sized businesses that want to find more customers effectively. Get the book:

From the category archives:

Marketing

An Open Letter: What do you want to see next on this blog?

By Monica O'Brien on June 18th in Entrepreneurship 5 comments

Hi everyone!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction of my blog. When I had this idea of doing a video series paired with a live Q&A a few days ago, I thought I wanted to do more in digital marketing, since that’s what I do for a living. The only problem was, everyone is at a different place with their marketing knowledge, and I had no clue what level and what specific topics to cover to satisfy the most readers.

So rather than trying to guess (always a bad idea), I decided to ask. I sent an email to my newsletter list, asking them what free content they wanted to see in this video series. Here’s the description I got back:

  • For those of you who *don’t* have a product yet but are looking to create one, or for those of you who *do* have a product but might want to market it better, you want to find a profitable niche in your area of expertise.
  • Once you’ve identified your profitable niche, you want easy ways to find and target your niche online, that also work for offline products and brick and mortar stores.
  • Once you’ve zeroed in on your niche, you want to build a tribe or base of potential customers for your product.
  • Once you’ve built your tribe or base, you want to build loyalty and a consistent client base that continues to buy your products.
  • Once this system is set up, you want the marketing portion to take a life of it’s own, with referrals and content-sharing from your loyal fans on social networks and via word of mouth.
  • And finally, you want to do all of this without spending too much time or money on it. After all, you are super busy managing your business, and you can’t spend all day tweeting, blogging, and hitting “Like” on Facebook.

The email list seemed pretty set on this idea, but I’m curious – does it resonate with the people who only read the blog, too? After all, I’m going to put the 6-part video series on my blog (completely free) and I want to make sure I get your input.

So here’s the deal. I’m happy to create a free series of videos and webinars about these topics and I’m really looking forward to doing something cool that helps people – but I will feel really dumb if I spend all sorts of time creating this material, and it’s not completely, 100% something that people want.

If you really want to see something like this, please leave a comment to let me know that I’m not completely off-base. If you have a different idea, you can also leave a comment below with what you’d rather see instead!

Thank you, and hope you have an enjoyable Father’s Day Weekend!

Monica

10 Tips to Market and Sell Your Premium Content

By Monica O'Brien on May 20th in Entrepreneurship 3 comments

I received an email from Margee Moore who has a really fun app out now called Sleeping With the Laundry. The app comes with 20 chapters of Notes from the Mommy Track and it’s gotten great reviews on iTunes! Priced at $2.99, it is a steal compared to a book or an ebook.

But I’m not here to promote Margee’s app – instead I wanted to address an interesting marketing question she sent me.

Margee writes:

“I’m running a low cost social media campaign to promote my app, Sleeping With the Laundry: Notes from the Mommy Track. Would you recommend a facebook page, facebook group or what? Which one works best? Then how do you promote your page and get more members? I’ve got my one page marketing plan and I’m working it, but what’s the most effective way to sell apps in today’s social media environment?”

I don’t know all the details of Margee’s marketing plan, but I had a couple thoughts on how she should market her app.

Click here to read how Margee should market her app

Round-Up: Atlanta Radio Edition

By Monica O'Brien on April 27th in Marketing Leave a comment!

Hello everyone! Disclaimer: this is not a typical Social Pollination post with new ideas and opinion, nor is it a summary post with good social media news from around the web. This is just a round-up to share some guest posts I’ve had on other blogs in the last week so people who have asked know where to find them. Here they are:

I also did an in-studio interview for High Velocity Radio which you can listen to here. The experience was awesome! I learned a lot and I will probably be doing much more radio in the future.

Also, for people who want to know more about my new job, how I got it, and what I do, the answer is covered in the full radio interview (not the excerpt).

One note on the blog posts: I’ve gotten a ton of emails asking questions about the material I covered. I’m going to answer only a few of the more interesting questions via blog post here. For the rest – I hate to be a brat, but a lot of the questions are covered in my book, Social Pollination. So my answer is go buy my book :) .

The good news is, if you read that first and then have additional questions, I’d be happy to answer!

Gen Y Cares About Conversation; Everyone Else, Not So Much

By Monica O'Brien on March 11th in Blogging 51 comments

Back in college, my sorority had a rule when we were voting in new members: anyone who used the word “nice” to describe a rush candidate got sprayed with a Super Soaker.

Yeah, it’s weird. But we never made the mistake of voting in women just because they were nice. That’s the point.

It amazes me how many PR and marketing professionals talk about the importance of conversation – that numbers and fans and followers don’t matter, and that’s it’s actually about building relationships. I don’t disagree with them. The part I disagree with is the conversations they seem to want.

The conversations most people want are the ones where you nod your head in sheep-like agreement, write a comment like “Wow, that’s amazing!” and generally participate in the virtual circle jerk.

Continue Reading…

The Biggest Stories: HuffPo Likes Me! Edition

By Monica O'Brien on February 20th in Blogging 1 comment

The Biggest Stories is a new feature on Social Pollination where I share information on the biggest stories in social media from that week. It’s a great place to catch up on the digital space if you’ve had a busy week!

Facebook

Wondering if all this social media stuff really works? New research from Rice University shows that Facebook Fan pages actually work as a marketing tool… when targeting Facebook users. Click through to read the results from the survey about local restaurant chain, Dessert Gallery.

Read what Facebook has to say about love and happiness

Page 1 of 9
1
2
3
4
5
...
9