Monthly Archives: July 2009

Social Guerilla Marketing Done Right: The X-One Mug

X-One is the most socially active coffee mug ever!

X-One is the most socially active coffee mug ever!

Guerilleros, today over at the ASI Central I read a cool post about 5 hot marketing trends and if it’s hot, there’s social media all over it.

No doubt, Social Media was the very first “hot trend” (they call it “trend”, we know it’s a GUERILLA!) and even though they didn’t seem to be very familiar with the topic, they picked a real Guerilla strategy to talk about: The X-One Mug Fan Page

The company that makes the X1 (Gold Bond Inc.) decided that

As a travel mug, the X-one is always going places, so the marketing team figured social media was a natural fit, and the X-one Facebook page was born

Pretty clever, huh?

There are a ton of reasons why Gold Bond marketing director Karen Sherrill should receive a considerable bonus, but here at the Guerilla we’ll discuss why their campaign works like charm:

Social Media Marketing With Humour

Attention to details: humor and constant updates on the x-one fan page

Attention to details: humor and constant updates on the x-one fan page

Now raise your hands those who enjoy when companies make fun of themselves… ???

When you go social, online or offline, it’s your personality that attracts people – and the X-One team have created a darn cool one for their fan page.

Mentioning personality is important not only to make the X-One remarkable but to instigate people to talk about it (like I’m doing right now).

I’ve written about the guerilla marketing viral effect and how content goes viral when there’s a benefit to the user that is syndicating it.

Sherill proved to be a master guerillera when she stated this in regards to being remarkable:

One of the important elements seems to be humor or intrigue that will give friends and fans a reason to pick your tweets and posts out of the onslaught of others

Why the x1 Guerilla Marketing Has Gone Viral

Sherill and her team have made the X-One campaign extremely engaging by asking people to share how and where they take their mugs. When customers send them pictures, they’re all published on the fan page under the album “Places I Have Been“.

Check out these pics from the album:

Is that a successful campaign or what?

Is that a successful campaign or what?

Remarkable social media marketing...!

Remarkable social media marketing...!

They’re completely NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA SILO – From their facebook page, you can see that the entire company participates: there are mentions of the plant manager, becky the sales rep…

What they missed – Subtle Monetizing…

We could not find a link to the company website at the fan page, and we could not find a link to their twitter account either.

ATTENTION: Good social media guerillas are subtle about these strategies, and it’s not a bad practice to make it a bit less obvious for your visitors that you’re trying to sell something.

In the X-One case, however, they’re really not trying to sell anything. Their approach is almost entirely entertaining, and that’s where they missed the point:

What If I wanted to buy an X-One?

My wife drinks more coffee than Brazil can export it, and I’d love to buy her one.

How about a link to a “getthex1.com” domain with more pictures, and an online order form?

Anyway, many praises to Sherill and the marketing team at Gold Bond Inc. They’ve put together a really powerful guerilla campaign, and it should be an inspiration for companies who think social media marketing is about blasting 140 character ads over twitter.

Is Your Company Stuck With A Social Media Silo?

If your social media marketing is a silo, you're doomed to implode.

If your social media marketing is a silo, you're doomed to implode.

When I read this post over at Label:Indescript about social media silos, I immediately connected the subject to at least 4 business owners I’ve been in contact with.

Justin Boone, the author (and a darn good guerillero), talks about how companies start their social media strategies with a department (read blogger guy) that becomes completely alienated from the rest of the staff and from other departments.

I’d say that’s a better start than having NO SOCIAL MEDIA WHATSOEVER, but there are points to be taken from this when it comes to a powerful social guerilla.

The majority of businesses that decide to implement a blog or create dedicated social network accounts do so with only one objective: create more revenue.

Now that my guerilla is expanding into the fascinating world of “real” business (read offline companies), I’ve found that all these companies really know about social media marketing is that it’s “cheap” and can go “viral”.

Why They End Up With A Social Media Silo

The real benefits of creating an active community start when there’s a commitment throughout the entire company to share, engage, and participate in a public dialog.  A good guerilla is never won by one lonely guerillero, but by a tactiful team.

And I’ve experienced lots of lost battles when:

  • Companies fail to communicate with the social media deparment

The poor “blogger guy” is left hunting for material to post, and is left out with the task of tracking customer feedback and analysing google and twitter alerts.

Or, what is worse:

  • All of the social media material comes from the marketing department (the billboard approach)

That happens more often than necessary, but it seems to be that corporate mentality impregnated on offline people; old ads, product releases, listing of properties… The entire community is now a giant billboard!

Stimulate The Social Spirit

Turn projects in development over to the SM department, let them post updates. Collect feedback, and apply their comments into the design.

Integrate multiple areas of your company by asking them to report daily activities to the SM team. Motivate the staff to post their comments on the company blog and to interact with each other within the corporate Facebook page.

And one more thing:

QUIT THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT CRAP!

There are tons of ways to measure social media buzz, to ignite content syndication, and those are valid strategies to evaluate strategies. Hiring a web analytics expert is also a good idea.

But enough with the constant cry about time and effort wasted: if these companies havent noticed yet, online content doesnt “die”, and even though it may not be immediate, a solid online participation will pay huge dividends as online usage wont stop growing anytime soon.

Quick Permalink Structure Fix Improves Blog Traffic!

Ninja SEO trick!

You’re probably familiar with the wordpress permalink structure showing some sort of date on the url, right? Something like this:

Common permalink structure with the post date

If you know a little bit about SEO, you know that the first place search engines look for keywords is in the domain url. As we see in the example above, 2009/07/10 is not a keyword anybody but a horoscope writer would target.

So, how can you change that silly date insertion to a more interesting, SEO-friendly url?

Changing your Permalink Structure

A permalink is the address given to a blog post, which is an abbreviation for “permanent link”. They are permanent because unlike your main domain url, which changes as you write new posts, the url on your permalinks remain the same. Therefore their importance for SEO.

To make changes to your blog’s permalink structure, follow these instructions:

  1. Log into your admin area (blogdomain.con/wp-admin)
  2. Scroll down to Settings >> Permalinks

At that point, you’ll see some WordPress suggestions like these:

This is what WordPress suggests for permalink structure

You don’t want to use any of these. Instead, at the bottom, where you see “Custom Structure”, enter this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

Your configuration should look something like this:

This is how your permalink structure works best

What happens now?

WordPress will use the categories you determine for each post as part of the permalink url, which will include (hopefully) more relevant keywords to your url.

After you’ve finished, your permalink will look like this:

Here's the optimized permalink structure in action

The Difficult Part?

So far, all you had to do was enter a half-a-line code to your wordpress admin area. That was ridicuosly easy.

The part that actually requires some thinking is determining which Categories suit your blog best.

For that, I highly recommend an extensive keyword research.

Make sure your categories:

  • are relevant to your content,
  • have decent traffic volume,
  • are generic enough to hold more than one or two posts.

The key with categories is that they’re not TAGS, but more like umbrellas from where your tags will come out.

After a week of updating all of the permalinks, I experienced a better indexation for most of the keywords within my categories, and an overall blog traffic increase of 20-25%.

It’s definitely worth it.

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