The origins of chiropractics?
Hello Guerilleros! So much for the consistency I promised last week, huh? But here we are again today! And today, instead of giving you a specific tip, I am bringing you a rather unique resource I found while searching for some ideas for one of my clients. A whole website devoted to using social media, specifically for chiropractors. Read More…
I am a writer by trade.
Hello Guerilleros. I am Guerilla Roberto. As you are probably aware, the site hasn’t been updated much lately. Unfortunately for us, but fortunate for him, our Guerilla Chefe has been overwhelmed lately with new projects that are sucking up all of his time.
As a result of this social media frenzy, I have been asked to step in and take over for awhile. And for my first post, I will just introduce myself. Next week we will serve up a new tip or trick from the mouth of the Guerilla Chefe himself.
I am not exactly a social media guru, I am a writer. Hence I will now be writing this blog. As a friend and co-worker of the Guerilla Chefe, I have unwittingly been involved in the chaos that is social media marketing. So far, it has been very good to me, and I hope to share some of the things I have learned along the way. I hope you all enjoy my style as much as you do our Guerilla Chefe.
And while I don’t know what the future holds, I do know the revolution hasn’t ended. In fact, we’re just entering a new phase. From now on, this site will be updated every week at least once. That’s right, we’re bringing some consistency to the site (and some better grammar!)
And for my final parting shot, how many of you can say Guerilleros out loud, with the correct pronunciation? That’s a tongue twister!
Content Syndication = Your Own NON-PAID Army of Marketers
You write a blog post.
You tell somebody on twitter about it.
That person comes in, likes what you wrote, and click on the “add to digg” button.
When that person posts your article on Digg, their app automatically updates that person’s twitter saying that she’d just digged your blog.
That person’s twitter followers come to Digg and see your post. They read it through the Digg toolbar, and automatically “digg it”.
Now that more people have “Digged it”, your post is up on the Popular section of Digg – and you reach tons of other Digg users, who repeat the process.
This is called Content Syndication and it basically means Viral Marketing through Social Media.
In the example above, all you’ve done was update your twitter about the new post. Let’s say that brought 10 visitors to your blog.
What if you had updated Digg, Reddit, Jumptags, Social Median, Simply, Delicious, Folkd, Facebook, and Twitter?
Now, you may argue that you might not have as many friends on Delicious as you have on Twitter. That’s a good argument, one that leads to the understanding of what Content Syndication really is based upon: SOCIAL CONNECTIONS.
Here are tools that will help boosting your Content Syndication:
You can see it at the bottom of this post – it even goes along the RSS feed. When you click on any option, the Permalink, Title, Description, and upper image are automatically inserted to the submit form of the service, reducing your time considerably.
You can get your add to any here
An impressive application that updates nearly ALL social services with the touch of a button – Ping.fm requires that you initially add each of your social networks to their list. They will then store your info and everytime you send a new update, it will refresh your status throughout as many social networks as you’d like.
Sign up for a Ping.fm account here
Even with these great services, your submissions may very well never be clicked by anybody if you dont have an active social community of your own.
Luckily, there is a way to fix that: The Synnd Software
Synnd is a private community that exists solely to vote/bookmark/spread other users’ content, therefore guaranteeing a successful syndication (one that creates a viral marketing effect).
See the Synnd software in action here.
Exploring the benefits of social media and content syndication is a way to work around getting free traffic without having to know SEO and definitely not spending money with PPC.
If you’d like to know more about Synnd, leave your questions below.
If you dont want to know anything about it, leave your comments below.
If you hated my disorganized writing, leave your comments below.
See you soon.
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:
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
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?
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…
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.
We'll help you go viral on twitter, so you'll maybe get off of it.
Guerilleros, this will be quick because my offline guerilla is taking up too much time. What I’ll show you today is a quick tip for lazy viral marketers.
I bet you’ve already seen the tweetmeme plugin, which automatically inserts a new status message into a user’s own twitter account.
TweetMEME Plugin helps viral strategies
That is a major twitter marketing tool, and I highly recommend you install it on your blog. After all, the easier you make for people to syndicate your content, the more they will. If you do nothing, you’ll receive nothing. That’s guerilla karma.
But what if you’re looking to add some twitter marketing juice to a good-ole website? What? No wordpress plugins?
Yeap, there are still places where a widget doesnt quite work. For those places, you can use a simple HTML guerilla code:
The only thing you have to pay attention to is that you cannot leave any spaces on the code, so you have to use + whenever you have a space.
For example, if I wanted to tell you to please retweet this awesome post, I’d write the following line of code:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT+@leosaraceni+Gave+me+this+cool+twitter+tip+at+http://socialmediaguerilla.com”>RETWEET ME</a>
It works even better when you have a banner image, or even a simple twitter logo. Check out how I merged this technique at my non-wordpress site, while I was writing about keyword research with google insight.
That’s it for today folks. Be creative with your guerilla, and always include viral twitter thingys on your content. As you know, twitter is profitable for a bunch of people (except its creators), and it will help your social media guerilla.
Talk to you soon!
The psychology behind anything that goes viral is that the user gets some sort of benefit by promoting it.
The “viral” aspect only works if, after spreading it to their friends, that user will be seen as funny, smart, up-to-date, or valuable.
So, when thinking about new Guerilla marketing content, focus on creating remarkable pieces, that will separate those who have seen it (the cool, the smart, the savvy, the geekiest…) from those who NEED to see it (beyond your potential customers)
Therein lies the Viral Effect; divising the “have seen it” from the “need to see”. And the more remarkable your Guerilla marketing is, the bigger the “NEED TO SEE”.
You’ve probably seen a very old viral video on TV being advertised in the ‘news’ and thought to yourself:
“I’ve already seen it, those TV people are always behind…”
And of course, you’re a much cooler person because you had already seen it 😉
First of all, check through this list to make sure your content passes “guerilla quality control”:
If it passes all these factors, there’s a big chance you’ve got a bazooka Guerilla on your hands.
But well, it’s not like there’s an ignition button to fire up massive content syndication – specially if you don’t have a large syndication network – but here are strategies good for any marketer:
This troublesome strategy of contacting social media personalities is the ONLY shortcut to those who do not have a large network of friends to syndicate your content.
The other strategy that seems to work (depending on budget) is to have a top-notch PR firm feed the media.
(of course, we’re talking about social media here – so don’t expect me to suggest helicopter-bombing-business-cards type of strategies here)
But turning any guerilla into a viral marketing depends on your ability to:
(grow a large group of ‘friends’ on multiple platforms – your content syndication network)
(turn a single campaign into multiple posts/pieces – start a specific website/blog just for it)
We’ll keep the guerilla rolling, and will post much more content here, but if you really want to overthrow the establishment and learn underground guerilleros’ tools to automate social media marketing, click here.
The Social Media Guerilla Logo
First of all, a quick explanation on Guerilla Marketing, from the one-and-only wikipedia:
“Guerilla Marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.”
How about a budget of $ 0.00, and results like this, or this ?
What if I were to tell you that Social Media Guerilla elected President Obama?
The possibilities are endless, and the results are extremely tempting.
So, what does it take?
Who turns any Guerilla content Viral? You. Me. Users!
And how does any content spread on the internet?
It starts with ignition:
Which is all very simple; the kick comes when nobody rates, or bookmarks, or retweets your content.
For the viral effect, a key factor in the formula is Syndication.
Content Syndication is how your Guerilla content gets to the first page of Digg, which leads to several retweets, which all together creates copious amounts of traffic.
And as we know, traffic is good for two things:
Okay, everybody knows that…
To answer a question with another:
How many friends do you have?
Just like word-of-mouth, the initiator usually tells a close friend, who tells another, and the entire chain is set.
Online, it’s all a matter of having the right friends – the more, the better.
Friends are created on social networking sites like Facebook, or MySpace (if you’re under 14). Those are great to meet and interact with people, but they are useless for marketing.
Good syndication-friends are created at services where user-voting determines the visibility and the quality of the content. We’re talking about Digg, Del.i.cious, Social Median, Reddit, etc…
The trick is not just to ‘add a friend’ but to lead attract that person to reciprocate, gaining a ‘mutual friend’ status.
This means (depending on the quality of your content) that your friend is more likely to vote positively for a content submitted by you.
Why not?
From now on, your focus as an Underground Social Guerilla (USG) is to:
With the first task, there’s not much anybody can do except recommend good readings.
But for the latter, you can kick-start your syndication here
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