The Edgy Entrepreneur

Why Skittles' New Branding Strategy is Brilliant

Skittles made a daring move in its recent web redesign and online branding strategy. Their home page has become a series of links to pages that show user generated content about their candy.Twitter search, Facebook, and YouTube all make an appearance. Essentially, their marketing plan is to harness the wisdom of the crowds (also known as "crowdsourcing").

And though it is risky to use content you don't control as your primary marketing strategy, I happen to think it is brilliant. Skittles understands their target market,the majority of visitors to their site are teens who are influenced by pop culture and online trends. Take a look at the Quantcast lifestyle analysis for www.skittles.com.
You can see that the site with the highest affinity rating is MTV. We also see gaming and lyrics sites. In the keyword section, we can see that a high percentage of people reach their site using their brand name...which is no surprise given their high brand visibility.

Just taking a look at their user demographics and traffic patterns more than likely sent them in the direction of strengthening their online campaign. The genius is in understanding that implementing a social media campaign means embracing it as a living thing and celebrating the unpredictability of it. And in knowing that their target market will think that seeing themselves on their product website is just about the coolest freaking thing ever...dude.

This site guarantees chatter will skyrocket...much like the people who like to wave at the cameras on the Today Show. But instead of the folks standing in a circle around the Today Show crew, the crew is coming to their neighborhoods, talking to them, filming them, asking them to create the content for the show. And who doesn't want to watch (buy) something they helped to create?

There is always an associated risk with this type of transparency. Anything that is said...good or bad...will end up on their home page. But I don't think that will bother their customers. Anyone who has a teen knows that one week they can't be separated from their best friend, the next week they can't stand each other...and so on, and so on, and so on.

While this obviously won't work for every company, it is an absolutely awesome example of the right strategy, at the right time, with the right people. I can't wait to see what happens!

Facebook Groups: Real Strategies for Building Interaction, Part III

Well, I intended to get this third and final Facebook Strategies post out earlier in the week but had to stall so I could get past my latest irritation with Facebook. This week there was quite a lot of hubbub about their new Terms of Service...which they later rescinded. And, I stopped to get angry about a friend who had gotten a warning because she had "too much activity" on her account. Wha???

Anywhoo, I went on a rant about it on another site where I post...so I will spare you. But I want to  make a couple of things clear. In order to market on Facebook, you need to a)fly under the radar by not taking too many of any kind of action each day and b) use your real name and only use your business name in groups and on pages.

Back to our series on strategies...today I want to talk about some advanced strategies that I use with   Facebook and other social networking/social media platforms. Here are some of my favorite tips:

• Connect all of your social media sites together: any place there is an option to add a link to your other profiles, you should do it. And be sure your blog has a link to the groups you have created on any social media sites.
• Update your group regularly, ask questions, enter comments, add links. By making changes on the group, your profile and the groups members are alerted that things are a-changing.
• Use the share button or bullitens  to promote your own group at least once a week.
• Send out an update to all of your networks (via Ping.fm) to let them know you have topic groups and what the hot topic of the week is...every time I do this, I have new members.
• Grab a discussion thread and turn it into a post on your blog and vice versa. You do not have to generate 100% new content. Great information is great information, share selectively and repurpose what you have created. 
• Join similar topic groups on all of your social media sites. Friend members of those groups, then invite them to join yours.
• Post videos and pictures around the web, linking back to your groups.
• Ask your social media networks (including Digg and Stumble) to help you promote the good news with a link. This is an easy one if you have built good relationships with your friends. Just don't wear them out by asking too often.

Hope these tips have been helpful to you...and despite my irritation with Facebook, I will still use their network. There are just too many people there who are a good fit for my demographics. Hopefully, they will make some changes that makes their system a bit more user friendly.

Facebook Groups: Real Strategies for Building Interaction, Part II

Yesterday, we created an optimized profile as a base for future online business development. Today, we will focus on the development and management of groups.

To the left is a screenshot of the group I created for my organic vegetable gardening blog, Gardener to Farmer. If you click on the picture, it will take you to the group. There are examples of all of the tactics I describe in this post, in this group.

Before starting a group on Facebook, it is important to engage in a bit of market research by exploring existing groups. Are their similar groups that are really popular? What kind of content are they providing? What kind of questions are being asked? How many members are there? This kind of information can help you create a group that has a special niche rather than duplicating topics and content. Be sure to join all similar communities. The members of these groups are likely to become members of yours.

Once you have decided on a topic, create a solid description and name that actually tells people what the group is about...you would be surprised at how many groups are obscurely named. That's fine if it is a personal, for fun kind of group...not so great if you want someone to find your group. And if you have a solid list of keywords, even better. Remember, keywords  are most effective when used consistently across the net.

A quick tip: add the Memorable Web Address application to your profile. With it, you can generate easy web addresses for your profile and groups. This is really helpful for promoting your group...the addresses that Facebook assigns are a yard long, full of numbers and letters and other strange characters.

Next, add some great content to get the group started. Discussion points, photos, videos...create value so people joining your group will see the benefit of membership right away.

Now, start inviting people from your existing friends with the invitation feature. You can also click the share button and invite your friends by promoting the group in your information stream.

You can also promote your group on other groups. Be sure not to do it in an obnoxious, spammy way. Most groups are fine with a topic related post and link on the wall...not so much in the discussion groups.

Another way to build both your group membership and your overall reach is to start friending members of similar groups. Remember that your friends will see your activity stream, and their friends will see their interactions with you. Though it may take a bit to get going, this is a great way to build viral messaging capability.

Now that we have the basics in place, we will talk about advanced engagement by combining other social media tools and Facebook in our final post.

Who's Linking to You? Yahoo Knows!

Links back to your website are an important part of online brand management. And while many people engage in the practice of building links, very few actually understand the value that this brings to their brand.

Sadly, we have oversimplified the benefit of many SEO techniques. We have put them in the category of "higher search rankings" without understanding their larger benefit. And with backlinks in particular, we have become so one-sided in our application that we rarely, if ever, talk about its benefits for brand research. Today, I want to spend a bit of time helping you get started gathering information and analyzing your findings.

Let's start by pulling up a list of links back to my site. There are several ways to find this information, but Yahoo seems to have the best search options with the most user friendly interface. Let's walk through an example:

Here, I have entered a search string that will pull up outside links back to my domain. You can see that I have entered a "-site:edgyentrepreneur.com" phrase. Theoretically, that will exclude interlinks from one of the posts of my site to another. In practical application, some seem to sneak by...

Yahoo returns with a list:
This is just a portion of the links for my site...I have 500+, which is a really small amount compared to my other sites. This gives me my first bit of pertinent information: I have really neglected this strategy as a way to promote the Edgy Entrepreneur brand online.

Next, I see that many of the links are from social media sites: various profiles, microblog aggregators and social bookmarking sites. This is actually a good thing, since many of my posts are about using the web to build business. The other thing that I discovered is that each time a link is posted on some of these sites, it remains in place for a significant amount of time. This is important because it helps me prioritize my link posting efforts.

Finally, I see other blogs and websites that have linked back to me. Identifying other non-social media sites that are interested in my content is an easy way to do a bit of market research. It also gives me a sense of community allies and ideas for future partnerships. And, it alerts me to negative commentary/concerns on the horizon.

Yahoo's advanced search has the ability to be much more sophisticated in its results. If you feel like playing around with the features you can drill down to a much more specific level of information. But, it isn't necessary to use all of the bells and whistles to generate valuable brand management information. Analyzing your incoming links should be at least an occasional component in your web marketing plan. Give it a try, you will be surprised at what you learn!