Blog

  • Teespring Uses The Share Then Like Process

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)
    We talk a lot around these parts about our philosophy of Share Then Like wherein your content should be so good your audience will share it with their audiences rather than simply Liking it. 
    A recent example we participated in was sponsored by the Teespring company to promote the efforts of the Immunity Project and their efforts to develop a free vaccine to end HIV and AIDS.
    The Share Then Like philosophy was applied when Teespring asked visitors to the campaign page for the effort to send a tweet promoting the effort. The tweet only mentioned the Immunity Project. The first 150 audience members who sent the tweet were then sent one of the shirts for free, postage paid. 
    Due to the power of the campaign and the social audience behind it, another 1142 shirts were sold, at $19.99 each, raising $22,828.58 for the Immunity Project.
    While we did not have anything professionally to do with this effort its good to see that everyone wins when Share Then Like is put into action.
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  • Better Know a Hashtag: #Missouri Edition

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)
    In this screencast video, we explain how and why you should use proper hashtags for geographic locations, including our own sweet home Missouri. Let us know what geo-tags you use in your social media in the comments below!

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  • How Fast Are You With Your Marketing

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)
    In these days of constant connection and 24/7/365 opportunities, you have to be ready to respond to customer questions, sales opportunities, and breaking news or be left behind by your competition from around the world.
    The good news is that between social media and tools like Hootsuite you can have your ears on all the time and be ready to respond. Let’s look at a couple of marketing philosophies which can help you out:
    Real-time Marketing: If you have your ears on and your tools in place you will be able to participate in real-time marketing. Real-time means news breaks over minutes, not days. It means ideas percolate, then suddenly and unpredictably go viral to a global audience. It’s when companies develop (or refine) products and services instantly, based on feedback from customers or events in the marketplace. And it’s when a businesses see an opportunity and are the first to act on it. (via)
    RTM is extremely hard to do ‘on the fly’ and maintain any sense of trust with the customer or prospect. Properly done it involved days, weeks, or months of pre-planning and content creation.
    Always Have Your Ears On: When it comes to managing the fire hose of information coming from social media, we have found the best way to be lists. Using list tools on Twitter and Hootsuite, we can follow publishers by specific location, industry or keyword. Check out the image below and note the three business opportunities:
    1. The first tweet shows that Illinois is wanting to tax the rich of their state. There is opportunity here for ant-tax activists to share and bemoan this fact, for elected officials to ride to the defense or demise of the issue, and for government affairs folks to contact their contacts who will be impacted by the action to seek contracts to stop the action. That’s a lot of business and action from one sentence.
    2. This local cafe does a great job with their food and their service. When they publish tweets like this which we saw in our local #JCMO column for activity in our actual neighborhood could lead to their competitors and neighbors touting their specials or their after-dinner activities. More business for everyone and more business conversation behind a community hashtag which really could use more.
    3. While this third tweet might be a joke, its also an opportunity for banks, ATM manufacturers, or even car companies to jump in an show a product highlight which would solve this problem. This is one of the best uses of RTM: find a problem and highlight a solution in non-selly way.
    Check out our use of Twitter lists here.
    Newsjacking: This is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story and generating news coverage, social media engagement, or sales from it. Be very careful with this tactic as plenty of organizations (dummies)  have ended up with egg on their face for jumping into news about bad weather or news they didn’t understand to sell their wares.

    The rule here is to always be listening (again: 24/7/365) for opportunities to help your audience, promote your services and products to new audiences, and to build your reputation as an expert in your field. Just be very careful about how you do it.
    UPDATE: The counterpoint to this real-time marketing discussion looks like this: 

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  • What Is Twitter?

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)
    In one of our recent Twitter 101 classes in the Jeff City Social Media classroom series we discussed the very basics of Twitter as a communications tools for business and personal use.
    The slide shown in the background of this video can be seen below:
    The above graphic from Gerry Moran is used to detail how the perfect tweet should be constructed. 
    To sign up for our social media classrooms hit the link below for the current schedule. Gus is also available for private and public presentations and training sessions for your business or group. Hit the contact link to schedule a time.
     
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  • Share Then Like with the Jefferson City Rotary

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)
    Gus Wagner discusses the Share The Like philosophy with the Jefferson City West Rotary Club. This was just a part of a 20 minute presentation. If you are interested in having Gus speak to your group, business, or convention just hit the contact button above!
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  • Creativity Is Not A Commodity

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)

    Here at The Rocket Group the office television is often tuned to MLB Network in the background. I’ve come to the conclusion, based on the commercials, the entire network is paid for by our competitors. Commercials for bulk printers, clip art graphic design, template website, and even social media management companies fill the airwaves between pitches.

    These are what we refer to as commodity marketing companies. It’s simple point-and-click-add-a-widget-without-a-creative-thought design. While this approach may work for some efforts and businesses it is not business we are interested in working on.

    I spent in almost a decade in and around manufacturing so I know how widgets are made on assembly lines. There is actual little thought which goes into the processes on the line as it is usually all automated by that time.

    You can do the same thing to market your company, organization, or campaign – which probably consumes your every waking moment and thought – by buying products from services mentioned above. If you are not interested in taking a creative and original approach to your marketing then you are probably not interested in standing out from your competition.

    These commodity marketing services may help you but it is more likely they will grab your money and run. You will be left with an inferior marketing product.

    What you need is a real live marketing professional, like ourselves or any of thousands across America, who will look you in the eye, walk your floors, and work with you to develop a brand, a message, and graphic tools for the web and the real world which will connect with the audiences you are trying to attract and retain.

    These tools, developed in a partnership with you, will help you succeed in making money, raising awareness, and dominating your market.

    If you need creative services for your efforts, contact us or any other marketing professional.

    If you need clip art which is probably being used by hundreds of other businesses like yours, then watch the MLB Network to see the companies you should call during every commercial break.

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  • Why Did I Favorite Your Tweet?

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)

    There are more than 500 million tweets sent every day around the world. That’s a lot of information to digest whether you are only looking at you’re the tweets of the folks you follow, by keywords, or by search.

    We’re able to slow down the firehose of information a lot by using tools like Hootsuite and Evernote ourselves. Another thing we do is hit the ‘Favorite’ button.

    You might be thinking, “Gus, you are the ShareThenLike.com dude. Why are you doing something on Twitter which tantamount to Liking something on Facebook?”

    I have a couple of reasons (and nice use of ‘tantamount’):

    1. I am saving it for later. Hitting Favorite on Twitter adds your message to a compilation list connected with my own profile and I can go back and look for that information at a later date. I often use Evernote for this feature as well but that is a private cloud-based system while the Favorite list is public.

    2. I also use the gold star to acknowledge that your great content educated or entertained me. I’d have probably loved to have retweeted the message but it was too long and I didn’t have time or resources to edit it shorter. Remember 120 > 140 and this theory will greatly help your retweets.

    3. Finally, I am connecting your content with our News page which is powered by the RebelMouse tool. We like to use this page to add another layer of social sharing to our efforts and your content.

    As I’ve said before, Twitter is my favorite social media platform and I use it for almost all of my news, weather, business and fun information gathering. The goal with the content I publish for TRG and clients is to educate, inform, and entertain our audiences. The Favorite feature is another way to do so and to help your content as well.

    Keep the great tweets coming and be sure to follow @RocketGroup on Twitter!

    UPDATE: This tweet seemed to fit the favor of this post pretty well.

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  • How to Get More People to Interact With Your Content

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)

    Between all the algorithm changes on social media and increased competition from more and more brands committing to online marketing you have probably seen less interaction with your content. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook post, a tweet, or content on your blog, the numbers are falling.

    Why is that?

    1. Do you know when your fans are online? Facebook tells you in your Insights what days and times of days your audience is on the platform. If you are posting when the smallest amount of fans are online you will be less successful.

    2. What’s in it for me? Your audience connected with you to support your business, to learn more from you, and to receive special opportunities. If ¾ of your content isn’t answering this question for your audience you will not receive interaction.

    3. Your content sucks.

    Your online content, especially on social, has to be informative and engaging. Sure, it acceptable to post the random fun item or dog photo (guilty) but if the majority of your posts are taken from George Takei then you will have problems. If you are posting all links, selling all the time, or posting ugly/blurry photos, you will not have successful interactions.

    Here are some tools we use to enhance our content. I’m not sharing any trade secrets here as you have the same internet we have and have probably found these tools yourself:

    1. PicMonkey is a great tool for editing and resizing photographic images. You don’t need to have a degree in Photoshop to run it either!

    2. Canva is a fairly new tool which will help you to manage your images, or use their stock images, to create some rather cool graphics. They also have templates you can use but we try to avoid those as it doesn’t take long for your content to begin looking like your competitors.

    3. Getty Images has always been the go-to source for news and file photos. They have recently opened up their sharing tools so you can go to them directly instead of stealing them from Google images.

    4. No marketer or communicator these days is worth their salt if they are not using Facebook and Twitter ads. These are both very powerful and very targetable tools which will help you to succeed for very small investments.

    If you still need help navigating the ever-changing waters of content management, let’s talk. Feel free to reach out to us at any time about launching your success story.

    As always, thanks for the time!

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  • How to Easily Work with Video in Your Marketing

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)

    One of our favorite things to do when blogging for ourselves it to add a video element to the content. You can see the videos which go with many of our blog pieces on marketing on our YouTube channel, throughout our Blog page, and even with this post.

    You can do the same thing to increase the opportunity for potential customers to find you. Video works to help you get found and to establish yourself as a topic expert online.

    You’re watching and reading this page right?

    Video is a key component of search engine marketing and with the rise of mobile devices, visitors are more likely to watch you talking about your topic than read the words you write. The reason: YouTube is the second largest search engine online.

    Yes, Google does own YouTube but the video platform still performs remarkably well separate from its mothership.

    Creating content may also seem like a burden but video makes production even easier. Video also gives you another form of content to publish and share through your social and other communication channels.

    And it’s simple to do.

    Yes, we do make high end video productions and we have access to all the cameras, lights, and tools of the trade we need to do so. For these blog videos, we prefer to use a simple Flip cam, tripod, and white board set up. You can emulate our set up from the photo below.

    You can’t even see the safety net!

    The one thing not pictured in this photo which you will need is trust in yourself.

    You have to exude confidence in the topic you are discussing to make yourself believable to your audience. Practice makes perfect so run through a couple of presentations on video then watch and learn from them. You will see your bad habits and tics (or your wife/husband/coworkers will when you show your work to them) and you will be able to iron the wrinkles out before you post anything on YouTube.

    Another thing to remember is to not worry if you don’t go ‘viral’ or even get 1,000 views. It only takes one customer or prospect seeing your video presentation to cover your overheard and make a profit on doing video blogs this way.

    Still have questions? Drop us a line anytime and we’ll be glad to help you get started on producing your own video content!

    *When using our Flip cams. It’s much more involved when we bring the big toys out to work!

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  • Never Unfriend Someone on Facebook

    Gus Wagner - Comment (0)

    We talk a lot around here about business applications for social media and other online marketing tools but we still get questions about personal use of platforms like Facebook. That’s cool with us because the personal use of these systems is still greater than the business use.

    Unfriending is a topic we often get asked about and our recommendation is to never do it. 

    You may want to unfriend someone because they post too much about their personal lives, their cats, their kids, their workout regimen or their politics but doing so leads to more drama in the real world than any you are dealing with just by seeing them in your timeline.
    It’s true that when you unfriend someone on Facebook they do not get a notification that you have taken this action. What is also true is that they will notice they aren’t seeing your content in their newsfeed where they had seen it before and when they go to your profile they will see they can add you as a friend.
    I’m not friends with this gentleman so the prompt is for me to add him.
    This tells them you are no longer friends and could very well lead to a real world confrontation when you encounter them at work, at church, or at the family reunion. You have successfully created more drama in your real life than in your online life.
    What you should do instead is go to their profile and click the ‘Following’ button. You will then be given the choice to unfollow them. This action allows you to remain Facebook friends, keeps their content out of your newsfeed, and keeps the uproar to a minimum.
    My wife’s profile shows we are Friends and I can unfollow her if I am being silly.
    I’ve unfollowed people, I have been unfollowed, and people have unfollowed you and you never knew it. Life goes on and everyone’s Facebook experience, and real life, is happier!
    Have any other questions about your personal use of social media? Feel free to drop a line to us anytime!
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