What I want for my birthday from LinkedIn

I’ve become a big fan of LinkedIn PPC advertising. The CPC is pretty low (especially for the B2B space), and they have been converting at an aggressive rate. Obviously, my landing pages can’t take all the credit. So, clearly, LinkedIn’s targeting and various anonymous algorithms are firing on all cylinders. I just wish that LinkedIn would put together a mobile app for its advertising platform.

Here’s the deal: my market is all over the world. And, when I wake up in the morning, I’d like to get an early sense of whether it will be a good day or not. Decent progress on my campaigns, of course, could make that extra cup of coffee superfluous. Unfortunately, I have to schlep over to my laptop, fire it up and then head over to the LinkedIn advertising platform. That’s just far too much work for me. It would be so much better if I could just pull up my LinkedIn advertising dashboard on my iPhone or Kindle.

So, LinkedIn, please, please, please: give me a mobile app for your advertising platform. To hit my deadline (check the headline), I’ll need it by the first week of March.

Social Media Survival Tips for Travel PR

As the date of a press trip approaches, itineraries are flying around, details are being finalized and media kits are assembled and distributed. Amid all of this, I’ve noticed over two and a half years of travel writing, there is no social media “kit” provided at the beginning of a trip … and it wouldn’t be hard to do. Look at the top of any itinerary: you see property and agency contact information. How hard would it be to include a Twitter account, too?

Hey, travel PR folks: in addition to thinking about the coverage you hope to secure in a magazine or on a blog after the trip has run its course, think about the incremental gains you could realize during the trip itself – especially for a group trip.

When you’re planning your next press trip, consider the following social media essentials:

Five Most Recent Social Media Marketing Guest Posts

Okay, I’ve been busy lately, which is why I’ve been neglecting Migrant Blogger. Just so you can have a sense of what I’ve been up to, here are my recent social media marketing guest posts for Social Times and Technorati:

Four Ways Corporate Bloggers Can Lure Readers Back >>

Four Ways to Hedge Against Twitter Platform Instability >>

Four Terrible Objectives for Your Corporate Blog >>

Corporate Blogging: Ignore Your Metrics >>

Top Five Ways to Turn Blog States into Sales Intelligence >>

Why the Twitter Startup Market Won’t Get More Cash

Peter Kafka’s latest article over on AllThingsD (a must-read for me) caught my attention quickly. He found that the amount of investment cash flowing into “pure play” Twitter startups fell to $10.4 million for the June 2009-to-May 2010 period … from $21.6 million the previous year. The 52 percent year-over-year decline probably feels like a shock to the system, but it looks like there are some clear drivers for this change.

Kafka cites the natural ebb and flow of venture capital deals, as well as Twitter’s rush to fill gaps in its services. The latter, to me, is a no-brainer, as I remember trying to keep up with it. During last spring’s Chirp conference, Twitter announced a number of new measures that rounded out its product set. Of course, it came at the expense – whether Twitter wanted to admit it or not – of the many companies that had arisen as a result of the market opportunities created by Twitter’s gaps.

Corporate Blogging Tips: Four Ways to Get Your Readers Back

Do you own your readers or rent them? If you want to turn the latter into the former, check out my latest for SocialTimes, “Four ways Corporate Bloggers Can Lure Readers Back.” I’ve been knee-deep in corporate blogging for a while now, and this reflects both the latest intel I’ve been able to pick up and a few years of accumulated knowledge.

Read the article >>

I Told You the Aggregators Were Coming

I wrote a while ago that the days of the social media platform (at least new introductions thereof) are waning, and that we’ll start seeing more aggregators instead. Yeah, it’s happening. Dashboards fall under “aggregators” (in my mind, at least), and involver’s just come out with a new one. For the social media marketing crowd, this is huge.

Check out the rest from TechCrunch below.

Involver, a company that helps both brands and smaller businesses manage their presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other online portals, has launched a new dashboard they’re calling AMP. The dashboard allows brands to aggregate all of their inbound tweets, Facebook comments, and other messages on a single site, and it isn’t just for monitoring incoming content — you can also respond to messages directly from the page. Involver was founded in 2007 … Read More

via TechCrunch

The Single Secret to Successful Blogging

I don’t usually share content across my blogs, but I liked this simple post so much that I decided to break the self-imposed rules. It originally ran on my other blog, Reinsurance Blogger, which deals with social media marketing issues in the reinsurance industry.

If you’re looking to launch a successful blog – or take one you have that isn’t doing much and turn it around – you really need only one little tidbit of info. It isn’t profound, and it will actually make your life easier.

So, here it is:

Good Content + A Lot of Content = A Great Blog

Skittishness Index: Few to Outsource Social Media

I took a look at this chart and almost lost my mind. I can understand the desire to maintain a certain amount of control internally, but the entire marketing world seems to be against outsourcing social media. That’s nuts! Social media, despite all the hype about “conversations with the marketplace” is really just another form of marketing. We need to come to grips with this. Anyone who remembers the dotcom days and has read the Cluetrain Manifesto realizes we’ve seen this movie before. It’s time to loosen up.

I see this chart as something of a snapshot. This (obviously) is where we are now, and I don’t think it’s going to be this way forever. Over time, as more businesses get a feel for social media marketing, they’ll start to outsource more comfortably. For now, this chart seems like a “Skittishness Index.”

[Source: MarketingSherpa]