AMP Up Your Social Media

Jason White is VP of SEO and SMM at DragonSearch. Along his journey, Jason has built a toolbox of experience in Pay Per Click, Email marketing, media buys, corporate events, and has worked both in-house and at an agency (he LOVES agency life) performing Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. He fell into his career as an SEO and appreciates how his role evolves as the field changes because it allows him to draw upon his core skill sets, creating holistic campaigns that deliver results. A constant learner, Jason is always seeking improvement and freely shares his knowledge. Jason recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss his view on employee advocacy and how it plays into overall SEO from an agency perspective. Marketing is owning the data and realizing the importance of connecting tools. Marketing is driving new tool adoption. Jason shared how he introduces clients to the concept of employee advocacy. Education – Start with content. Establish your bloggers and get started with a small group of advocates, preferably 20. Give a lot of feedback and coach. Start with a webinar to help them optimize their social profiles. Invest in the employees and they will invest in the program.  Establishing your blog authors – Leverage your blog authors as part of your employee advocacy program. This will provide a jumpstart to get their content to the right people as organic reach on social media declines. Using these advocates as blog authors will build up their authority on search as more traffic is directed. As the employee gets more followers and posts you will see the brand website start to rank for employees branded terms. Trust – Win the trust of different groups through building out the blog and showing success. As people speak about the program excitement is built. People will start to come to you wanting to be part of the program. Jason would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Content Amplification and Engagement Solutions Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS  

Bernie Borges is CEO of Find and Convert, a B2B digital marketing agency. Borges is a consummate content producer.  He blogs regularly on Find and Convert’s OptimizeThis blog, speaks at marketing conferences and educates his clients through private workshops and webinars. Borges is also the executive producer of the Social Business Engine, digital media property which showcases brands in action using social media strategically across the business. Bernie recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss his view on content creation and how employees can be more involved in your process of creating and promoting content. “Make it easy for the employee. Don’t put the burden on the employee. Just capture the story from the employee and the marketing department then produces the story. They write it, they make it look good, they give it back to the employee and say “Here’s the story from our interview” and the employee goes “Wow I told that story! It looks great! I said that?” and make it easy for them to share it. ” Bernie shared a methodology he likes to call “The Ice Cream Sandwich Approach.” Storytelling –  Stories that are authentic and relevant are impactful when originating from the employee subject matter experts across the enterprise. Stories that are actionable take planning. Employees – Employees are the domain experts. Harness their storytelling potential by making extremely easy for them to share their stories and expertise.   Marketing – It’s the job of marketing to convert captured conversations into stories and allow employees to easily share those stories. The most important responsibility of the marketing team is to make stories actionable – stories so meaningful that the consumer wants to take an action. Bernie would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Content Amplification and Engagement Solutions Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS  

With the rise of marketing automation, sales VPs at software/SaaS startups are intent on tracking and monitoring multiple KPIs – outbound calls, trials started, emails sent vs. opened, etc.. But, there’s only one KPI that counts – revenue, according to Brian Burns, a 25-year enterprise software sales veteran, and the author of the widely read book Selling In A New Market Space. Burns recently joined Glenn Gaudet on the Amp Up Your Social Media podcast to discuss software/SaaS sales in today’s sales environment of marketing automation and social media selling. Finding Your Ideal Sales Targets And Where They Spend Their Time Online: Sales teams need to find the person of entry into an account. Who in a company has the problem that your product or service solves? Once you’ve identified those typical prospects, you need to figure out where they live on the Internet. Are they discussing problems on LinkedIn? Are they active on Twitter? Where do they look for answers to the problems that your company solves? Are they reading specific blogs? Creating Content: Smart content marketers will create content that’s open and honest about the problems that their software solves. Effective content will add humor or entertainment to those real problems. And, it’s important that the content created is not too self-involved and talks only about your product. Sharing Content for Social Selling: Effective social sales people will share quality content. But, it’s important not to just share your content. You need to share content that’s adjacent to you and relevant for the sales targets you identified in the initial sales process outlined above. Social Sales Are No Different Than The Real World – Don’t Be That Guy: Amidst all the marketing automation and social selling tools, we’ve forgotten that people are people.You don’t go up to someone at a social event, give them your business and give them your elevator pitch. But, everyones don’t that online and in the social media world. If you’re willing to help people and engage with them, naturally the topic of what you do, and what your company offers, will come up. Cold Calls Are Almost Worthless: How many people pick up a phone call from a number they don’t recognize? Almost no one. So cold calling for sales is not efficient. With social selling, you have context and connections when you contact a sales prospect. “We met on social media. We’ve traded comments on relevant articles. I re-shared a timely blog post that you originally shared a few weeks ago . . .” Connect with Brian Burns on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Brian Burns After spending 20 plus years selling enterprise software for 12 VC backed start-ups, Burns is now a sales consultant focused on helping a handful of companies. He works with leadership teams and sales executives to dominate their market segments. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media.

Jason Cormier is one of the co-founders and managing partners of Room 214, a social media agency that leverages marketing automation, research, social networking, and online advertising. His background is in web development, and his partner’s background is in public relations; They worked together in 2003 to find a new way of marketing. Between SEO, Google AdWords, and other communications strategies, they realized they could combine their backgrounds to form one cohesive company dedicated to leveraging online tools to benefit the online visibility of businesses. Now, social media plays a primary role in their ability to help companies extend their reach. Jason recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss ways in which a company can utilize social media to connect and engage with more users. “It’s always easier to join a conversation than to start one, and I believe that there’s a general lack of social listening that’s happening. Pay attention in order to recognize conversations and have that help shape your social media strategy. ” Jason discusses tips for using social media marketing as a way to generate traffic: The real value in Public Relations is Media Relations. Community management and content calendar editing and creation is important, but if the PR firm couldn’t drive hits on major social media sites that were relevant to the company, then they didn’t provide much value. Companies that can, for instance, provide a press release and keyword optimize it to generate search engine visibility are the ones that make the biggest impact and create the most value in social media. Social media is now about distinguishing your company among the social noise. Most companies now produce their own content and know how to navigate social media, so companies are now focused on how to overcome the social noise, and it begins with social listening. Whether it’s a small company or a fortune 500 company, you need a strategy that connects with your other marketing channels. People are looking for agencies that can connect the dots, so to say. Know your goals. This sounds basic, but many companies aren’t entirely sure of their goals. Broadly, you may want more awareness or to use social media to help drive leads, but you need a more quantitative assignment to go with your goal. Understand your existing team and the roles within the team. This helps you to better understand your process and procedures as well as the tools you have available to achieve your social media goals. Also, make sure that whoever is in charge of marketing is implementing systems that can be used by others should they happen to leave your company. B2B is generally more focused on lead generation and longer sales cycles. B2C can be quick purchases that are less expensive, and that separates the way that marketers may approach social media depending on the type of business they’re marketing for. B2B offerings are oftentimes approached via software platforms and really gets into the lead lifecycles. Another big difference is in the type of content that’s being produced.   Your themes need to relate to existing conversations. Your brand message can be shaped by the current conversations on social media, and those conversations need to play an integral role in your social presence and the way that you create content. Jason would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Jason Cormier  Hailing from Boulder, Colorado, Jason spends his free time on the Board of Advisors for Give Hope Global, a non-profit corporation which is involved in 5 specific activities in SW Haiti. All of these activities are aimed at realizing the organization’s vision which is “To see the young people we serve become able to help others both physically and spiritually.”       AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media.

Meagen Eisenberg is the CFO of MongoDB, an open-sourced, modern database which has been around for over 7 years. Meagen’s first clue as to how important social media was to become was when Twitter came out with promotional Tweets. Meagen and her team decided to use those promotional Tweets to increase their company’s awareness and engagement as a trial to test the waters and see how much of an impact that extra investment would make on their reach and engagement. The results were impressive, and after this success, Meagen shifted focus to finding better ways to utilize social media to reach her target audiences. “Participate. Listen and learn on social media, and activate your social media accounts more effectively. ” Meagen discusses tips for using social media digital marketing as a way to generate traffic: The reach you get on social media trumps traditional methods. Email marketing is a traditionally noisy channel, and when you can utilize other marketing channels like Twitter which is less noisy and typically more engaging, then the result can mean farther reach and more awareness for your brand. Look at reach and how it compares to competitors. It’s hard to gauge whether or not you’re being successful without knowing what kind of traction your competitors are getting on social media. Look at your reach, and then compare your data with the data of your competitors. Combine those statistics with the cost of each lead to see whether or not you’re measuring up to the competition. Pay attention to trending topics. Trending topics give you insight into what’s popular on social media right now. Utilize trending topics when they’re appropriate to capitalize on what people are interested in, and keep an eye on these topics as they continually revolve and evolve as topical interests change. Utilize softwares and programs like GaggleAMP to track leads, campaigns, and conversion rates. There’s a lot of value in awareness, reach, and social mentions, but having the ability to track your campaigns, leads, and conversion rates is the best way to analyze the concrete success of your social media efforts. Customer advocates generate more customers. Word of mouth is a great way to generate more business, so engage your customers, and make it easy for them to spread the good news. Awareness is extremely important to garnering more leads, especially when it comes to social media today. Listen first, and then engage. Engaging users on social media can be more authentic and useful when you first listen to customers and then engage. In this manner, you develop more meaningful relationships with customers which are more likely to convert to solid leads. Meagen would love to hear from you! Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Meagen Eisenberg Hailing from Los Altos, California, Meagen spends her time at home as the mother of 3. She studied marketing and strategy at Yale University from the Yale School of Management. She’s also a member of Eloqua Master, MOCCA, Marketing Leadership Development Program (MLDP) – IBM, CPIM (APICS), Order of Omega, and Alpha Omicron Pi.         AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media.

Greg Cooper is a LinkedIn coach and trainer located in Bristol. He works with small to medium sized business to find new opportunities using LinkedIn as one of the key tools. He runs regular public courses aimed at individuals, business owners, and sales and marketing teams which are designed to increase individual productivity and encourage a more joined-up and effective approach to business development. Greg recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss ways in which a company can utilize LinkedIn to make connections and build relationships online. “Comment on the posts of the people you want to influence. It’s a mechanism to show up on their radar, and it’s a way of building the relationship.” Greg discusses tips for using LinkedIn to form B2B relationships and create new opportunities: The larger your network, the more opportunities you can find. It’s very important to build out your network but, at the same time, to keep it relevant. Link up with people beyond just those you’ve personally met but with discrimination enough to stay within your own niche. The key to building your profile beyond your network is being active. It’s like going to a party with your nice clothes on but never talking to anybody. There’s a ‘status update’ on LinkedIn like other social media sites, and you’ll want to interact and engage to keep your profile active. Use updates as well as published posts. Your status updates are different, shorter posts than a published post. You’ll want to continually do status updates as well as published posts. Your published posts can be up to 40,000 characters and helps you to demonstrate your expertise as more of an opinion piece. Use blogs on your website but also on LinkedIn. Copy your blog from your website and put it in your LinkedIn profile with a sentence on the bottom about where the piece originated from. Google will know which is the original one, so you won’t be penalized. Your blog is not a sales pitch. Share something that is valuable to your audience. These can be done once enough and can even be as short as 500 words, but always be sure to avoid pitching sales to your customers, or you’ll risk losing their engagement.   Greg would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Greg Cooper Hailing from the UK, Greg Cooper acquired his degree in Psychology from the University of Bristol. Some of his projects include We Dig Mondays, a community initiative by members of the Plus Your Business Academy (a digital media training zone) to restore the image of Mondays to its rightful place as the most exciting day of the week for self employed entrepreneurs and small business. Some of his interests also include tennis, cooking, and the theatre.   AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media.  

Jason Burrows is the CEO of an integrated marketing agency with a global reach focusing mostly on B2B. His first experience with social media was with Myspace to Facebook and then Twitter on a personal level which then evolved to use on a professional scale as well. It started with connections and telling stories, and today it’s still very much the same. Jason recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss ways in which a company can utilize LinkedIn to make connections and build relationships online. “Empower your staff intelligently. Don’t just give them the tools; empower them.” Jason discusses tips for using digital marketing as a way to generate traffic: Email is not appropriate for cold conversations. If you want to generate leads from email, then you need to start with a huge database. If you don’t have that database, then you’ll have to spend a lot of money – and the results are still less effective than other methods of connecting with digital media. Social is the replacer for having a conversation with people. We can’t initiate a conversation, but rather, we have to be found. So we now must think about telling stories, content marketing, and volume. Use your staff as a marketing channel. Empower your staff. Big social accounts typically don’t garner as much traffic as much as the staff with corporate accounts will. This is where there’s a lot of hard evidence that empowering your staff works. So then you can worry about how to optimize it and improve it. Use GaggleAMP to remove the barriers. Many times it’s not a matter of interest when it comes to using social media but rather a matter of time. Simply put, many companies simply don’t have the time to invest in social media in an effective way. Use GaggleAMP to streamline the efforts and make it easier for employees to share your content. Avoid posting into groups. Spamming LinkedIn groups is simply just poor form, and many of these group managers will end up admonishing you or even excluding you from the group because of this. Employees in the same groups run the risk of spamming customers, and GaggleAMP helps to give control to avoid this issue. Jason would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Jason Burrows Jason Burrows is the CEO of the Intelligent Sales and Marketing Agency, Creation Agency. Jason works mainly with global brands on through the funnel marketing programmes, specialising in Marketing Automation and Social Marketing services.         AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media.

Janet Fouts is CEO of Tatu Digital Media in Silicon Valley and is also a social media strategist, keynote speaker, trainer, and author. She started an online community in the early ‘90s, and she started her first social media startup in 1996. Her firm belief that social media and community go hand-in-hand has helped propel her business. Janet recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss marketing automations solutions on social media. “Be mindful while you’re in social. Think about who you’re talking to, who you represent, and be thoughtful and considerate while you’re using social. Talk to users as human beings, not targets.” Janet discusses tips for using the community on social media to propel your business to the next level: Choose connections with appropriate influences. While having a ‘celebrity’ with a large following trying your product and promoting your brand may reach the most followers, a person with a smaller following who actually influences their followers would be a better investment of your time and money, as you’re likely to get more leads from a more influential person. Social media doesn’t work if you don’t do the work. Your brand promoters need to be researched, and you need to put in the work to see if those folks are just broadcasting or if they’re actually having conversations with their following. This plays a huge role in their success and, thus, yours! Utilize tools. Social media listening tools are widely available. SocialBro, Sumo, Community, LittleBird, and other apps are great for seeing who is actually influential as opposed to who just has ‘empty numbers’. Choose the right social network. Not everybody hangs out on all the social media networks. Research all of the major networks, and check out apps that listen across all platforms for mentions. Where are people talking about what I want them to be talking about? Narrow down your search and choose the right social network for your customers and your product. Janet would love to hear from you! Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Janet Fouts A self-professed ‘Mac’ girl, Fouts hails from San Jose, CA. She loves travelling, wine, food, and equestrians. Janet has been involved in online community for over 20 years. She co-founded ONTHERAIL, an award winning online community for the restaurant industry and has continually been involved in online community ever since. She’s also an active participant in San Francisco Women on the Web (Director 2000-2001), Women in Technology, Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, Green & Sustainability Innovators & Innovation Network, and the Social Media Club as well as several industry groups. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them.

Ron Ploof is a content marketer who has been interested in social media since 2005 when he started his podcast called Griddlecakes Radio: The Lost Art of Audio Storytelling. Over the years, he’s started his own agency and even headed up social media for Epson America. While he didn’t start his podcast to get into the social media industry per se, he did see the value in his ability to utilize social media to publish and distribute content via audio formats. Ron recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss marketing automations solutions on social media.  “[Your social media and storytelling success] will all come from empathy.”  Ron discusses tips for using storytelling as a social media connector: Create great content by developing a great story. Storytellers have great empathy with their audience, and a business storyteller has an audience that is a customer, vendor, or partner. By understanding them and their problems that they have to solve, you can create effective solutions to help them think through their issues through utilization of your content. The B2B space is a story in and of itself. Characters and conflict are the very essence of B2B negotiations. There’s risk on both sides, and sometimes politics even come into play that enhance and develop the story. The act of doing business is a story, and having empathy for your audience will dramatically improve your story’s artform. Even ‘inactive’ products can tell a story. Ask what functions a potentially ‘inactive’ product serves. What problems is that product solving? What have other similar products provided in the way of benefits and even disasters that can help tell the story about YOUR product? There are bigger reasons as to why someone might purchase an item than the simple fact that it exists and ‘can get the job done’. Look at your product through your customers’ eyes. Marketers tend to focus on their product, the ‘right words’ and terminology, and their strategies. Oftentimes, the empathy for their customers and viewpoints of their customers tend to get left behind. Write about what your customers care about and not what your company cares about if you really want to create engaging content. Content generators need to be more active with their customers. It seems so simple, but take time to talk to your customers directly. You may not necessarily use your products as much as your customers, and then your customers could have more information about your products than you might! You can learn something about your product by speaking with your customers directly. Ron would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or through his company website. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. Listen to the podcast here. About Ron Ploof As a graduate of Merrimack College, Ploof has spent many years perfecting the art of storytelling. As such, he’s taken interest in many radio talk shows and storytelling venues, and is responsible for writing, recording, and editing a family/work safe storytelling/entertainment podcast on Griddlecakes Radio. Additionally, his labor-for-love quest to tell the story of Lizzie Milligan consumes much of his spare time in a project lovingly entitled Project Lizzie. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them.

Bryan Mattimore is cofounder and ‘chief idea guy’ of the Growth Engine Company, an innovation agency based in Norwalk, CT that helps companies come up with ‘the next big thing’. Before co-founding the Growth Engine Co. in 1999, Bryan was founder and president of the Mattimore Group, an 18-year-old creativity consulting and ideation facilitation company. Bryan recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss marketing automations solutions on social media. “People at all levels […] should be learning these techniques. It’s a tremendous way to get ahead personally but also to help your company and clients to get ahead as well.” Bryan discusses tips for connecting big ideas to effective social media campaigns: Help people make behavior transformations through appropriate channels. Conventional media isn’t necessarily tuned towards catering to younger generations, and so social media is going to be your key to tapping into behavior-changing impacts for millennials and those other younger generations. Start with ‘the big idea’. Social media may be your channel to reaching your customers, but you’ll always have to start with that big idea which may, in turn, reflect in your social media campaign. The idea isn’t always necessarily for social media, but it may have ramifications on social media channels. Start with your brand and your target market. Often times coming up with ‘the big idea’ can be overwhelming for creative personnel. Instead, start with the basics, and build from there. Discuss your brand, values, and core target market to get a good grip on where your ideas are headed, and brainstorm ideas around those central focuses. Use a variety of techniques. Sometimes coming up with the best idea takes a little bit of creativity, like ‘The Worst Idea’ technique! In this way, have everyone come up with the worst possible idea the can come up with. Then, use facets of those awful ideas to turn bad ideas into good ones. Then, you’re off to a good start on your social media targets. It’s important to have cross-functional teams. Your creative team shouldn’t consist of the same three people sitting at a table staring at each other constantly. You’ll get the same ideas constantly, so expand that when you can by including other areas of your brand in the creative process. Bryan would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or through his company website. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Bryan Mattimore Graduating from Stamford High School in ‘72, Mattimore made his way to Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire where he majored in Psychology. Since then, he’s published his book  “Idea Stormers, How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs,” (Wiley Jossey-Bass, 2012) which includes a wide variety of newly-invented and empirically-validated ideation and innovation processes derived from fifteen years of successful innovation consulting assignments. He is also the author of the bestselling book, “99% Inspiration, A Real World Guide to Business Creativity” selected in 1993 as the American Management Association’s membership offering/book of the year; and the inventor of the creativity training game, Bright Ideas. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them.

Dorie is a marketing consultant, professional speaker and recognized as a “brand expert”. She is the author of two books, Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future and Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following. Dorie recently joined AMP Up Your Social Media host Glenn Gaudet to discuss how to build a following. “How do you build your following?  The ability to create tribes, create people who are interested in our message, who want to hear to about it and opt in to it. That’s something that GaggleAMP does really well; bring together a community of people who are interested in and eager to share your content.”   Dorie shares her process on how to build a following for your brand: Building Your Network: Start by creating a group of personal, trusted advisors and creating a 1 on 1 relationship with them. These should be people who can help you grow your idea and provide you with honest feedback before you begin sharing it. Building Your Audience: Next, you want to expand to a broader group of people with whom you can begin sharing your ideas. You want to expose them to your ideas and, hopefully, get them excited about your ideas through social media, blogging and speaking events. Building Your Community: Finally, you want people to believe in your message. It can’t just be you blasting your message, other people need to believe in your message and share the message too. It’s a powerful thing when you can get people to not only believe your message or idea, but also begin to share it. Dorie would love to hear from you! Connect with her on Twitter at @DorieClark or at dorieclark.com. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network About Dorie Clark Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant, professional speaker, and frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and the World Economic Forum blog. Recognized as a “branding expert” by the Associated Press, Fortune, and Inc. magazine, she is the author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)  and her next book, Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, will be released by Portfolio/Penguin in April 2015. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them.   Grow your community! Find out how GaggleAMP can help. Register here. »

Justin is the founder and CEO of LeadMD, a company that helps marketers build revenue engines. In 2011, Justin realized the potential that lies in creating organic and engaging content, catapulting Justin into the social media mogul he is today! Justin recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss marketing automations solutions on social media. “Spend a day with sales. It’s the most high-performance activity you can do as a marketer.” Justin discusses tips for providing technology and automation into your social media strategy: Educate and train your employees. Technologies are easy to purchase, but truly mastering the technology will reap the most benefits for your company. There are always new skill sets for marketers to learn. Organize your funnel and the technology that helps manage that funnel. The new role of management of the technology stack means that marketing automation is the most broad-based marketing solution. It works to create engagement throughout the buying lifecycle. CRM, GaggleAMP, and other social tools can integrate into an effective buying cycle or ‘marketing funnel’. Get your marketing and automation teams on the same page. Education and alignment are the top barriers. Naturally, alignment comes with education, and it’s truly a top-down initiative. Have the teams gather in one room and agree on the buying cycle and the universal definitions. Break away from the traditional marketing funnel diagram. It’s truly more of a bell curve, and communicating to the middle of that bell curve will help those who are stuck in the middle of the B2B cycle. Create engaging messaging to each area of the curve or funnel. Justin would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or jgraymatter.com. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Justin Gray As a marketing professional, Justing obviously leads a busy life. But he prides himself on always making time to connect with others and building relationships. He speaks both German and English, and he has a soft spot for animal welfare, education, and economic empowerment. He’s a sponsor for Helping Hands for Freedom and is a board member for Future for KIDS. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them. GaggleAMP can help! Leverage your employees to amplify your current social media efforts. Try GaggleAMP for Free. »

Dino Dogan is the CEO of Triberr, a SaaS solution that makes media buying in blogs, podcasts, and videos easy, scalable, and effective. His past exploits as a network engineer led him to working with people and then towards his company Triberr. Triberr distributes content thereby hitting the most important success indicators, like number of shares, traffic, and engagement. Dino recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss content marketing on social media. “Write an article directed and targeted at a single person. The ‘fly on the wall’ effect is powerful!” <<Tweet This>> Dino discusses tips for effective marketing in social media: Search engine optimization is big. SEO works for transactional-type interactions. For instance, Google can filter results to what folks are looking for. But if you want to set up an ecosystem around your brand, then it’s a completely different ballgame. Bogging gets people to take interest. Users are drawn to groups (or ‘tribes’ like Triberr) the same as they would be in real life. Blog often, share others’ posts, and comment to get the group engaged and magnetic. Get employees engaged. Utilizing your employees can help fill the void in creating groups of people to talk about any given subject. They help get the ball rolling to successful social media campaigns. Keep learning every day. Blogging is an evolving part of social media, and stay open to learning new tactics as the market changes. Keep in mind that many things will stay the same as well! Own your blog. It’s great to have a social media presence, but make sure that your content goes back to your site because you own and control that. For Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, you’re merely ‘renting’ that space. Dino would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter or dinodogan.com. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Dino Dogan Dino Dogan is a recent US Citizen from Bosnia. In his spare time, he dabbles in mixed martial arts as well as singing and songwriting. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Theological Studies from the University of Sarajevo and has also touched interests in dog training as well as psychology. He funnels his interests into different blogs – all of which can be found online! AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them. Need more tips? Here’s how your employees can help you create content! Read here. »

For the past 10 years, Tony Zayas has been passionately engaged in the world of social media. He works for printing and promotional products in the franchise organization called Proforma. This is his second time on GaggleAMP’s podcast, and we welcome his expertise once again! Tony recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss power prospecting using social media. “Apply sales marketing tactics to social.” <<Tweet This>> Tony discusses tips for prospecting using social media: You have to grab customers’ attention in a number of different ways. Your customers aren’t sitting right in front of you, so you have to open a box of brainstorming tools in order to reach these customers and really grab their attention without the benefit of a face-to-face interaction. Continually promote your program. Because you aren’t always face-to-face with potential prospects, you’ll want to continually promote your program in order to ensure that you’re given the most opportunity to touch your prospective client base. Get folks to participate. Participating leads to action, and those customers will help to gain more momentum in traction with getting others’ attention as well. I requested video testimonials from those who took my training courses, and this was then utilized to get more customers! There are three major challenges to overcome on social media. Time, content, and strategy can all block your success on social media. Carve out time, create engaging content, and design an effective strategy for your online efforts. GaggleAMP thankfully can knock out the first two issues fairly easily! Tony would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Tony Zayas Tony is a proud father and husband hailing from Aurora, Ohio. He’s a Chicago sports, UFC, and Iowa Hawkeye football enthusiast and has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Iowa in Philosophy and English. While he also dabbles in mixed martial arts, he’ll always retain that his greatest passion lies in his family. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them. Want more tips from Tony Zayas? Turning Social Media Relationships into Business Read here. »

Lew Sabbag has 25 years of marketing experience and now works with businesses to improve their content marketing strategies. Currently, he is the VP of Social Media and Community for the American Marketing Association in Boston. Lew recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss content marketing on social media. “For smaller firms, just get started. Pick a channel, and get one running!” Lew discusses tips for effective content marketing in social media: Have a presence that allows your company to be seen as ‘people’. Show folks that there’s a friends and family side that is behind your company. Show when you work with the community to connect with other users on a more intimate level. This gives your client base a more comfortable way to communicate and engage with your company. Create local pages for large companies. When your brand involves many businesses under one name, it’s best to have local brick-and-mortar offshoots to have their own social media pages in addition to the brand page. You can answer local-specific questions, tame the ‘trolls’, and give local-specific information. Give quick responses. Customers get frustrated quickly when businesses don’t give a quick response. You’ll likely see ranking improvements as customers find themselves interacting more reliably with your company on social media. Change your message across platforms. As you localize the content better, you’ll find that you can customize your content better as well. Humanize your efforts and keep variety across your social media platforms, as they’re likely addressing different crowds. Find the right person for the right answer. Have a list of approved answers for questions. When you find that your locality can’t confidently answer standard FAQs, then it might be time to thank them for their question and funnel that question to someone higher-up. Lew would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Lew Sabbag Lew values going out and helping the community and hails from Reading, MA. He’s also partner to a company called Business +1 and has a wide variety of side jobs aimed at helping the community with their marketing efforts. In Lew’s own words, ‘Here’s to helping people, learning, doing the RIGHT thing and having FUN along the way!’ AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them. Amplify your content. Leverage your employees to amplify your current social media efforts. Try GaggleAMP for Free. »

Gareth Goh is the Content Marketing Manager at InsightSquared, an analytics generation company for growing businesses. Academically, he hails from Boston University with a degree in Journalism, but as he saw the evolution towards content emphasis, his employment started focusing on content marketing. With a varied background in both journalism and content marketing, he is an experienced veteran of inbound marketing, SEO, and business intelligence. Gareth recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss content marketing on social media. “There is a great deal of opportunity to be more effective, be more efficient, and be both!” Gareth discusses tips for effective content marketing in social media: Invest in marketing. This isn’t just financial; Invest the time and effort in hiring as well! Marketing involves commitment – both during success and in the face of failure. Attract results by investing in the commitment on all levels in social media. Disseminate complicated topics. Your brand may involve technical and complicated topics. There’s a component of having to learn all of the concepts and disseminating those topics into digestible content for the common user. Quality is important, but it’s useless if it’s not connecting with your target audience. Utilize C-level business partners. Sales leaders and leadership is essential to helping them grow their social media presence. You’ll have a much easier time growing your followings when you have the support of higher-ups, and ‘selling’ the importance of your social media presence may be the most difficult part. Use GaggleAMP to extend your reach. Salespeople don’t want to do any thinking when it comes to social media, and GaggleAMP does the hard work for you. It’s increased our reach by 4x, and it’s made it easy for our employees to share great content. Know when to grow your team. And split up the team to best capitalize on a variety of social media aspects. From blogging to long-form content, there are a variety of tasks, and it can get overwhelming if you only have one person doing all  of your content writing. It’s a threshold that will depend on the size and demands of your company! Gareth would love to hear from you! Connect with him on LinkedIn. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Gareth Goh Aside from running the blogs at InsightSquared, Gareth spends his free time as the commissioner of many fantasy leagues. He is a die-hard fan of the Phoenix Suns and Liverpool Football club. As a fan of the Game of Thrones series, he feels pride in the saying ‘Valar morghulis’ meaning “all men must die” in High Valyrian. AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them. How to Increase Your Social Reach Give these 5 tips a try to boost your social reach Read here. »

Douglas Spencer is a marketing and branding expert and is president at Spencer Brenneman, LLC. As a brand strategy consultant, he has 25 years of experience in branding and marketing. He ensures that brand strategies build businesses by connecting with customers and employees. Douglas recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss brand marketing on social media. “Get a handle on who is representing you on social. Understand where your voice is being amplified – and by whom. Do they have what they need?” Douglas discusses tips for effective brand marketing in social media: Strong brands are built on consistency. Tone of voice and messages in general demand consistency if they are to represent a strong brand. This includes employees out on their own time communicating with potential customers. Governance is important with social media. Everyone needs to not only be held accountable but also get pointed in the right direction – and this is up to the company to get their employees on the right track! Strong governance programs take into account the needs of the business as well as the needs of each individual function (sales, customer service, marketing, etc). Create employee advocacy programs. To be effective, blend these programs with other trainings. Employee advocacy comes naturally for many, so training on tone of voice, translations on social media, and other aspects are left to the brand policies to harness these intricacies. Tone of voice is important. With subtleties and intricacies, tone of voice can be a tricky part of training! Getting employees focused without feeling restricted can truly boost your social media brand efforts. Everything starts with a brand strategy. Understand not only what your brand IS but also what your brand WANTS to be! This will help you focus on a projection of yourself that you want to develop to connect with your ideal customer. Having everyone coming from the same place and going towards a common goal is essential. Douglas would love to hear from you! Chat with him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Douglas Spencer Douglas is a graduate of Marietta College, specializing in journalism. He’s a board member to Fenway Health, AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, and Agency Spotter. You can find his dog popping up at his headquarters often on social media sites as well! AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them. Amplify your content. Leverage your employees to amplify your current social media efforts. Try GaggleAMP for Free. »

Simone Douglas is a Social Media Specialist trainer, presenter, and coach as well as founding partner of Social Media AOK, a social media agency in Australia. With 17 years of specialty experience in corporate management roles, she is considered an expert in her field of social media, risk management, and marketing strategy. Simone recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss practical training techniques on how to get the most out of your social media strategies. “Get into the habit of using LinkedIn daily…Send [those who have viewed your profile] a connection message!” Simone discusses tips for getting the most out of your social media: Don’t forget the basics of business. Have a social networking marketing plan that keeps the human connection at the forefront. The way we do business hasn’t changed in terms of human context, and many overlook this when attempting to connect with clients on social media – and that oversight could be costly. Find your contact strategy. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but here’s what I do: If someone sends you a connection request, you could potentially do business with them or ignore it – open yourself to connecting with them without a sale in mind. Grow your network with the idea that you’re establishing peer connections. Twitter is great for small talk. Use Twitter to reconnect and reunite with users! It’s quicker than email, and you can tag those users to grow your relationships. Remember the purpose. Investing the time, effort, and energy really boils down to more than simply connecting with a community. You’re looking for sales, at the end of the day! Build relationships that can gain you customers and that are congruent with clients you’re interested in, and foster their growth. Face-to-Face scenarios are beneficial. Connecting via social media is a great way for extending your reach and growing your network, but fostering relationships by setting up face-to-face contact where possible can help to strengthen those ties. Simone would love to hear from you! Chat with her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network .About Simone Douglas Simone is a Telstra Business Awards 2014 Finalist and prides herself on being creative and forward-thinking in life.  She’s also a member of Family Business Australia, a peak body committed to contributing to Australia’s future through a dynamic and sustainable family business community. She values animal welfare as well as civil rights and human rights! AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them.

Brad Young is a global content strategy leader for Dun and Bradstreet, leading the creation, curation, and editorial coordination of world-class, modern content and content experiences for customers, sales teams, partners, alliances and influencers. He also has 17 years of content and marketing experience, making him a leader in content strategy marketing! Brad recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss the significance of content marketing and strategy. “Be absolutely relentless in asking yourself ‘Who is this for?’ and ‘What’s the value?’” Brad discusses tips for content marketing and strategy: Become a powerful storyteller. When you have the mentality, metabolism, and mindset, you have an incredible opportunity to reach the most people in an engaging, revenue-driving way. Use modern technology. Your story is only as good as who it reaches. Don’t be afraid of utilizing modern technology and social media to get your content into the hands of the most people possible. Use data to advance relationships. Your raw data can have stories built around them, and use this data to move your company forward. Content marketing needs to be useful. Don’t make it all about you! Your content should be designed around the lifestyle of your target audience, and you don’t have to be promotional to sell your product. Story first, media second. Mine your content for all it’s worth, and create content calendars to drive your story forward. It may be appropriate in some instances to outsource your videos to other companies so you can focus on your story! Brad would love to hear from you! Chat with him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn. Subscribe and get the AMP UP Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUPSocial. AMP UP Your Social Media is a proud member of the FIR Podcast Network. About Brad Young Brad is married to a wonderful wife and father of two daughters. He’s a positive thinker and progressive leader with a degree in journalism from Penn State University. He currently calls New Jersey home and roots for the Phillies in baseball and, of course, Penn State in football! AMP UP Your Social Media is sponsored by: GaggleAMP – Empower your employees, partners and resellers to amplify your social media. SafeLinks – Know when your links on social media messages fail before you lose out on the people clicking on them.