Blog

Have you updated the LinkedIn app on your smartphone yet? If not, you should!

There’s no doubt that LinkedIn has become the most important social media platform for building a professional personal brand and while the old LinkedIn app was fine for checking a few updates or accepting a friend request, the clustered functionality and not-so-aesthetically-pleasing user interface somehow limited it’s potential to enable users to enhance their personal brands adequately via mobile.

The new LinkedIn Flagship app aims to provide users with ”a mobile experience that is more intuitive, smarter and dramatically simplifies your LinkedIn experience.”

Personally, I think LinkedIn did a great job reaching this goal.

Here’s how the improved features of the new LinkedIn app can help you boost your personal brand on the go:

Edit Profile & Adjust Settings in the ‘Me’ tab

The new app breaks down its functionalities into 5 tabs: Home, Me, Messaging, My Network, and Search.

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Next week I will be sharing some thoughts and ideas at a virtual event held by the SEMPO Education Committee – Google+ Hangout: All About Branding.

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Earlier this month, I was invited to share some insights on How to Make eCommerce Business Stand Out by Creating a Branding Action Plan with the listeners of eCommerce Marketing Podcast.

In the latest episode of the podcast series hosted by Robert Kilonzo, Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies to Grow Your Store, I was asked to reveal the secrets of how to make your brand stand out, top mistakes people make with building their brands, and tools to put together a successful branding strategy.

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October has been a wonderfully busy month with Team Delightful appearing at several digital marketing industry events throughout the US.

At the beginning of the month we were at SMX East in New York with the Bing Ads team and Majestic.com. Watch the wrap-up video we helped produce for Bing and see how much of a blast we had there!

A couple of days later, our founder, Mel Carson, was honored to MC the US Search Awards and shared some insights on Personal Branding at Pubcon. Read an article from Bruce Clay’s team on the personal branding & social strategy advice Mel and his fellow speakers shared on the stage.

We also attended =LIFT, the first annual social media conference by Simply Measured. Here’s the top takeaways from us from that event on social analytics and technologies.

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Last week, Simply Measured, one of the leading social media analytics companies out there, hosted their first annual conference =LIFT in Seattle. The 1-day conference provided marketers with a lot of insight on the latest industry trends, benchmarks, and best practices on social media marketing.

The keynote speech delivered by Nate Elliott, VP & Principal Analyst Serving B2C Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research, was a great kick-off of the event. We were so impressed by the data and insights from his talk we wanted to share them with you.

Technology and Measurement are the Biggest Challenges for Social Media Marketers

Social media is bigger than ever before. From 2014, both agency fees for social media and social media advertising spend have been increasing and will continue to increase. About 9.6 billion dollars will be spent on social media in 2015 as Forrester predicts.

(Slide credit: Nate Elliot from Forrester at =LIFT)

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Social selling is definitely a vibrant buzzword in the 2015 business world. Businesses, large and small, are trying to jump on the social selling bandwagon in fear of missing out.

Social selling is not just about helping your sales reps set up their social profiles and start pitching people on social media. It requires a comprehensive plan and deliberate strategies and tactics to deliver successful results.

A recent study from Forrester shows that a large number of sales and marketing professionals don’t know how to get started with a formal social selling program.

Let’s suppose you’ve recognized the value of social selling, persuaded your stakeholders it’s a great idea, and are ready to get started with a solid plan, here are 8 steps to help you build a winning social selling program:

1. Define your goal

It’s obvious that the ultimate goal for any social selling programs would be generating more sales. However, for a winning social selling program, the goal needs to be more specific and scalable.

The Forrester study recommends marketers to think about customers’ purchase circle and functions of social media when setting the goals for a social selling program:

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At Pubcon in Las Vegas earlier this month, our Founder, Mel Carson, shared some actionable insights on Personal Branding and Social Media Strategies together with Mark Traphagen, Senior Director of Online Digital Marketing at Stone Temple Consulting, and Matt Craine, a Brand Strategist at Craine Consulting.

Here’s the presentation Mel had a blast when sharing with the marketers.

Hopefully you will glean some helpful tips from it…

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September was full of fantastic industry events and Delightful has been busy learning about, and sharing the latest digital marketing trends and technologies.

During Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco, we got the chance to learn about the future of marketing technologies and the current state of the industry from some great speakers like Satya Nadella from Microsoft and Marc Benioff from Saleforce. With our client Majestic.com, we attended Share15 and Mel was invited to share his wisdom on influencer marketing in a session with the digital marketers. The last stops on the crazy autumn conference train were SMX East and #JanesofDigital in NYC, where we had a great time helping our clients and connecting with our friends from the industry.

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A couple of weeks ago, along with more than 150,000 attendees, we were at Dreamforce in downtown San Francisco to learn from numerous amazing keynote speeches, educational sessions, and networking events.

Salesforce, soon to be the 4^th largest software company in the world in 2016 according to its CEO Marc Benioff, presented a mind-blowing event again with guests such as Satya Nadella, Jessica Alba, Susan Wojcicki, etc.

Surrounded by a ton of new technologies and insights over 3 days at Dreamforce, here are some of our biggest takeaways on digital marketing from the event:

The Marketing Cloud is Becoming More Intelligent & Predictive

According to Marc Benioff, the cloud computing market will be worth 270 billion dollars in 2020, so we looked forward to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud session where CEO, Scott McCorkle, kicked off the their keynote with a bunch of big brands on stage telling compelling stories of how personalization and predictive analytics were driving incredible results in engagement and ROI from their target audiences.

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We recently remodeled our house in Seattle. It was quite a large job which included replacing the roof, furnace, windows, doors, floors, and adding a new kitchen and bathroom.

In all we needed 8 specialist contractors to do the work and we needed it done quickly. While early summer is not the best time to request bids as it’s a busy time in the lives of contractors, I was amazed by some of these businesses lack of communication and marketing skills.

Channeling my frustration into some lessons learned, here are 4 of my takeaways from an experience that EVENTUALLY has helped us renovate a home we love living in.

Establish a Response Protocol

When emailing in requests for bids I’d like to think I was pretty thorough with the ask. I’d detail what we needed doing and within what timeframe, and wait patiently for an answer. Sometimes there would be none, sometimes it would take days and sometimes someone called or emailed within 24 hours.

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