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About Me
Alex - Alexandros Poulos is Covisio's Managing Director and co-founder. He enjoys technology marketing, innovative thinking, and living by the sea.
Alex is the main contributor of the On the Scene marketing blog.
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Here’s a short article on a very successful pordcast initiative that I sent MarketingSherpa and they published it in their annual Marketing Wisdom report for 2010. This year’s report features 70 real-life stories and lessons from marketers who weathered last year’s brutal economy. You may download the full Marketing Wisdom 2010 report here.
Last year, Covisio ran an extremely successful podcasting program for one of our clients. Our main goal was to generate podcasting content that was valuable to our client’s target audience. If we were successful with that, we knew we would get better brand awareness, increase online reputation, demonstrate thought leadership, boost web traffic, and, ultimately, facilitate the sales process. So here’s a few things we did differently:
1. All podcast participants were industry experts (non-affiliated with our client) that shared their insights on key industry topics.
2. No promotional pitches for our client were allowed in the podcasts; rather the focus was on hot-button industry topics.
3. Each podcast was structured in a way that could provide the most value to the audience (in terms of topic, insights, length, etc.)
4. The podcasts were hosted in an open WordPress/Podpress platform allowing for social sharing, bookmarking, tagging, rating, etc. No registration forms were required to access the podcasts.
5. The podcasting program was tightly integrated into our clients marketing mix and featured on their web site, their e-newsletter, their blog, their social network presences, and so on.
6. Production costs were kept low primarily because the content itself ended up being extremely valuable.
In social media marketing, if you provide value to your community, you will get value back!
If you would like to visit the site of the award-winning podcasting program (that’s still being very very successful), it’s Xyleme Voices.
A few months ago I read a nice post by Adam Cohen on when social media is right for your business and when not; it was entertaining and conversational as well as quite truthful. So, based on my own experiences in social media marketing, I wanted to post a few notions that I think are still largely misrepresented in a number of organizations.
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This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily in the high technology sector). As we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to share a few real-world cases that we came across and I think are quite useful to show what can happen (or not happen) in social media monitoring programs.
So here are our most telling stories:
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Not too long ago I followed a nice discussion on Ken Burbary’s blog about social media monitoring tools. Ken had come along some noticeable inconsistencies in the results reported by two leading social media platforms, namely Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy SM2. Since we have been working here at Covisio with both of these tools for a while now, I agreed to post a few numbers based on our own experience from a real-world listening campaign that we are currently running for one of our clients in the enterprise software space.
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I was speaking to one of my clients about a potential podcast series as part of their social media initiative. He informs me that he knows of a great vendor who produces podcasts – and, at $3,000 a pop, they are a total bargain. My first thought: are podcasts lux items now?
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We are sitting at the dawn of 2009, a year that’s expected to be one of the most challenging ones in recent history. A year that is likely to redefine social and economic structures worldwide with drastic effects on our lives and businesses. Can we be optimistic?
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It’s been quite a while since I last wrote. The reason was a potentially forgiving one: too much time with customers. Actually, way too much time with customers. Is that always good?
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Social media initiatives such as blogging are long-term strategies that function cumulatively, gradually building the author’s (and/or firm’s) reputation via quality interactions and boosting search engine rankings via organic links that are far more valuable than any paid links. Corporate blogs, rather than promoting products or rehashing the latest sales pitch, should aim to make serious, constructive contributions to the body of industry knowledge online. They should also encourage and facilitate reader participation via constructive comments, meaningful links and trackbacks, social bookmarks, collaborative tags and so on.
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