10 tips for Twitter awesomeness

By Nick Harrison

Although Twitter is very popular and everyone else is doing it, that doesn’t mean it is easy to have a good ROI from it. Here are some steps I’ve taken to improve the effectiveness of my Twitter accounts and those of my clients: 1. Be on at specific times: There are certain times of day when you will get more re-tweets than others, and when there will be more people online to engage with you. By staying consistent with the times you are online, it will help people know when to engage with you, and it will help you to determine the most effective times for you to be active on social media.

2. Pre-schedule tweets: It can be much more time efficient to spend 15 minutes and schedule tweets for the week, versus always having to go on Twitter to do so. Social media is extremely distracting and by pre-scheduling tweets, you can have your Twitter account work for you while you are busy doing other things.

3. Create lists of engaged users: Most Twitter applications make it easy to create and specify lists of other Twitter users. I often create a list of people who re-tweet me, people I have spoken to and people I have seen share similar interests as the company I am tweeting for. By engaging users and targeting your messages, you can create a loyal Twitter army that can help when you need to share your content, as well as getting other users to engage with you.

4. Consistent brand voice: The larger the company, the more likely that a Twitter account could have several people feeding its Twitter stream. I find it very important to write in a similar way compared my colleagues on a specific Twitter account, so that users feel they are talking to a person — not a logo — when you communicate.

5. Track all time: Sorry to break the news, but social media is not free. It takes a lot of time gaining followers, engaging users and building a network. In order to figure out the ROI (if any) you should track the time you are spending on the social network.

6. Tweet with purpose: It is very easy to spend several hours on Twitter “playing.” Your time is valuable, so make sure you are on Twitter with a purpose and you are focused on building your brand and engaging users who are potential customers.

7. RT for a reason: There are a million people out there who are re-tweeting content left and right, and Twitter doesn’t need another one. Be selective with the content you are re-tweeting. The more content you share that doesn’t reflect your brand, the less powerful your tweet messages can become and the more you fade into the rest.

8. Stay off, set mention alerts: The biggest problem with social media in my opinion is that you can get stuck on it for hours while not doing things that are more important or need to get done. A lot of social media tools have popup alerts you can set when someone responds or talks to you. If you want to answer people right away to create engagement, that is fine, but it doesn’t mean you have to be on Twitter itself. Using it more like an instant message that pops up can keep you more focused on work; well that is the plan anyway.

9. Be careful when changing your Twitter avatar: People tend to be very visual and your avatar is essentially your brand, so changing it is like changing a company logo. Don’t do it lightly.

10. Target, target, target: Remember that you are on Twitter for a reason and that is to make money in some way either directly or indirectly. This is achieved, like all marketing, through your target audience. Focus on following people who are your consumers or who can help your career. Who would I follow on my account? CMOs, business owners, people who could use my services.

Remember that to be the most successful at social media, you need a purpose. Time is money.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

How to boost your business with digital automation

By Nick Harrison

Any business, small or large, has numerous functions it has to deal with on a daily basis. Some of those functions can end up being very time-consuming and, worse, distracting.

Fortunately, there are some ways to automate and plan digitally to reduce the load or increase sales conversions.

1. Auto response emails: When used correctly, automatic emails can have a ton of benefits. One — which my clients have had great success with — automatically sends out an email when a user fills out the contact form on their website. This email thanks the users for filling out the form and tells them a representative will contact them shortly. It helps to plant your company in users’ minds even more because, even though the communication is automatic, there is a new level of engagement as the company responds to users right away. I’ve found this can help detour the users from going to other websites. It is also very helpful in e-commerce to confirm to users that their order was placed and that it was shipped, which can result in fewer calls to your customer service team.

2. User recapture marketing: This is known by several other names, including “drift marketing.” The idea: recapturing the user who either got distracted (happens way more than someone might think) or meant to come back later and complete a task but forgot about it or maybe just needed the added nudge. If a user has items in his shopping cart or wish list, or simply didn’t complete an application, an email is sent automatically based on set parameters (a number of days or hours when no action has been taken) without the company having to do anything. This program has been helpful for my clients. We are in a world of constant distractions, and sometimes a user just gets sidetracked.

3. Content scheduling: One issue with having a blog or content that is constantly changing is that if it is not scheduled, it can always take time out of your busy day and distract you from things like calling clients, selling and running the business. It helped our company greatly by setting up our content changes during the weekend or at non-busy times, so that they would be published automatically when we set a time and date. If you have ADHD like me, having to stop everything to make content changes can make you lose focus on other things that might be more important.

4. Preplanning social media: Tools like Hootsuite make it easy to plan social media posts for anything from publicizing your blog posts and content (our internal office term is “pimping out”) to asking customers a question, to any type of tweet, Facebook post, etc. Social media can be extremely distracting and time-consuming. One of the reasons that ROI is difficult with social media is that, when you’re distracted, social media can take up your whole day. By spending an hour and doing all of your content pimping, as well as your social advertising and other tweets for the week, you will save a lot of time and retain your focus. I have my account set up so that I am notified if someone mentions one of my Twitter accounts so that I don’t need to be on the social network to check and lose focus. I cannot recommend this enough.

5. Scheduling follow-ups and meetings: With software like Outlook, iCal and CRM, it is really easy to schedule follow-up calls and meetings. A lot of them can tie to your mobile device via applications. If you can get in the habit of digitally scheduling things, it can be much easier to actually make that follow-up call versus just seeing it in a notebook at the start of the day.

The more you use technology to do some of the work for you, the more time you will have to perform activities that really require your full attention — like taking care of your customers.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Designing effective ads for your startup: Some dos and don’ts

By George Deeb

Now that we have learned how to set a marketing plan for your business, the devil is in the details in terms of executing that plan. This is especially true for the copy and creative images you use in your advertising materials. Today, we will tackle some dos and don’ts to maximize the success of your advertising efforts.

Let’s start with an example print advertisement that we used at iExplore (a sea kayaking trip to Alaska):The mandate I gave our chief marketing officer was to turn iExplore into the “trusted first-of-mind brand for once-in-a-lifetime adventure travel”. And, at the high level, this creative does exactly that. You certainly get the sense of once-in-a-lifetime from the lone sea kayaker paddling in close proximity to an orca whale and a tag line that said “Come Back Different”. And, you certainly get the sense of trust from the “Inspected by Expert #34″ tag. And, if iExplore has 34 experts, they must be pretty big, and I trust them as a leading player in the space. We had this same type of strategy behind our online banner ads and video ad creative (I was really pumped when I first saw this video!):

So, as a first-time CEO, I was really excited about the prospective results from this campaign. And, the advertising industry would have certainly guessed the same, as this campaign won a ton of awards for best creatives in the travel industry.

Then reality hit us in the face like a ton of bricks. This campaign was not selling any trips! We were spending a lot of money buying double page print ads in expensive magazines like National Geographic, Conde Nast and Travel & Leisure (and even NYC billboards in Times Square!), but there were very little revenues to cover the massive costs of this effort. So, we were hemorraging the cash provided from our venture capitalists.

Ignoring the fact we were spending a lot of money offline, when we should have been better spending most of this money online, as an internet company, let’s study what was specifically wrong with these creatives. The first problem was the creative size itself. Buying double page spreads in the major travel magazines was VERY expensive as a startup company. We would have been much better served with single page, or even half page ads to start, stretching out our budget over a longer period of time.

The second problem was the iExplore name and business was unknown to anybody, and the tag line did not do a good job describing the business. Instead of an inspirational message like “Come Back Different”, it should have been more descriptive about our business, like “Adventure Travel Experts”. It is perfectly acceptable for Nike to use the brand-building tag line “Just Do It”, when they were a 20 year old company, and everyone already new them as an athletic apparel and footwear manufacturer. But, not for iExplore, a brand new company that needed to educate the market on its core business offering. We thought we were doing a good job explaining the business in the paragraph of copy at the bottom of the ad, but didn’t realize that magazine readers turn the page at an average flip time of two seconds. Nobody was reading the paragraph in two seconds, and we needed to get the message out faster.

The third problem was the biggest of them all. Where was the call to action? There wasn’t one! There should have been a message like “Book Your Trip by December 1st and Save 10%,” or “Free Airfare with Any Tour Purchase by December 1st.” This tells the reader more about the business (e.g., that we sell trips), gives them a special deal (e.g., to save money), and gives them a sense of urgency to make an action (e.g., by a certain date). We could have easily doubled our revenues from this campaign with more call-to-action oriented messaging.

A fourth problem was the limited frequency of the print ads. In the travel magazine world, new issues were coming out once a month. And, it typically takes 6-7 ad impressions before it catches someone’s attention to make it actionable. So, that meant 6-7 months of expensive print ad buying before we would really know the full success from the campaign. Travel sections of newspapers would have been a much better vehicle, since the ads were coming out daily/weekly, not monthly. Or the travel sections of the Yahoo or MSN websites would have been even better, since the ads would be running online, and the action is simply “one click away”, instead of print readers having to get to their computers to make an action.

At the end of the day, this campaign was a complete disaster, for all the reason mentioned above. And, to make matters worse, we ended up pulling the campaign after only 3-4 months, which meant that any repeated impressions we were building up towards the 6-7 month requirement, were entirely flushed down the toilet midstream (no pun intended). Believe me, after that first year at iExplore, we never made those same marketing mistakes again!! And, we established key disciplines for tracking our marketing ROI on a line-by-line basis, as discussed in our last post.

This is just one example of the things you need to consider when designing the copy, creatives, frequency and placements for your advertising efforts. The summary is: (1) startups need to be crystal clear on what they do with as few words as possible; (2) there needs to be a strong, time-sensitive call to action, to trigger a transaction; (3) design your campaign with maximizing frequency in mind, to build up repeated impressions; (4) pick creative sizes that are most affordable to your budget; (5) if possible, make sure the campaign is easily cancellable if not working; and (6) place ads in the medium most logical for your business (e.g., e-commerce companies should bias online advertising).

I hope this post saves you a lot of misspent advertising dollars. I surely wished I had all that venture capital back, to do it right the second time!

George Deeb is a managing partner at Red Rocket Ventures, a Chicago-based startup consulting and fundraising firm with expertise in advising Internet-related businesses. More of George’s startup lessons can be read at “101 Startup Lessons — An Entrepreneur’s Handbook.”

George’s posts appear on Crain’s blog for Chicago entrepreneurs on Fridays.

Follow George on Twitter at @georgedeeb.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Crain’s small-business editor Ann Dwyer is on Google+.

Nanigans Releases Support for Facebook Mobile Advertising

Nanigans, Inc., a Facebook® performance advertising company focused on helping marketers maximize ROI, released a new mobile advertising feature that enables marketers to reach Fac

How to calculate the ROI on your marketing spending

By George Deeb

The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is dump a bunch of money into marketing spending without having the appropriate reporting in place to track the results. Although marketing can often feel like a “creative” area of the business, which it is, it is more importantly one that requires religious “financial” discipline. In this post, we will discuss how you infuse ROI disciplines into your marketing DNA and team.

Let’s start with Internet marketing, perhaps the most trackable medium in the history of marketing. Based on ad tracking tags, web server logs and other software, you can track each ad impression and the resulting clicks, leads and transactions therefrom. Whether that is search engine marketing, or email marketing, or social media efforts, or affiliate partnerships with third-party websites, the data is easily captured. But the key is to make sure you are using these ad tracking tools and reporting on each of these inputs.

While I was at iExplore, my marketing dashboard told me data like: 1 million visitors came to my site that month, sourced 50 percent from search engines and 50 percent from affiliate partner sites, resulting in 1,000 people contacting our call center to book a trip and 200 actual transactions. And, more important, I could dissect my search engine performance between Google, Yahoo and Bing, and even further, between paid search and free search efforts within each. I also knew that my affiliates like National Geographic were driving more leads and sales than affiliates like Travelocity. This was very valuable data, if studied and used, to dial up and down my marketing spending online, moving money from underperforming vehicles to overperforming vehicles to maximize my marketing ROI.

Although it is harder to do, you can also use the same level of tracking on your offline marketing activities. As an example, if you send a direct mailer, use a unique promotion code that the customer shares at the time of purchase with your call center staff. If you are promoting a 1-800 number in your TV advertisements, use a unique 1-800 number for each cable channel you are advertising on, or more specifically, each specific program you are advertising on. In your magazine buys, use different promotional URLs to point your traffic by magazine (e.g., .com/TimeMagOffer). Not all consumers will end up contacting you via these tracking mechanisms, going to your main website instead. But a good portion will, and you will be able to make smart interpretations and extrapolations from there.

The overriding point, where you can, is to track each distinct marketing effort on its own stand-alone merits, to assess whether or not you want to continue investing in that vehicle going forward. And, worth mentioning, never start spending your full budget on day one. Take 10 percent of your budget, test a bunch of different vehicles you are considering, and then invest the remaining 90 percent of your budget in the best-performing vehicles from that initial test.

Then, once you know the profitable metrics for your business (e.g., never spend more than a $2 CPM on any online banner ads), you need to religiously live by those metrics. Only buy ads that fall below that criteria. And, often times, your desired sites will not allow you to buy committed advertising at a level well below their rate card. So, in those cases, you need to be really creative when negotiating those deals. Tell them you don’t need to buy committed space at $10 CPM, but you are willing to buy remnant, unsold inventory at $2 CPM, which may be more digestible to them instead of letting remnant inventory going unsold for zero revenue.

If you cannot get the appropriate line-by-line tracking of your marketing investment, then you need to make sure you are studying the overall impact on your business from that aggregate marketing investment. For example, if you put an additional $1 million in marketing dollars to work in January, what was the resulting incremental lift in overall revenues in the following months, and did the incremental profits justify the investment? But, when you do this, it is critical you are comparing apples-to-apples data. For example, make sure seasonality isn’t skewing your data (e.g., a retailer’s big Christmas sales season naturally boosted revenues, not the increased marketing).

And, it is equally important you know your normal sales cycles between the time marketing is placed and the time a transaction actually closes. For iExplore, it was a three-month sales window, and for MediaRecall it was a six- to 12-month window (so study the lift in revenues in the appropriate sales window for your business). But, for long sales cycle businesses, you do not want to keep your marketing running for too long without knowing whether or not it is profitably working. So, instead of waiting for actual closed revenue data, study inbound sales leads immediately after the marketing period, to ensure the leads pipeline is building up fast enough to justify the marketing investment (based on your estimated and historical sales conversion rates).

Marketing departments are typically run by “creative” types who don’t necessarily understand the “financial” side of the business. It is up to you to make sure these financial disciplines are followed to avoid potentially wasting a lot of misspent marketing dollars.

George Deeb is a managing partner at Red Rocket Ventures, a Chicago-based startup consulting and fundraising firm with expertise in advising Internet-related businesses. More of George’s startup lessons can be read at “101 Startup Lessons — An Entrepreneur’s Handbook.”

George’s posts appear on Crain’s blog for Chicago entrepreneurs on Fridays.

Follow George on Twitter at @georgedeeb.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Crain’s small-business editor Ann Dwyer is on Google+.

The right work-life balance for your startup

By George Deeb

Let’s face it, startups often feel like an all-out sprint to get your product to market before your competitors do. That typically means you are living and breathing your startup around the clock, often putting in long hours. And, you typically can’t ever get away from it, even in your limited free time. Your friends want to talk about it, your best thinking is while you are alone in the shower, you get that great idea while at the gym, etc.

That is fine and dandy, until you realize that a sprinter can only go all-out for a limited period of time before collapsing from exhaustion. So, I prefer to think of a startup as more of a marathon (albeit a really fast-paced marathon) and not a 100-yard dash. So, like any good athlete, you are going to make sure you set your pace accordingly with the proper work-life balance.

You have to make time for your personal life, to clear your head and start fresh each day. You simply can’t think clearly if you are continually exhausted, burning the midnight oil seven days a week. Now, this is going to sound completely out of character for a typical startup executive, but why can’t you work a normal 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-to-Friday work week, leaving your evenings and weekends for yourself, if you are religious about your work prioritization and how you spend your work time?

Prioritization is the absolute key to solving the work-life balance for any startup. Every minute you spend on non-mission-critical items requires you make up that time in other ways, late at night or on the weekend. Do you like to sit back and chit chat about last night’s ball game? If so, do it in one minute, not 10. Do you like to brainstorm ideas with your team? Fine, do so in a pre-scheduled hour, not an impromptu four hours, tying up your time and your team’s time. Do you really need to call your phone service to resolve a billing dispute, or can someone on your team do that for you?

I try to prioritize all tasks (for myself and all team members) in a way that will maximize revenue and increase the odds of hitting our goals. So, if 10 projects are on the list, you have to knock off No. 1 before you start wasting any time on No. 10, since your prioritization efforts dictated a higher ROI from those efforts. And, guess what: If you were right in your assumptions, revenue and profit will follow, and then you will no longer feel you have that “cash burn-out gun” constantly pointed at your head (which is never healthy to any startup executive’s peace of mind).

A lot of time gets wasted in startups, particularly from the perspective of reinventing the wheel. You are not the only startup to ever launch, quite the contrary. So, surround yourself by proven entrepreneurs that have “been there, and done that” that can be your sounding board on various issues you run into. Because the odds are, nine times out of ten, that they have already run through the same problems before, and can help you solve it in one hour, not one day. So, piggyback on them to save you the time from trying to solve that same dilemma from scratch. And, if you don’t directly know people that can help, there are tons of online Q&A sites, like Quora and ChaCha, and business networking sites, like LinkedIn, that may be of use. If you can free up all those wasted hours, now you have more time to focus on the problems that really matter, issues specific to your business. And, did I mention, more free time to spend on your personal life.

Also, it is important to avoid the usually time sink a founder experiences: their inability to hand off tasks and key projects to their staff. You are not doing this all by yourself and you are not the only smart person in your office, if you are hiring correctly. So, delegate where you can, to get back some much needed time for other things, while at the same time empowering your team and making them feel like they are valued and contributing to the overall success.

To me, your personal life is the yin to your yang (work life). You simply cannot have one without the other. How can you possibly focus on your work, if in the back of your head you know you are missing your kid’s school play? Or, your marriage is suffering because your spouse feels they never see you? Or you just need a change of scenery from a quick vacation to clear the head? You have to make time for these kinds of things to recharge your batteries and make your work time that much more efficient (the key word to all of this). And, equally important, you have to encourage and permit your staff do the same, offering flexible work hours or otherwise (in this case, preaching what you practice).

Now, stop wasting time reading this blog and get back to work!

George Deeb is a managing partner at Red Rocket Ventures, a Chicago-based startup consulting and fundraising firm with expertise in advising Internet-related businesses. More of George’s startup lessons can be read at “101 Startup Lessons — An Entrepreneur’s Handbook.”

George’s posts appear on Crain’s blog for Chicago entrepreneurs on Fridays.

Follow George on Twitter at @georgedeeb.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Crain’s small-business editor Ann Dwyer is on Google+.

5 social-media practices for 2012

By Nick Harrison

The best part of starting a new year is the ability to put aside old habits and start developing new ones. Now put the candy bar down — you are supposed to be going to the gym in an hour — and learn some good practices for social media in 2012.

Here are five practices that can help with your social media efforts

1. The special club: Throw words like VIP, rewards and exclusive around and pupils dilate and ears perk up. People love to feel special, and they like to feel as if they are part of a special club. Consider offering a discount for Foursquare check-ins and for your Facebook fans. You can do both for little to no cost. The discount you are offering cannot only be made up with higher customer conversions (offsetting marketing dollars), you are getting those customers to market for you. Instead of making all of your content available on Facebook, consider having a reveal tab so that only your fans get that “exclusive” content.

2. Mini-site on Facebook: If you have a customer in front of you, why not sell them there vs. asking them to go to your website? Facebook tabs can be an extremely powerful tool that can be used to tell your customers about your products and services. If your focus is driving traffic to your website using Facebook, you could end up losing a lot of potential customers because your customer has to find the will to click on your website link, vs. just seeing what you offer while in the same space without having to navigate away from your page.

3. Know where the traffic and leads are coming from: Stumbleupon recently stated that it drives more than 50% of all social-media traffic, making Stumbleupon the No. 1 social-media traffic source. According to a Webmarketing123 survey of B2B marketers, 44.6% said that LinkedIn has been effective in generating leads, with Facebook coming in second (35.1%), and Twitter third (31.6%). Before using your valuable time and resources, make sure you are spending your time and resources in the right place for the best results.

4. Focus on the right ratio: I can’t say this enough in a lifetime (thankfully digital lives forever, well . . . thankfully in this case). It doesn’t matter how many visitors you have if they aren’t buying anything from you. Don’t focus on how many “Likes” or Twitter followers you have. Instead, focus on how many Facebook “Likes” and Twitter followers it takes to make a sale. That is how you improve your content and strategy.

5. Getting ROI by keeping your cost and time spent down: The way to see ROI from social media is to be as efficient as possible with both time AND money. The two best ways to achieve this are by using social media blended with other marketing efforts, and having your customers do the work for you. If you’re already going to send out emails or a mailer, think about a combo. If you are offering customers 20% off, think about offering them 15% and offer an additional 5% if they “Like” you on Facebook. Did you spend any additional money? No. Do you now have a way to market to them for free? Yes! Get people to market for you. If you run a restaurant, perhaps you could offer a free soda at lunch if customers tweet what they ate. Now they are interacting with your company and telling their friends. Is the $1.50 you lost in revenue on a happy customer more expensive than the time it takes to grow a following and get someone to tweet about you?

Getting no ROI from social media is so 2011. Focus on your strategy so that you can use social media to help your business.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

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