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4 Steps to Reach your Target Audience

What are some of the first steps a business owner should take when creating his or her digital strategy? I shared 4 tips to better reach your target audience during an interview with Andrea Genovese of Wind Business Factor. The video is in Italian, but the original transcript has been translated into English below by my team at itive.net. Enjoy!
Andrea

The Experience of a Business Owner

When a business owner is going to use the web for the first time he or she should keep a few important things in mind. First and foremost, a business owner should no longer think of the web or “digital world” as something disconnected from the real one.

Today, the web is constantly evolving. And a consumer and a business owner can do business exactly as they would if they were downtown “IRL” (in real life).

First, the most important thing to understand is where you are as a business and where you would like to go. Therefore, at this initial starting point there is a need to create a digital strategy that will allow you to reach your goals.

Second, you should analyze the tactics that will be utilized to achieve your objectives and reach the finish line. After that, you could reach out for support from somebody who has experience in this arena. It could be a web agency like us at itive.net, it could be an external consultant, an online communicator who in a certain sense could help you move through these “first steps” of the digital world.

Before you start to do any of this, though, be silent and use these, one of the most important organs we have, your ears. You have to listen carefully in order to learn about what is happening in your niche market. You have to be attentive listeners and figure out the dynamics that are in your market, as well as to identify the needs of your consumers. Once you understand the current situation within your market, you should contribute to the conversation and become an active member who interacts with the digital communication dynamics that are already taking place in your field.

In summary, the 4 tips for creating digital strategy are:

Listen to what is happening within your niche market
Analyze the market dynamics
Evaluate the needs of your consumers
Contribute to the conversation and to the digital dynamics

If you’re interested in creating your digital strategy with us, feel free to contact us or go ahead and click here to fill out a “get started” form and we’ll help you get there!

How to Upload Files and Folders to Google Docs

Here’s how you can upload, not just files, but an entire folder from your computer to the cloud using Google Docs.

I can’t tell you how happy I am about this new feature! I’ve been waiting ages for this. It’s handy to upload data to the cloud but when you deal with a huge number of files you need a way to transfer offline archives to the cloud without then spending extra time in reordering everything once everything is online. This new Google Docs feature solves the problem.

Google Docs is an essential tool that I use on a daily basis with my team and clients. If you are not familiar with Google Docs I encourage you to have a look at it, I’m sure it will come in handy.

Andrea

How to Get the Best Out Live Events

The web is starting to become a natural extension of ‘real world’ events. However, in order to achieve success you need to do it right. One of the niches in which my team and I specialized through the years is strategic online communications for events.

Last week we were in Italy where we helped the organizers of the International Trophy “Judo Vittorio Veneto” to get the best out of their event. 310 clubs, 2100 registered athletes from 18 countries, a 4500 seat sport arena, 2 days of competition and 1000 squared meters divided into 8 competition areas make this event the largest International judo tournament in Italy and among the top judo tournaments in Europe.

Itive crafted and handled the entire online communication plan of the event. Here are some interesting stats:

30 hours of live video were streamed.

181,000 minutes transmitted worldwide during the 2 days of the event.

650 GB of bandwidth for transmitting the data online.

1 control room, 3 cameramen, 2 directors of general video, 2 directors online.

Updates and moderation in real time via live chat, Twitter, and Facebook.

Results and brackets of the fights downloadable online at the end of each day.

3 photographers, +800 photos, +23,000 views in 2 days.

…and more

I encourage you to go and take a look at the entire case study that we shared on the itive.net blog. There you’ll see several other stats that I’m sure you’ll find interesting and inspiring if you are looking to get the best out of your events. If then you want to see some broken arms and a few black ~~eyes~~ belts in action you can hit play on the video player below which is streaming all the finals that were shot during the weekend on-demand.

And indeed if you need help with your events, well my team and I will be happy to help you out 😉

Andrea

[Communications Report] for June 28th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

5 Tools to Track Twitter Trends – On any given day there are over 600 tweets per second on Twitter for a total of over 50 million tweets per day. With an overload of tweets daily it can be difficult to grasp what is really trending at any given moment. Use the tools below to quickly find current Twitter trends and trending conversations.
Social Media Measurement Should Focus on Outcomes, Not Output – It’s not about simply looking for opportunities to drop messaging into ordinary conversation, but about finding shared interests, shared benefits and shared rewards for others in the communities where your brand interacts.
8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona – In social networks, the brand and how it’s perceived, is open to public interpretation and potential misconception now more than ever. Without a deliberate separation between the brand voice and personality and that of the person representing it, we are instantly at odds with our goals, purpose, and potential stature.
Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks – The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood.
How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload – Useful productivity tips.
15 more awesome social media infographics – Infographics that demonstrate a mixture of both hard data and strategy practices. Hopefully, they’ll also provide some inspiration or can be useful in helping you with presentations or pitches. As before, links to the actual graphics are in the headline titles.
6 ways to find value in Twitter’s noise – A great example that shows how we can get insights from analyzing Twitter data.
Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web [graph] – A search that compares the world wide search volume on Google for new media, web 2.0, and social media. What the graph shows is that we’re at an inflection point in the language we use to describe the macro trends of innovation on the web…it’s the indicator that we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and it’s The Era of Social Media.
How The World Spends Its Time Online [infographic] – Millions of people across the world are constantly connected by the internet. Here’s a look at what everybody’s doing when they’re in front of their computer screen.
Is Social a Source for B2B Leads? – Terrific insights about B2B site visitors referred from social media.
Diesel Cam – Interactive installation at Diesel Stores in Spain, being the first store that allows users to share the moment of buying and trying garments on their Facebook profiles from the store. Consumers are able to make pictures, publish them and boast their new acquisitions with their Facebook friends.
The Fun Theory – A great Volkswagen initiative. #engagement
Teens and Their Mobile Phones / Flowtown – Have you ever wondered what teens were really using their mobile phones for? A recent study released by Pew Internet Research has shed light on average mobile
Public Media Joins Forces for One Big Platform – The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

[Report] for January 27th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

Forrester’s Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder – Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market’s social technology behavior. The big addition this year is “Conversationalists”: people who regularly post status updates to places like Facebook and Twitter. This re-design by Mike Arauz makes the findings a little bit clearer, and also compares 2009 to previous findings from 2008 and 2007.
The Maturation of Social Media ROI – The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.
Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year – According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.
Ten Ideas for the New Decade – An Edelman Digital White Paper – Downloadable PDF + Video.
Video Interview: @Scott Monty Ford Motor Company (via @SteveRubel) – In this four and a half minute video, which I shot yesterday, Scott talks about what he does in his day job, how social media is integrated into Ford’s communications engine (pun intended) and how he works with his executives.
Why The Agency Of The Future Looks Like My Fantasy Baseball Team – Clever.
World’s First Computer to Human Marriage: London Girl Weds Laptop – My friend Hermione is getting married. I wish them the best.
5 Top trends in online PR for 2010 – Online PR enthusiast predicts the next big thing after Twitter.
The 5 Reasons You’re Failing In Social Media – Short and spot-on.
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples – More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media. The proof is in the numbers: 34% of consumers use social media to search for health information, according to research data from How America Searches: Health and Wellness.
WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free – WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly.
Uploading any file : Uploading and exporting – Google Docs – Now you can upload all your files without converting them to Google Docs. You can use Google Docs to open these files anywhere and share them with anyone.
12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising – Few things to keep in mind if you do online video.
Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect – Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.
10 Musts for Marketing on Facebook – This post was initially wrote to target women only, but I think that some of theses tips can apply to other audiences too. Facebook has done a great job of giving marketers a powerful tool with its Pages product, but like most things in life, it comes down to execution.
18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business – You may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go…I do, always.