That’s the challenge Meg Faure, founder of The Baby Sense Company, and Jeremy Pepper, a Los Angeles-based social media and public relations consultant on our Small Business Panel, are taking on this month. Faure is the international bestselling author of Baby Sense, which over the past decade she has expanded into a franchise that includes several more books, a seminar series and an ecommerce business that spans three continents.

Faure and her company are a natural fit for social media: In South Africa especially, she is a well-recognized expert on child care, and the company’s Facebook page and Twitter account are peppered with questions from concerned parents. With a modest marketing budget (less than $500 a month), Baby Sense has amassed more than 31,000 fans on Facebook and 2,400 followers on Twitter.

Faure, who handles both accounts herself, along with a Pinterest page and a UStream blogger profile, posts a variety of content whenever she has a spare moment. Opportunities for fans to ask questions tend to perform best: A recent question posted to Baby Sense’s Facebook page, “What are your pressing baby skincare questions?” elicited 53 comments in four hours. Faure tells Mashable that for one hour once a month, she holds a “Facebook party” where fans can ask her anything, and that she’ll generally receive upwards of 200 questions in that hour. Faure will also post child care tips, and promote new products and upcoming seminars.

Faure says she’s pleased with the engagement she receives on social media, particularly on Facebook. With around 8,000 subscribers to her email newsletter, she feels it’s the best way to get the word out about new products and events. Faure’s also finding ways to monetize her presence on those platforms by mixing sponsors, including Johnson & Johnson, into the feed.

But Faure would like to use Facebook to generate more sales. She said she’s had some success with Offers, but so far most of her Facebook marketing budget is spent on promoting posts and getting more Likes on Baby Sense’s page — which ultimately isn’t converting to many sales, she said. Faure is also looking for a tool to help her schedule, manage and respond to posts. In addition, she has started a Pinterest page but isn’t sure how to optimize her presence there, and wonders if she should even be on Pinterest in the first place.

The Master Plan

Pepper has devised a social media strategy to help Baby Sense achieve its aims — one that spans Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, UStream and email — and fits within Faure’s current advertising budget and limited spare time. The primarily goal is to grow Baby Sense’s online community, seeking out possible paid sponsorship opportunities. The focus will be on Facebook, where Baby Sense’s community is already strongest.

First off, Pepper suggests that Faure develop an editorial calendar and schedule for Facebook and Twitter. That way she can plan and promote events and products, and the community knows when to tune in. He suggests using an app like Buffer to schedule posts.

The editorial voice of Baby Sense’s online profiles also needs to change, Pepper says. Right now the voice is very corporate. Faure needs to be more “Mom to Mom” — more conversational, engaging. Posts on Facebook should be between 200-300 characters with a call to action (tell a story, share an experience, or do you agree/disagree). Faure should spend more time reading and responding to comments on both Facebook and Twitter. She should also be cross-posting and cross-promoting content from Facebook, Twitter and UStream, encouraging users of each platform to participate in live chats on the other platforms. Faure should also create a YouTube channel to index her UStream chats.

As for the newsletter, that too is an important platform for community-building. Subscribers should be alerted to all of the content that’s going out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and UStream, and be encouraged to participate on those networks.

Curious to know how it all goes? We’ll check back in with Faure and Pepper next month.

Image: Flickr, Eric Fleming

The post Can a Popular Baby Franchise Turn Its Facebook Fans Into Customers? appeared first on Digitrock.

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Sick of your car? Use #wantnewcar to tell us why and you might get a special one of these: https://t.co/TwIHMFUfzV

— Honda (@Honda) July 15, 2013

The videos will be filmed and uploaded on the same day and customized to each user’s feedback. “If a user mentions needing a new car to pick up a pizza, that Vine video response may feature a Honda dealer offering a great deal … with a mouth full of pepperoni,” Susie Rossick, a senior manager at Honda, said in a statement.

Here are a couple early examples:

Hey @bwidow752006, head to the Honda Summer Clearance Event & stop wondering: https://t.co/Tw83GrkWpX #WantNewCar

— Honda (@Honda) July 15, 2013

Hey @that_zguy, stop by the Honda Summer Clearance Event and meet some new friends: https://t.co/GxPuctq4Z2 #wantnewcar

— Honda (@Honda) July 15, 2013

Other companies like Urban Outfitters and Marc Jacobs have also turned to Vine for marketing. Nissan, another car company, recently asked for Vine and Instagram video submissions for a TV commercial.

What do you think of Honda’s new ad campaign? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of YouTube, Honda

The post Honda Responds to Customer Tweets With Real-Time Vine Videos appeared first on Digitrock.

Facebook will conduct a review of ads on the social network beginning next week and said it will remove ads from all groups and pages that contain “violent, graphic or sexual content” by the end of that week, even though that content does not technically violate Facebook’s community standards.

“We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously,” Facebook representatives wrote in a blog post. “While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups.”

This move comes about a month after more than a dozen companies pulled ads from Facebook in response to a boycott campaign over the amount of domestic violence imagery on the social network.

Facebook said its effort to restrict ads from controversial pages will be manual at first, but in the coming weeks it plans to build an automated feature to handle this process.

Image by Stephen Lam/Getty Images

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Statistics suggest that the amount of time the average person now spends on Facebook exceeds the amount of time he/she spends watching television. This would imply that the opportunity for seeing advertisements on Facebook is potentially larger than it is on television. This especially holds true today, in the age of digital television, when commercials can be very easily skipped by users, who simply fast-forward them.

Another important fact is pointed out by Adam Berke, president of retargeting firm and FBX partner AdRoll, who say that News Feed ads are basically bought on a per-insertion basis. That is, if a user sees a News Feed ad when checking Facebook on their work computer and then the same ad again when checking Facebook on their home computer, the advertiser only pays for the initial impression, no matter how many times the same user sees it. This is significant, because costs involved in television advertising are very high, as each repeat airing of a TV commercial costs as much as the first. Moreover, there are length constraints in television advertisements, they are short and do not convey much about the product.

A further advantage of Facebook advertising is the ability to reach smart-phone users.

Nutella is employing the decades-old marketing mix model (MMM) – a nuanced sales attribution system for integrated campaigns – to measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads. They combined Facebook ads with TV spots and other paid channels in Germany during December 2011, attributing 15 percent of sales from the yuletide campaign to its Facebook ads. In terms of RoI, the brand told ClickZ that Facebook ads outperformed the TV spend, according to its MMM data.

Socially multiplied advertising, the core of which is contagious brand-owned content on social platforms, is roughly 100 times more cost-efficient for brand advertising than primetime TV on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis. – Kirk Cheyfitz, Wallblog, UK

One key piece of research that must not be ignored is the Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising survey. The survey’s 2012 edition revealed that 92% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations of friends and family when making purchase decisions and 70% trust recommendations from strangers online. The same survey showed that, at most, only 47% of consumers trust traditional ads—TV, newspaper and magazines. Trust in such traditional ads has gone down the slope in the past three years, according to Nielsen.

Considering human psychology, Nielsen’s data suggests that having a friend or stranger deliver a brand message online through social media is 1.5 to 2 times more likely to influence behavior than delivering the same message in a TV ad.

Do you agree that Facebook advertising is the way to go in the current market? Share your thoughts with us.

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(Note, also, that this graphic was was put together using Piktochart, which was one of our first Startup Arena competitors).

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Head over to kisses.burberry.com using your desktop Chrome browser or the web browser on your smartphone or tablet. You’ll then be prompted to capture a kiss by pressing your lips to the screen — or, on the desktop, by capturing the shape of your lips with a webcam. The longer you press, the bolder the imprint.

Once you’ve captured your kiss, you can fill out a postcard to send from your town or city to that of a friend. Send a postcard from Newport Beach, Calif., to Tokyo, for example, and you’ll catch a glimpse of your letter taking leave from Newport Beach’s ocean-facing Cliff Drive, watch it fly across the ocean and descend upon the Tokyo skyline. Its journey will be set to the tune of Burberry Acoustic singer Misty Miller’s “Evergreen Love.”

It’s an experience designed, in the words of Burberry Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey, to give technology “a bit of heart and soul.” It’s also a marketing opp — after you take an impression of your lips, you’ll be able to color it using one of five Burberry lipstick shades. (Alternatively, you can opt for no lipstick at all.)

The initiative is part of Google’s Art, Copy & Code project, an ongoing series of storytelling collaborations between Google and brands.

Sending and receiving a postcard is itself fun and engaging, but equally cool is the map of kisses you can view at the end, which shows cards being sent from city to city in real-time.

To try it out, check out kisses.burberry.com.

Images courtesy of Burberry and Google.

Source : Mashable

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Advertising Age reports that the company is planning to offer “highly targeted ads” via iAd, its mobile ad network. The Cupertino, Calif. company is expected to make the announcement during next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the report says. Reps from Apple could not be reached for comment.

Audio ads are more profitable than banner ads. Apple pays 70% of iAd revenues to publishers who monetize their apps using the service. Apple would share 10% of ad revenues with music-rights holders versus 4% for publishers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Introduced in 2010, iAds were designed to be “mobile ads with emotion” in the words of late co-founder Steve Jobs. However, demand for iAds hasn’t been as strong as Apple has hoped, and the company has cut prices for ad units several times. Initially, the ads were sold to advertisers paying $1 million and up, but the company has since cut that entry-level price to $100,000, according to reports.

Image via Getty/Justin Sullivan
Source : Mashable

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