Summary: Shama is the bestselling author several books including Momentum: How to Propel Your Marketing and Transform Your Brand in the Digital Age. She is the award-winning CEO of The Marketing Zen Group—a global online marketing and digital PR company.<br> She did her grad school thesis on Twitter when it only had a few thousand users. Shama started her own business because she saw opportunities in the field of social media that no one was exploiting.<br> “You could already tell [even at the beginning] that twitter was shaping the Internet,” Shama explains.<br> In this podcast we talk about the history of Twitter and we dive deep into the marketing strategies that work on Twitter and other social media platforms.<br> Here are some of the highlights of our conversation:<br> <br> * Even at the beginning Twitter was shaping the conversation of the Internet.<br> * The power of Twitter is how it allows people to connect and communicate with one another.<br> * One of the first user bases of Twitter were seventh grade teachers teaching evolution and trying to figure out how to introduce a sensitive subject like evolution into the classroom.<br> * When social media was the new thing it was hard to get big companies interested in the opportunity that was there.<br> * The ROI for social media is definitely there otherwise businesses wouldn’t do it.<br> * The nice thing is we have more metrics today than at any other time in human history to figure out what types of marketing are working.<br> * Even so, it can still be difficult to pinpoint exactly piece of marketing was the tipping point in your buying decision.<br> * We can tell a piece of marketing is not working. What we can’t exactly quantify is how much each piece of marketing affects your buying decision.<br> * Marketing isn’t an exact linear equation.<br> * Another reason you know the ROI is there is because digital media is where the audience is.<br> * You may see a product marketed five or six times before you decide to buy it and there’s no way of knowing which of the six instances caused you to make the decision buy the product.<br> <br> Five Principles of Momentum For Marketing in the Digital Age<br> 1. Agility Through Analytics <br> Look at the numbers for answers. Eliminate myths and sacred cows. What do the numbers tell you about where you are right now?<br> One of the best ways you can make use of the overwhelming amount of information today is to ask intelligent questions and find the data that gives you the answer to those questions. In the case of Google Analytics There are two pieces of data that you can look at to get valuable information about your visitors.<br> The first piece of data is called your Bounce Rate . Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site immediately after arriving there. If your bounce rate is 70% or above you know you’re not converting well on your website when traffic it gets there, or you’re sending the wrong type of traffic to that site.<br> The other thing you can easily look at using Google Analytics is the amount of traffic you’re getting from mobile devices. If you see that you’re getting 50% of your traffic from mobile devices but your website is a mobile optimized, you know that you’re missing out on 50% of the traffic that could be doing your site.<br> 2. The Power of the Right Kind of Customer Focus <br> Customer focus in the digital age isn’t about the customer always being right. Modern companies have to evaluate what interacting with their brand says about the customer. In this Internet age we all have a digital foot print. For companies to succeed in this new world they have to make sure that interacting with them reflects positively on the customers who do so.<br> The ice bucket challenge is a great example of modern customer focus and action. The ice bucket challenge got people all over t...
