Selina Jane Eckersall

Selina is a self-proclaimed culture junkie and direct marketer who began her marketing career almost 9 years ago at a Tech company and has since continued to make technology a focus throughout her career, adopting early many of the platforms that are widely used today.

Having worked for companies including HMV Canada, Carlson Marketing, and a few other smaller agencies, Selina has a wealth of brand & client experience. While at Carlson Marketing, she worked on the BMO (Bank of Montreal) account managing a National employee incentive program called Bravo as well as on the Ford of Canada account managing several data-driven programs and projects, including their National used vehicle program; Quality Certified.

In January 08 Selina launched Sublime, a marketing consulting firm that specializes in Social and Interactive marketing and has been building a solid portfolio ever since.

Selina is educated in Marketing, holds a Direct Marketing accreditation with the CMA and continues to be an active member in the Marketing community.

5 Free Fantastic Social Media Monitoring Tools

Working in the social space is about more than just connecting, networking and broadcasting. You also have to listen so that you know where and how you can improve your brand's reputation. Conversations will inevitably happen with or without your involvement, so even if you’re not active in the social space, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t being talked about.

The good news is you don’t have to rush out and purchase an expensive software package to manage your social monitoring for you.

You can do it yourself… FOR FREE!

There are a number of tools available on the web to help marketers with their social media monitoring.

Check out some of these tools to help you with your listening objectives:

www.search.twitter.com
Perhaps obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people DON’T know about the Twitter search tool. Twitter search allows you to search by keyword and monitor recent tweets.

The search tool also has a “reply” option as well as a “view tweet” option, which is great for presentations and social media monitoring reports.

www.backtype.com/
Backtype is a conversation-monitoring tool that allows you to search conversations on blogs, social networks and various other social media sites so you can find out what people are saying.

The great thing about Backtype is that it extensively monitors comments on blogs, which a lot of listening tools do not.

http://boardtracker.com/
Boardtracker is a tool that allows you to monitor conversations happening on forums. I like how specific it is, especially because a lot of important conversations happen on forums. It’s an important medium that should not be overlooked.

Boardtracker recently released a 2.0 beta version, however, I would recommend using the original version FIRST, as the results may not be the same.

www.socialmention.com
Social Mention is a tool that allows you to monitor conversations happening online in virtually any social web property. It searches blogs, microblogs, forums, comments, video and more.

While I like to use this tool a lot, I don’t recommend using it as your ONLY source of monitoring. You should use it in conjunction with others. It also tends to be slow at times.

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ (or .com if you’re from the US)
Google Blog Search is a staple. It helps you find relevant blog posts and blog authors who discuss your brand and have influence on the web. It’s important to know who these people are, so that you can engage in conversation with them or at the very least, know what they are publishing about you.

So these are just a few of my favourite tools. Of course there are search tools available on practically every social site as well. I routinely scour Digg, BlogCatalog, YouTube, and Facebook during my monitoring programs, in addition to the ones mentioned above. It's all about using the tools that you are comfortable with, that give you the best results.

Have fun out there!

Facebook URLS Are Here. Let The Trampling Begin

Admit it, it’s frustrating when you’re adding your social profiles to new websites. You can remember your Twitter URL, your Stumble Upon page, LinkedIn, Flickr…But what about Facebook? Well prior to today it was a randomly assigned nine digit ID number like 098768594.

Who can remember that?

Now when someone asks you if you’re on Facebook you don’t have to say “yes just look me up”. That might be fine for someone like me who doesn’t have a common name, but if you’re a John Smith or someone with an equally common name, good luck!

Tonight at 12:01 ET Facebook will be opening the flood gates and allowing it’s 200 million users to select a unique URL to identify their profile on a first come first serve basis.

This move by Facebook will keep them in line with other social media tools (as mentioned above) who already allow custom URLS, as well as being more SEO friendly. Blogs have been doing this with blog posts for years, so it’s nothing new or groundbreaking, but a nice tweak on Facebook’s part.

Users and businesses must choose their URL carefully, however, as they are not changeable once selected. So names like “boozeymcdrunk” or “bongmeister” might not be the best of ideas, so choose wisely kids.

Have fun out there!

5 Things to Remember when Considering Social Media for Your Brand

One of the major mistakes that a lot of companies make is jumping into the social media space without any sort of plan or strategy. This can turn out to be a major mistake and actually hurt your brand and reputation. Or... on the other hand it may not have any impact whatsoever. Either way, not the outcome you were hoping for.

Dipping your toe in to test the waters might be appropriate in some instances, but with social media it is better to take a more deliberate strategic approach, especially if you are looking to achieve specific measurable results.

Here are a few things to remember when considering a move into the social media space:

1. Be genuine
If you want to engage with your audience represent yourself as a human and an individual first, then represent your company. Authenticity always wins and people truly appreciate transparency.

2. Don’t rush
Think out your actions carefully. Have a solid plan, the right people to execute and understand what your objectives are before you set out to achieve them. Social media isn’t going anywhere, so don't panic!

3. Care
Not just about your campaign or social media efforts, but care about the people you desire to connect with. Show them that you care. Be helpful, offer advice, and talk with them not at them.

4. Offer Value
Nobody is required to interact with your content and nobody will really pay much attention to it unless it somehow has an affect on them personally and creates a sense of meaningfulness. What you find valuable vs. what your customers find valuable may be different. Evaluate this.

5. Create Conversation
Social media is wonderful for creating dialogue. Always remember that the goal of engaging in social media is connecting with others. By doing this you will gain valuable insight from your customers experiences with your brand. And your customers will feel delighted that they were able to connect with you in a genuine way.

Finally, if you are nervous or uncertain about the best way for your company to proceed, hire a consultant or a service provider who is already in this space. They can help you formulate a winning plan.

Have fun out there!

R.I.P. Monologue

I can’t even count the numerous times I’ve heard seemingly intelligent marketing folks speaking about Social Media as if it were some trend or fad that is simply just going to go away. I think some believe that we will momentarily resume our positions on our soapbox with our megaphones blasting generic messages out to crowds of uninterested people while June Cleaver bakes cookies for us.

Get real.

Conversation is marketing.

Consumers aren’t interested in hearing your monologue and certainly don’t have to give you their time or mind share. They have an opinion, a voice, and a platform on which to share it. In fact, not only are customers smarter and more resourceful, but they have less time and have become professional ad muters. That $300,000 ad spend you just invested in, sadly may have fallen upon deaf ears.

But don’t worry. There is another way. I like to call it, Change or Die.

Social Media is not a fad or a trend. It is the web, relationships, connection, trust, conversations, listening, sharing, evolving, collaborating and… is now a very important part of daily life for Canadians. This is your chance to move from being a company with a product, to a company with a heart and a voice.

When you’re planning on taking an all-inclusive vacation for a week, do you call up the resort directly and ask “how good can I expect my vacation to be if I choose to come here?” No!! You fly over to TripAdvisor.com, check out the reviews of the 300+ people who have visited the resort within the last year and base your opinion on the collective experience of others.

The way that consumers gather information and make buying decisions is now vastly different. There are groups and communities online all with the premise of sharing information. We’re assembling and becoming organized groups of buyers. We don’t take as many risks anymore, because… well, we don’t have to.

Naturally, marketers must evolve and adapt to accommodate this changing landscape. This means listening to your existing customers, talking to them, and being flexible. Don’t be afraid to socialize your brand. It’s a necessity. Customers want to know that there’s a human in there somewhere. There are simple low-cost things you can do right now to begin the socialization process. Why not start with a blog?!

Conversations about your brand are already happening online with our without your involvement. Wouldn’t you rather be a part of the conversation?

The Problem (?) With Social Bookmarking

Experiencing major success with social bookmarking & sharing sites is definitely not easy. And unfortunately (for marketers), there is no trick, strategy, or tactic that will see your content rise to the top bringing in traffic in the millions.

The ONLY way to ensure your content gets spread, shared, dugg, stumbled, and bookmarked… is to CREATE GREAT CONTENT!! That’s right folks… Great content. Not a boring press release, a new product page, a lame viral, or the equivalent of you standing on your soap box shouting through a megaphone.

Forget the Ps of marketing, it’s all about the Es now. Experience, Engage, Everywhere, Exchange and Evangelism. Burn these into your mind, because nothing else matters. Much like the rest of the social media world, nothing will get shared on Social bookmarking platforms unless its WORTHY of sharing. What does worthy of sharing mean? Unfortunately for marketers it means unbiased, useful, often non-branded content that people are happy and proud to discover and share.

Another thing marketers need to be weary of. You must be engaged in a community in order to post content there and have anyone see it. If any random spammer could just come along and blast whatever they feel like into the filters of these platforms, they wouldn’t be as popular as they are. The content at the top is there for a reason. But more often than not, the content that becomes the most popular does so because of the USERS not the CONTENT. The heavy platform users endorse it... their friends see it, also endorse it, and so on.

So what all this means at the end of the day, is that us marketers have to think more like humans and less like sales people, we must think about human connection and values because in the end it is these traits that will triumph in a web 2.0 world.