Social Media
Our social media marketing coverage addresses management tools, educational courses, platform tips, social analytics, and strategies for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. We’ve interviewed merchants who rely on social media traffic, and vendors who provide specialized services.
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Social Media
Book Excerpt: Niche Online Communities Can Benefit Your Business
September 24, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...
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Social Media
Book Excerpt: Social Media Helps Overcome Consumer Skepticism
September 10, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...
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Social Media
PeC Traffic Report: Generate Buzz and Traffic With Contest Marketing
August 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketers can use contests to boost traffic and improve sales. If I guaranteed you an additional $10,000 in annual sales just for reading this article and posting a comment, would you do it? What about if I said you had a 1-in-100 chance of getting an additional $10,000 in a...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Use Twitter to Build a Community of Loyal Customers
June 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Microblogging site Twitter has the potential to be a powerful marketing and brand-building tool for ecommerce businesses interested in engaging their customers and being part of a community. But successful marketing on Twitter, or any microblogging site, requires more than just posting ...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Tinker Sorts Your Twitter Tweets for Brand-Safe Marketing
May 27, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Tinker sorts and organizes Twitter.com tweets around brands, products, and other topics or events. This potentially gives ecommerce businesses a new, brand-safe way to market via social media and a means of monitoring popular trends. Tinker allows users to create so-called events based...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Share This Makes Adding Social Media a Breeze
May 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Share This is a JavaScript-based widget that merchants can easily be embedded on their websites, allowing visitors to email web content to friends, send links as text messages, or post the content to a couple dozen social sharing sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Digg. Each week, "The P...
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Social Media
Quick Query: Comodo CEO on Hiring a Social Media Officer
April 16, 2009 • PEC Staff
There's much talk about social media sites and there's also talk of how companies can use social media for marketing purposes. One company doing just that is Comodo, a firm that provides online security solutions. Comodo has recently created a “social media officer” job position and Com...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Elgg Lets Any Business Create an Online Community
March 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Elgg is an open source platform to power any kind of social media community, and it is a tool that online merchants can use to help develop a loyal flow of site traffic. Social media communities similar to Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular. For example, eMarketer, a marketin...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Use Facebook, LinkedIn to Promote Your Store
February 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Online communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tangle allow members to join groups, post content, and respond to other's activity. While some marketers have tried to exploit the media, there are positive ways for online merchants to participate in linking networks and build stronger re...
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Social Media
Social Media: Listening is the New Marketing
February 18, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Marketers are known for talking, not listening. That is not to suggest we have not used tools like focus groups, user surveys or other research instruments in the past. It's just that, in the era of the participatory web, listening is not an option; it is a mandate. It provides great ...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Social Media as a Marketing Tool
February 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An integrated social media marketing strategy can help you and your ecommerce site increase brand visibility, improve customer loyalty, and gain important insights about the markets you serve. And with the dramatic growth in social media traffic, ecommerce merchants would be smart to in...
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Social Media
Social Media Marketing
September 9, 2008 • Paul Chaney
Something my employer at Bizzuka said recently sparked my thinking. "What you're doing (in terms of marketing) will not just help us create greater awareness among prospects, but among those considering coming to work for us," he said. It caused me to realize that marketing, especial...
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Social Media
Ratings And Reviews Engage Your Visitors
July 24, 2008 • Paul Chaney
Trust in word-of-mouth recommendations is at an all-time high. Public relations firm Edleman says in its 2008 Trust Barometer study that “a person like me” is still the most trusted source for information about a company and its services or products. While the most influential form of ...
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Social Media
Social Media Wheels Keep On Turning‚ And Fast!
July 16, 2008 • Paul Chaney
My social media journey started with blogs, then LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, a few other social networks, social sharing and bookmarking sites thrown in, then Twitter and now, Plurk. Sound familiar? How the wheels of social media evolution do turn. It's hard to keep up. Aft...
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Social Media
Never Edit Your Own Stuff
July 15, 2008 • Paul Chaney
How many times has this happened? You compose a blog post, usually in a hurry, then hit the submit button, only to read it later and wonder how in the heck you missed what is a glaring error. I am the world’s worst. Years ago, a veteran magazine editor gave me this advice, “Never edit y...
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Social Media
Blogs and Email: A One-Two Marketing Punch
May 21, 2008 • Paul Chaney
I have long been an advocate of using blogs and email as complementary online marketing strategies. Blogs serve a customer acquisition function, while email serves a customer retention role. That belief was recently reinforced when I attended a webinar jointly sponsored by a new company...
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Social Media
A Social Media Symphony
April 28, 2008 • Paul Chaney
How often do you find a classical musician who is not only a virtuoso on his or her appointed instrument, but who demonstrates Internet marketing virtuosity as well? Allow me to introduce you to classical pianist Grace Nikae and her website, Gracenikae.com. From looking at her website, ...
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Social Media
Online Reputation Management
April 17, 2008 • Paul Chaney
Like it or not, people are talking about you online. They're talking about your brand, your products, industry and competition. Do you know what they are saying? If not, why not? Can you afford not to listen? There is a relatively new industry burgeoning on the Internet. It's called ...
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Social Media
Social Networking: Build Your Own Community
March 17, 2008 • Paul Chaney
There is not a day that goes by that I don't reflect on how to leverage social media, including social networks, for marketing purposes. I have tried a number of approaches, some of which have been successful and some of which have not. This month, I want to share an idea that I think h...
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Social Media
Social Media As A Marketing Strategy in 2008
January 2, 2008 • Paul Chaney
2007 was a good year for holiday shopping. comScore reported that online shopping totaled nearly $28 billion, up 19 percent from 2006. Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday all had record traffic compared to previous years, according to Hitwise. Hopefully, your business experi...
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Social Media
Social Media Comes Of Age
December 3, 2007 • Paul Chaney
Seemingly, everywhere you look these days, people are talking about social media online technologies and websites that people use to share content, opinions, insights and experiences. It's Facebook this or MySpace that, and those are only two of the myriad of such sites that comprise th...
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Social Media
Nine Things to Consider Before You Blog
August 20, 2006 • Paul Chaney
You’ve heard a lot about web logs or blogs. That’s because during the past six years blogs have evolved from a highly personal form of communication on the Internet to a powerful new medium for business. Not since Procter & Gamble invented branding back in 1931 has there been so muc...
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Social Media
RSS Basics
May 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
Want more traffic to your ecommerce site? Need an easy way to distribute news and updates? An RSS feed may be your answer. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a format for syndicating website content such as might be found on major news sites like CNN, as well as on blogs. ...
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Social Media
Email Marketing: Tips for Success
April 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
MAKE THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR LIST YOUR NUMBER ONE GOAL. "If you are serious about wanting to do email professionally, you need to be diligent in how you sign up contacts, using double opt-in techniques. Otherwise, you're building a list that will never perform at maximum levels," says Ji...
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Social Media
Bullish on Blogging
March 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
A few years ago the investment firm Merrill Lynch coined the term “We’re Bullish.” It became the company’s corporate mantra of sorts. In stock trade terminology, being bullish represents a rise in value. I’m bullish on blogging, and for a number of reasons. I think it is a technology to...
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Social Media
Blogs and Affiliate Marketing
February 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
Blogs have typically not been thought of as direct response sales tools. In their brief history, blogs have morphed from being “personal online journals and diaries” to vital tools for business, but the focus has been more on using them for relational marketing or purely informational p...
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Social Media
Successful Blogging: Utilize the Four
January 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
Everyone remembers the three “R’s” from your school days: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. These three areas are considered essential to building a good educational foundation. Similarly, there are also some basic essentials to strategic blogging. I would like to present the four “R’s”...
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Social Media
eCommerce Marketing: Use Email, Blogs and RSS Together
December 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
Think of things that just naturally go together and what comes to mind? Peanut butter and jelly for one, ham and cheese for another. How about a hammer and nails or a table and chairs? In terms of online marketing, two strategies go together equally as well: email and blogs. Email is t...
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Social Media
Blogs Are One Way to Get Consumers
November 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
Are you “stuck on style?” If so, you may already be a fan of online retailer’s blog, Flypaper. Those three words describe the audience Bluefly, a discount women’s apparel e-tailer, is attempting to attract via the blog: women who care about fashionable clothing but who do not want to pa...
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Social Media
Ten Things to Consider Before You Blog
September 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
You’ve heard a lot about web logs or blogs. That’s because during the past six years blogs have evolved from a highly personal form of communication on the Internet to a powerful new medium for business. Not since Procter & Gamble invented branding back in 1931 has there been so muc...
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