DC Interactive Group’s SmartMarketing Blog

I am a working mom. It’s 10:30AM. I just put my son down for his first nap of the day. It’s actually late for a morning nap…rather than the usual 7AM, he decided to sleep in until 8:30 this morning. His daily schedule is flexible like that—he’s in charge. And that’s okay. Because my job allows for that kind of flexibility.

When he naps, I work. I am part of the growing workforce of work-from-home moms, largely made possible by the new popularity of social media. At DC Interactive Group, for many clients we provide a virtual online marketing department. We consider ourselves part of our client’s team—but we happen to be experts at our focus area, and we happen to work off-site.

When I was 4 months pregnant, my husband and I gave our working plan a lot of thought. And from just a cost perspective, when we factored the cost of daycare, reducing my hours to part time and working from home was the perfect scenario. Fortunately, the boss was on board—he’s a family man himself, but he also gets it—because our focus is promoting your business in online circles, we can take care of that from anywhere.

And he’s not the only employer taking advantage of the unique skills moms have to offer the online world—check out MomForce.com , an entire site dedicated to placing moms in just this sort of position. The job placement site offers flexible jobs, some entirely telecommute, some with some hours at home, some with all hours on site, and many jobs in the social media arena, including jobs categorized as blogging and social media jobs. It also gives moms the chance to post their resumes and skills for employers to review.

When I was a kid and people asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?", I never would have answered, "A blogger." (Considering the world wide web wasn’t quite invented until I was around 10, that would have been an odd answer…stranger than my usual answer, "A turtle.") But now, blogging can be a career. In fact, Alecia Keys just announced a job listing she posted on Monster for a "Head Blogger" , and she teamed up with Monster, who will use their 6Sense search technology to find the right candidate.

Blogging for clients is a big part of what I do. A lot of times I enjoy myself so much that I think, I couldn’t possibly be getting a paycheck for this. And it isn’t that bad of a deal for employers, either. When I sit down to work, I work. I hate to admit it, but the hours I record are among the most productive work hours of my life. When Wally Ben is napping, I am approaching each task with a focus unmatched in my days of sitting at the same desk from 9-5.

So hooray to the social media world for opening up a new work alternative for moms. And hooray to the employers out there who see how that alternative can work for both moms and their businesses. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to change the way we work. It’s exciting to be a part of a new, developing arena that plays such a big part in people’s lives.

Now I’m off to change another diap, and while I’m at it, I’ll ask Wally Ben what he wants to be when he grows up. Hopefully he’ll come up with something a little less reptile than his mom’s childhood dream.

See the “share” button at the bottom of this post? It’s thanks to AddThis, the “#1 Bookmarking & Sharing Service.” You might already be aware of the button and may in fact use it on your blog posts, but you may not know that it can be placed into the HTML code of your email as well.

Whether you’re sending an email to one or thousands of people, utilizing an AddThis share button makes it easy for the recipients of your email to pass your information along. It’s just up to you to have captivating content!

Here’s a screen capture of what you’ll see. Click to enlarge.

To add the button to your email, you’ll want to click on the ‘more options’ link at the bottom, then specify you’d like to use the button in an email newsletter. From that point you just choose the design of the button and the link of the article you’re sharing, and you’re good to go!

Setting up an account is free and anayltics are provided by AddThis, so you’ll easily see if taking advantage of their share buttons is worth your time. If your content is interesting, chances are it’ll be well worth the couple extra minutes.

Social Media provides some really great benefits to marketers. So do Web 2.0 strategies and PPC buys. But these tools represent just a small part of a good online marketing program. The key is to bring these all together in a nice, synergistic package that’s easy to create, easy to manage and easy to analyze

Welcome to “Sparking”, the web marketing program we created almost two years ago that provides an incredible ROI by building relationships with customers through online networks, blogs, eblasts and more.

To find out more, click here and learn about Sparking and how you can benefit by romancing your customers online.

Last week I wrote about the need for companies to get on board the Social Media bus now before it leaves marketers so far behind that the cost to start and show immediate results will be so high that executives will not want to “experiment”.  Judging by the emails I’ve received about the post, the problem is not the marketers don’t agree, but rather that they cannot get others above them to allocate any budget to Social Media because they’ve heard that it cannot show a direct correlation to ROI.

While I had no problem answering each one and gave clear examples of how to measure the ROI of Social Media, I just came across this slide presentation by Olivier Blanchard that sums it up rather nicely and with some much needed humor.  While his presentation is different than mine, this is pretty much exactly what we advise others to do and what my company does for our clients.  Enjoy.

As an interactive marketing agency, social media is our middle name. We recently read an article in CRM Magazine that outlined the importance of social media but more importantly, user-generated social media. The article notes that the tables have turned and the public now holds the reigns and is forcing marketers to find value in the noise. That value can be found through the metrics of this user-generated social media, found below.

Volume: The number of comments, blog posts, tweets, links, etc., about your brand, your competition and your field.

Sentiment: The positive, negative or indifferent consumer reaction to your brand or a topic, which can be measured by text analytics and natural language processing.

Emotion: The reasons that a consumer felt good, bad or indifferent that point to how you can resolve her problem or how your business can change and improve.

Topic/Issue: The context (e.g., product, customer service, advertising, competitor, etc.) in which your brand is being discussed. Nielsen’s Brand Association Map helps visually associate the relationship between terms; a Google AdWords keyword expansion tool helps improve the relevancy of your selections.

Source: Where the conversation is occurring (e.g., Twitter, blog, discussion board).

Author (Influencer): The people talking about your brand and their social media impact (e.g., number of followers, readers, commenters).

Virality: The reach of your brand and relevant topics around your brand (e.g., how many people are reading, posting, linking and sharing).

What’s important to note about social media as well as the metrics by which they are measured is that it’s consumer-driven. The conversation that occurs via social media requires the willful and active participation and interaction of your customers. Big Picture is key. Sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the big players right now but with social media evolving so quickly, it’s hard to say who will be on top in a few years. The main idea is to be prepared. No matter what the medium, you should be thinking of ways to get your name and your brand on people’s tongues…and fingertips.