I’ve used it a few times now – and it’s come up trumps each time (I’ve learnt some new stuff too!). The tutorial gives comprehensive lists from basic to advanced – recommended!

The manufacturing industry has been somewhat slow to accept social media as a marketing tool. This is largely because it can be difficult to see how social media plays into the larger business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy. That, however, appears to be changing. Acccording to a Forrester report released in March of 2011, 30 percent of global manufacturers intended to increase social media investments in 2012.

As global manufacturers increase their social media spending, the case for small- to mid-sized manufacturers to invest in social media grows stronger. The opportunities are particularly attractive in the contract and job shop manufacturing segments, which have traditionally relied on word-of-mouth marketing to win new business. I’d like to share two ways that manufacturers can start using social media today to improve their brand visibility and win more business.

1. Create a Blog to Tell Your Story
Blogs give manufacturers an opportunity to do more than just promote their brand. Blogs allow manufacturers to communicate with their customers and prospects using a richer form of media with longer-form stories. They’re also a great avenue for sharing company information and providing industry knowledge. Manufacturers can use blogs to announce major company milestones, such as getting ISO 9001 certification, as well as share general industry trends and news. By striking a balance between promoting a brand and sharing useful information, manufacturers can gain a thought leadership position that will help win customers later down the road.

2. Use LinkedIn to Help Fill the Sales Funnel
For manufacturers, getting the most out of LinkedIn requires more than just becoming a member of the social network. Manufacturers can use LinkedIn to prime to sales funnel by using their networks to gain access to sales prospects. Once you get a few hundred contacts, your typical network usually reaches in the millions. This network can be used to get an introduction to a potential sales contact – or at the very least to connect with someone that can help strategise on how to contact the prospect. LinkedIn can also be a great place to demonstrate industry expertise by participating in relevant community discussions. Answering a difficult question in a Q&A forum, for instance, could very well lead to an unexpected contract.



For more ideas on how manufacturers can make use of social media, Software Advice – a site that reviews manufacturing software.

To access the original article, visit: How Manufacturers Can Use Social Media to Win Business

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So credit where it’s due then for those outfits who are going the extra mile to try out new ideas, especially when their initiatives attempt to address the fact that trade press journalists have so much less time to spare than in the past. I’ve mentioned the First Friday Club before, but here’s another initiative which I suspect will pay for itself in spades if you’d like to give it a try. Give Me 5 is a sort of speed-dating event where you can brief up to a dozen journalists in quick succession. You get five minutes to talk to each one – which should be more than enough to get a message over – before everybody moves round. It’s a great idea, and I wish it had been around when I was an editor. Indeed, with these sort of happenings available nowadays, I can see that, eventually, the only reason left for companies to hold their own (expensive) press conferences will be to impress the chairman.

The next Give Me 5 is focused on the electronics sector and will take place on 13th March 2012 in London. One of the organisers of the event, Ian Clay, tells me: “We have a good number of journalists committed and, as with our recent industrial event, we expect interest to be high. We’re aiming for 10-12 journalists and 10-12 presenters, and it’s ‘agency neutral’ so PR companies can jump on board and recommend it to their clients.” I suspect it’ll be of just as much interest to companies which do their own press relations internally. There’s also a Give Me 5 in the industrial/engineering design sector, on May 15th. Give it a try – some very switched-on companies already are.

One way of creating an attention grabbing image is to use FiveSquids.co.uk. The fundamental premise of the Web site is that users can post online the things they are willing to do for, well, five quid basically.

At this point, be warned, there are one of two things on the site that aren’t suitable for work. However, due to FiveSquids own terms and conditions, users can’t post offers based on any of the usual things we all like to avoid in polite society.

So, back to communicating your message in an unusual way; the offers on FiveSquids.co.uk include:

Have your message written in pebbles on a beach
Have your message written on a traditional American road sign
Have your message written on a campaign plaque at a protest using 2D tracking

There are loads more. It’s fun and it’s throw away but it could easily work at very low cost in a piece of e-mail marketing.

*Stone Junction is a progressive UK based technical PR agency that offers bespoke engineering PR, technical PR and technology PR campaigns. Services include trade, online and national PR, copy writing, Blogging, social media consultancy, e-mail marketing and Web content optimisation.

Lots of other tools available on this site – including duplicate page finder, similar text finder and many more.

More reading on redirects at SEOMoz’s very helpful Best Practices.

Nice one!

Great comments too…

Here’s some good guidance, about including ‘don’t know’ / ‘not applicable’ in surveys from SurveyMonkey.

I’ve always avoided Friday afternoons/Monday mornings, as these days many people finish early, and that means any email would get caught up with the Friday afternoon, weekend and Monday morning mails…

These days it seems that time and day aren’t actually important, according to a recent posting on the emailvision Blog, they say:

“In a small poll we ran, 94% of people said that when returning to their inbox they scan all new or recent unread emails. This means your position in the inbox is relatively unimportant. Your email will be scanned for a delete or read decision regardless of whether it’s the top email or number 25. Your email will live and die by much stronger factors than time of day such as: subject line and from name, content relevance, previous experience of your emails and brand loyalty and engagement.”

Makes sense, especially if you analyse your own email habits (in the workplace), and your target audience really isn’t any different from you in that respect. So your email stands every chance of being deleted if you don’t engage the recipient, first and foremost with the subject line.

So, basically, time/day really don’t matter. But you do also need to ensure you are actually mailing the right person (you are, aren’t you?)

Although, I suppose, if you really want to test out days and times, you could always stagger your campaign and measure the results. Now there’s a thought.

The full article is here, and further reading on subject lines can be found here.

Good luck!

Their resources section is certainly worth visiting – amongst others, there’s a handy guide entitled ‘How to avoid spam filters’ – available to download or read online.

It covers checking campaigns prior to sending, preventing false abuse reports, using double opt-in and lots more.

They say, “Innocent email marketers who send permission-based emails to people who requested them get spam filtered all the time. Unfortunately, there’s not a quick fix. The only way to avoid spam filters is to understand what spam is and how the filters work…”

I think this deserves a banana, or three!

Well, I’m going to be honest and say I wasn’t entirely sure. The best explanation I’ve found is from the Marketo Blog, where they discuss the subject in respect of blogs, they say “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. A high bounce rate is most likely caused by visitors not finding the information they are searching for when they land on your page. Chances are these visitors are clicking the back button and going on to the next relevant page from their search engine results, resulting in a missed opportunity for you…”

In other words, you need to make your page(s) sticky.

So how do you remedy this?

You need to ensure your page content is relevant to the keywords which pushed the visitor to you in the first place.

The article gives five tips on how to achieve this – easily sorted, and all equally relevant to your company website pages…