Shiv Singh

Cheat Sheet / Updated 09-16-2024

The Marketing with AI For Dummies book, by Shiv Singh, offers great advice for using artificial intelligence (AI) in all aspects of marketing efforts. In the book, marketers at any level can find solid guidance for applying the capabilities of AI, whether they want to develop entire marketing campaigns or simply find help for automating repetitive processes. In this Cheat Sheet, find information about planning successful AI implementations, training marketing teams to use AI tools, finding the right partners for your work with AI, and avoiding over-reliance on AI automation.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-05-2023

Creating and operating a nonprofit organization can be a gratifying and worthwhile endeavor. Success depends on developing a good idea that meets a real need, testing that idea, planning (and then planning some more), and inspiring others. Though the work is demanding, it’s also deeply rewarding. Here, we include helpful information to help you raise money when you’re just starting out and apply for e-grants.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-15-2022

Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, present unique marketing opportunities. To make the most of social media marketing, you should begin by exploring the online social media sites and see how things are done. Next, you need to zero in on your niche and target your market. After you've done that, you will be able to run a successful online campaign and measure the results.

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

Reddit is a community discussion and rating platform where participants vote content up and down. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in 2005. It calls itself the “front page of the internet” and lives up to that billing; Alexa ranks it as the sixth most visited site in the U.S. You can submit blog posts, images, audio, and original content. In fact, there is a separate link for original content on the front page. According to Statista in 2017, the Reddit audience skews male (sixty-nine percent), and the majority were in the 18–29 age range (fifty-eight percent). If this is your audience, you need to look into what’s being shared here. Marketing on Reddit Should your company consider joining Reddit to become one of its “Redditors”? That depends on how much you want to spend time digging deeper and connecting with your niche audience. It’s likely that there’s an audience online that is discussing your topic. According to Statista, Reddit has: Five hundred and forty-two million monthly visitors; two hundred thirty-four million unique users) as of March 2019 Over one hundred and thirty-eight thousand active communities Almost 1.6 billion visits to their online forum (from February 2018 to April 2019) Reddit has gotten the interest of brands because it has a mass audience and marketers are eager to grab their attention. But, not surprisingly, marketing behavior is virtually shunned on Reddit. Therefore, figuring out the best way to participate as a company takes time and effort. Determine whether you have the time to spend learning the rules and determine the best way to join the conversation. You don’t want to associate your company with inappropriate content and be banned. To avoid being banned from Reddit, think about the following: You first goal is to understand the lay of the land. You want to find subreddits (threads) hat have content related to your business topic and determine how you want to participate in discussions. Think about adding value by doing things like answering questions. If you act like a marketer who only talks about their products, you won’t be welcome. You want to develop a community and serve them well. See how content is presented. Make sure not to use cheesy headlines or clickbait. The administrators can ban you. Setting up on Reddit To join Reddit, you have to register and verify your account. Here are a few important things to note: Username: You can’t change your username after you pick one, so give careful thought to your choice ahead of time. Rules: After your account is verified, you receive a welcome letter from Reddit that outlines acceptable behavior (reddiquette). Subscriptions: Reddit automatically subscribes you to fifty of the most popular subreddits when you join. Communities on Reddit are called subreddits. You can keep or delete them as you choose. All subreddits names start this way: reddit.com/r/ name. Premium: You can subscribe to a premium version of Reddit for $5.99 a month. This gives you an ad-free version, access to the r/lounge community, and seven hundred coins to spend each month. Coins are virtual tokens that can be used to show the writer of the content that their contribution is exemplary. Account: To view your account as others see it, go to your account. Search: To search subreddits type a term related to your business. To keep up on the latest communities, you can find new subreddits as they are created. Knowing Reddit lingo When you join any community, it’s helpful to know the special terms used by its members. As a marketer, here are two you should know: Karma points: Karma points are earned by upvotes to your posts or comments. This is your currency. Other users can judge you by this, so pay attention to this metric. Shadow ban: If you violate the rules you may be shadow banned by the administrators. This means that no one else can see your account although you think your account looks fine. Analyzing Reddit content One of the reasons for participating on Reddit is to see the kinds of things others in your communities are writing about and how they’re using it. Here are two free/paid tools you can use to analyze subreddits users and determine how well your content is performing: Snoopsnoo is a free tool that lets you look at other member profiles to see how they’re using Reddit. You can see such things as how long they have been on the site, how long it’s been between postings, and their karma scores. TrackReddit is a tracking tool that lets you set up alerts for topics (two are free). For example, you can monitor what’s being said on Reddit about a brand name or person.

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

Looking for something new in social media? Are you a brand hoping to attract attention from a teen audience? If so, you may want to check out TikTok. In 2017 ByteDance, a Chinese Internet company, introduced a new social media video-sharing app called TikTok. In 2018 ByteDance bought Musical.ly that had a substantial U.S. based audience and merged it with TikTok and gaining a presence among Americans. Forty-one percent of TikTok’s audience is between the ages of 16 and 24 (Global web Index, 2018). Getting in on the TikTok action Although the platform may be new to you, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store in the first half of 2018 — one billion downloads (CNBC Sensor/Tower) worldwide, which surpasses downloads of platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Currently, it has more than five hundred million monthly active users. Interested in exploring the app? You can download it free from the App Store and at Google Play. You’ll want to look around and see the types of content that are successful. So, what is TikTok? It’s a video sharing app on which users create fifteen second videos that play on a loop with music tracks. The videos are largely made up of lip-synching, stunts, pets doing tricks, and other humorous music-backed content. The app supplies tools to create something unique and fun. Experimenting with TikTok If you think that major companies aren’t interested in an app such as TikTok, you forget that five hundred million monthly users are a lot of eyeballs. Companies like Guess, Chipotle, and even the Washington Post are experimenting with this new social media app. Of particular interest to brands is the Challenges tab. Companies are trying out challenges that relate to their products. A challenge asks the reader to participate in a themed action. For example, in 2018, Guess a fashion brand, partnered with TikTok to create TikTok’s first branded content challenge using the hashtag #InMyDenim. Guess asked popular fashion influencers on the channel to create content and asked users to take photos of how they looked in their new denim line. So how did it go? Guess considers the campaign a great success with thirty-four million views and lots of attention to their product. If you want to reach this Gen Z audience, research carefully and see what others are doing. This is an audience that will let you know if you’re missing the mark!

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

In addition to thinking about your commitment to different stakeholders beyond your customers, consider what it means to be a socially responsible marketer. Fundamentally, socially responsible marketing is defined as taking moral actions that encourage a positive impact on all the company’s stakeholders from the customers and the employees to the suppliers, shareholders, and communities in which your company operates. The American Marketing Association (AMA) has designed a statement of ethics that govern marketers’ actions. The statement includes six ethical values that marketers are expected to uphold: Honesty: Be forthright in dealings and offer value and integrity. Responsibility: Accept consequences of marketing practices and serve the needs of customers of all types, while being good stewards of the environment. Fairness: Balance buyer needs and seller interest fairly, and avoid manipulation in all forms while protecting the information of the consumers. Respect: Acknowledge basic human dignity of all the people involved through efforts to communicate and understand and meet the needs and appreciate contributions of others. Transparency: Create a spirit of openness in the practice of marketing through communication, constructive criticism, action, and disclosure. Citizenship: Fulfill all legal, economic, philanthropic, and societal responsibilities to all stakeholders as well as giveback to the community and protect the ecological environment. For more details on the statement of ethics, visit the American Marketing Association Statement of Ethics. Making a commitment to the truth in your social media marketing campaigns If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the truth can be highly controversial. Whether it’s politics, business or even within local communities, sometimes separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, and information from falsehood has gotten incredibly difficult. Finding the truth feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. Sadly, those challenges exist across the business world. Put simply, companies aren’t always truthful with their customers. It can be a CEO speaking about the company’s future, a marketer talking about a product’s benefits, or an engineer responding with data to a government ask. Companies, too, suffer from stretching the facts when it suits their interest. This is a problem and in a social media driven world where lies can spread like wildfire across the Internet, being true to the facts and honest at all times takes on even greater significance. This puts a special responsibility on the marketers in a company or anyone practicing social media marketing. Marketers are in the persuasion business using stories to convince others to change their opinions and purchase specific products. Furthermore, through advertising budgets, the marketers also fuel other industries that depend on advertising revenue streams. Misinformation is rampant in our world and by virtue of providing the revenue stream for social media platforms that may inadvertently allow for the spreading of the lies, marketers carry unique responsibilities too. As a marketer, you can easily fall prey to furthering falsehoods and misinformation when it supports a business’s objectives or directly influences online sales. This is especially the case in social media where the way a product is positioned and marketed may not be visible to regulators or informed third parties who can call out misleading advertising. You may find yourself unintentionally marketing your own products in a way that may not be completely ethical and without the checks and balances that come with mass advertising, it may go unnoticed for a while. 5 ways to encourage truthfulness in your social media marketing campaigns Few marketers intentionally try to mislead or cheat their customers. And social media marketers are typically even more careful because they want to please their customers, being fully aware of the real-time feedback loops of social media. Those feedback loops serve as a natural checks and balances. However, something can always go wrong when you’re publishing a lot of content quickly. Here are five ways to encourage truthfulness from your team and yourself too. Ask for facts. When you have a team member reviewing their social media marketing plan with you, ask that person whether he or she has all the facts verified. Look for the facts and encourage the team member to keep opinions to a minimum. Use reflection to override bias. You rarely mean to intentionally perpetuate lies. However you’re human and you may accept certain opinions as facts. One way to address this problem is by consciously choosing to delay arriving at your judgment. Let all the available information sink in and deliberately reflect on it before approving the direction. Engage openly with dissent. When the facts are contested, one way to find what is the truth is to engage with those that disagree with you. Actively engage with all parties involved in a particular disagreement. Try to get as much of a 360-degree view of the issue as you can, before you form any judgments. Appoint people to play the “devil’s advocate.” When tasked with making a major decision, set up an alternative team whose responsibility is to justify the opposite conclusion. It leads you to better solutions. Be open to criticism. Find trusted people who can provide you with feedback in a way where the message is heard without it feeling like an attack. It’s important to have people surrounding you who don’t agree with everything you say all the time. Marketers have unique and important responsibilities in any company. Knowing how to separate fact from fiction and truth from lies is supposed to be common sense — something that you learn as a child. However, in the social media world, it’s hard to separate the two. Bad actors twist the truth, play at your weaknesses, and use psychology tricks to confuse you. As a marketer, you have to be extra careful both as a potential victim yourself and as an unintentional endorser of those lies. It may be retweeting a news headline that validates a product, and not realizing that the headline isn’t true, or it could be taking a fake endorsement of a product and putting it in a piece of advertisement, and anything in between. The point is that in a social media driven world where information spreads like across the Internet, it’s extremely important to only be a purveyor of truth and not to be lazy in what you communicate and how.

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

It’s important to know the different types of social media marketing campaigns. After that, you take a look at the rules and guidelines that make social media marketing campaigns successful. In the realm of social media marketing, how you implement a campaign is nearly as important as what you implement. Before you launch your social media marketing campaign, make sure that you’ve done an inventory of all the other major campaigns going on at the same time that target your customers or are within your industry. The last thing you want is to launch a campaign in which you’re asking your customers to do basically the same thing that they may have just done for a competitor. In 2017, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) imposed guidelines on how pharmaceutical companies can market using the social web. Those regulations cover the promotion of FDA-regulated products. More information can be found on the FDA website. If you’re a pharmaceutical company or are operating in another regulated industry, be sure to check with your lawyers about what you’re allowed and not allowed to do before launching a social media marketing campaign. Influencer outreach Among the most common form of a social media marketing campaign is the influencer outreach program. This campaign typically takes the form of identifying influencers on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and elsewhere who your customers follow. They’re the expert influencers who cover a topic or a passion point and have a following. The best way to think of them is as media that publish content, accept relationships with brands, and build fan bases. Many accept advertising but typically have day jobs that they’re balancing unless they’ve done extraordinarily well as influencers. Influencer outreach programs incentivize these influencers to publish about your brand or product. You can give them incentives by inviting them to the R&D labs of your company and treating them with the same deference that the mainstream press gets, to sending them sample products and providing them with prizes with which to run contests through their social media channels. Social media campaigns are sometimes built around these influencers. It’s important to note that the debate continues to rage online about influencer compensation. Some influencers absolutely refuse to accept compensation, whereas others are comfortable with it. Some companies, such as Aveda, a natural beauty products company, give influencers gift cards or spa treatments but no outright payments. Influencers typically accept these gifts with the understanding that their review will not be influenced by a gift of any kind. Companies want honest evaluations, and their readers demand it. You must know where your targeted influencer stands on this debate before reaching out to him. Knowing how to reach these influencers without coming across as heavy-handed, commercial, and ignorant is critical. Before you reach out to them, be sure to follow them in social media so that you know how they cover your brand or category; scan the comments on their channels so that you get a feel for the readers and how they participate; understand their policies with regard to brands engaging with them (some prefer to go through representatives, for example); and, ideally, try to develop a personal relationship based on the content that they publish and the topics that they cover before approaching them with an idea. These are all common-sense ideas that would apply even if you were attempting to engage with traditional reporters who are doing a story for a print publication. But as the saying goes, common sense is often uncommon, and many a company has done exactly the opposite. UGC contests Contests in all their various forms have always been a big hit in the marketing campaign arena. But now contests structured around user-generated content (UGC) are all the rage. And with good reason: They are invariably extremely popular, engaging, and fun. You structure a contest built on participants who contribute something in return for rewards. This can be something as simple as crowdsourcing a TV advertisement, as General Motors did in the early days of social media with its Tahoe campaign in 2006, to asking users to contribute video clips of their funniest moment with a product. The best clip (by the predetermined criteria) gets a prize, with all the other participants getting some sort of recognition. As Wired magazine reported, in the case of the Tahoe campaign, the microsite attracted 629,000 visitors, with each user spending more than nine minutes on the site and a third of them going on to visit the main Chevy.com website. Sales took off from that point, even though environmentalists tried to sabotage the UGC campaign by creating video clips that highlighted their views about on the environmental toll the vehicle takes on the environment. Another successful contest was run by Applebee’s in the summer of 2014. Applebee’s asked its customers to snap pics of their meals or themselves chowing. The best photos were then published by Applebee’s on its Instagram feed using the hashtag #fantographer and were cross-promoted on Facebook and Twitter with posts and ads. When the campaign ended in the fall of 2014, engagement had risen 25 percent and tweets tagged with #fantographer appeared in 78 million users’ timelines (users would submit their photos to Applebee’s via Twitter and used the hashtag when doing so). Brand utilities The basic idea behind brand utilities is that instead of providing the consumer with some advertising, you build their trust (and get their dollars) by giving them a utility application that provides actual value. If the utility serves a purpose, users adopt the application and think more favorably of your brand. Dollars that would have normally gone toward buying media go toward building the application instead. For example, Estee Lauder launched a Facebook brand utility called “Shine a Light on Breast Cancer.” It lets breast cancer survivors and their families post “messages of hope.” It also lets you know where breast cancer events are being held around the world. This connects people from all corners of the world to support one another in the fight against breast cancer. An application doesn’t always have to take the form of an application or a widget on a social network. The famous Nike+ solution, which is considered the world’s largest running club is a virtual community that helps users improve their running via real-time coaching over audio, track the distances they’ve run, compare themselves to their peers, and share their running statistics in social media. The advertising industry moves between trends very quickly, and it seems that brand utilities are already out of the limelight. What’s gaining favor now are apps that use crowdsourcing. For example, Lays potato chips used this type of application to solicit ideas from consumers for different chips flavors. In the program’s first year, consumers submitted four million flavor ideas. Called “Do us a flavor,” Lays designed the promotion so that an expert jury narrowed down the choices to four, which were put on the market. The winner was then chosen based on fan votes (through the application again) and made a permanent fixture on store shelves. Podcasting A podcast is a digital audio file that is made available via web syndication technologies such as RSS. Although it’s not, strictly speaking, social media, it’s often classified as such because it allows anybody to easily syndicate her own audio content. You can use podcasts as a way to share information with your audiences. Often, podcasts take the shape of celebrity interviews or discussions about your product or brand. A successful example of a podcast is the Butterball Turkey Talk podcast. It’s a seasonal podcast including stories from Turkey Talk hotline workers. You can subscribe to it via iTunes and other online podcast directories. Podcasts typically don’t form a whole social media marketing campaign in and of themselves but work well with other parts of a campaign. Sponsored conversations Sometimes the most effective social media marketing campaigns are the simplest ones. These campaigns engage with consumers in a straightforward, authentic fashion on a social platform while also aggregating other conversations, pointing to new ones, and stoking the community. An early pioneering example was when Disney partnered with Savvy Auntie, an online community focused on aunts without kids, for one such effort, which you see below. Melanie Notkin, who runs SavvyAuntie.com, tweeted about Disney’s Pinocchio movie in March 2008 to coincide with its Disney anniversary release. She tweeted about themes in the movie, often in question form, encouraging others to respond. Her 8,000 followers on Twitter at the time (today, she has more than 24,000) knew that she was doing this for Disney (every tweet about Pinocchio had a special tag), but because the tweets were appropriate for the audience, entertaining, and authentic, the campaign was a success. Since that pioneering example, there have been many more scenarios in which brands have partnered with influencers around sponsored conversations. A very different example comes from Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress company, that used video to provide value to its consumers in thoughtful ways. While this example technically isn’t a sponsored conversation, they treat it as such. In 2019, Casper launched a sleep channel on Spotify, YouTube, and IGTV that helps people quite literally fall asleep. With soothing sounds and educational video clips, Casper launches new episodes on these channels each week and promotes them more widely on their other social media platform. Here Casper isn’t promoting a specific mattress and nor are they asking their customers to advocate on their behalf. However, by promoting sleep they’re helping their customers as a branded utility would do. And in setting up a sleep channel, they’re acting like an influencer themselves. Needless to say, Casper occasionally promotes its own mattresses and when it does so, its acting as if it is sponsoring a conversation elsewhere! Recognizing what makes a good social media marketing campaign A social media marketing campaign is one that specifically allows for social influence to take place digitally. A few years ago, marketing through social media was a niche activity, and the notion of targeting influencers was an obscure one. The closest comparison was word-of-mouth campaigns conducted in the offline world to build brand awareness for a product by incentivizing people to talk about it among themselves. Digital campaigns, for the most part, were about display advertising (those banner ads that appear at the top and side of a website) across large magazine and newspaper websites, complemented with paid search campaigns and maybe email campaigns. These campaigns were used to drive prospects to a microsite (a site devoted to that particular campaign) or a website, where they were encouraged to make purchases or engage with the brand. With a social media marketing campaign, you mustn’t drag people away from the social platform on which they’re communicating and interacting with each other. They don’t want to be distracted, and you’ll probably only waste precious marketing dollars trying to lure them to your website. Instead, it’s more important to execute the campaign on those very platforms where your potential customers are in conversation. You have to engage your customers where they want to participate, not where you want them to be. And unlike in a digital marketing campaign of yesteryear, the customers of a social media marketing campaign ignore you unless your social media marketing campaign is aligned with their objectives and behavior patterns on those social platforms. A good example of a failed “build it and they will come” attempt was Bud.TV by Budweiser. They tried to create an entertainment destination bypassing YouTube. The effort failed miserably because Budweiser had to spend valuable advertising dollars to encourage consumers to do something that they had no interest in doing — moving away from YouTube, where they had the most entertaining content (and all their friends), to a corporate-sponsored website. What’s more, the fact that users couldn’t embed the video clips elsewhere (including YouTube) hurt the effort. Bud.TV launched in January 2007 and was shut down early in 2009. Fast forward to 2019, and you’ll notice that very few advertisers launch social media marketing campaigns where they try to pull customers to their websites to engage with them (granted pulling customers to your website to purchase is different and appropriate if done with sensitivity).

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

Understanding the mindset of Millennials makes it easier to understand what they expect from your company. There are specific things that Millennials look for when connecting with a brand. They would rather respond to useful information that speaks to their needs rather than their checkbook. They want an honest connection that is meaningful to them. Here you get a taste of what Millennials want to see from your company. Millennials appreciate trustworthiness and authenticity Millennials are particularly interested in buying from brands that are trustworthy and authentic. They have grown up with traditional advertising, and many ignore it completely. They want something (or someone) they can trust. They know that images can be faked and changed in Photoshop and are likely to disregard them when deciding what to buy. For example, they care about the ingredients in their packaged goods and the chemicals in their cleaning products. Brands need to step up and demonstrate their commitment to “clean and real’ rather than just displaying nice images of trees and farms. They want to see a commitment to the farmer. Millennials have a cause-minded attitude Millennials are careful about how they spend their money. They are also concerned about how your company spends its money. They want to see that you are worried about the needs of the broader community. According to research by Millennial Marketing, fifty percent of Millennials would be more likely to buy from a company when their purchase supports a cause, and would even be willing to pay a bit more! Millennials want brands who are respectful of privacy concerns With all the concerns about data theft and misuse, Millennials are much less willing to trade their email addresses for information like Baby Boomers and Gen Xers did. They also eschew “sneaky” ways of showing them ads. According to its study “Marketing to Millennials in 2019,” listwithclever.com found that Millennials are “creeped out by ads that follow them.” These ads are facilitated by a technique called remarketing, which lets advertisers show an advertisement for a product in your browser after you have shown an interest in it on its website. If you’re targeting Millennials, it’s a good idea to use less intrusive ads that don’t make them feel that their privacy is being violated. Millenials like companies who are open to collaboration with customers Millennials are used to being asked about their opinions and enjoy giving feedback to companies about their products. Many of them have created online content and consider themselves creators. You can gain their loyalty by soliciting their thoughts about how they use your products and how to improve them. Trust matters. Don’t ask them for their input if you don’t intend to use their suggestions. They consider their time way too valuable to spend with companies who don’t care about them. After you have shown to be uninterested in their ideas, they won’t come back.

Article / Updated 05-01-2017

When at all possible, add images to your blog posts. This is important for social media marketers because images break up the text and help to illustrate a point. They also help to catch the eye of readers rather than scanners. Of course, you can’t just use any old image you find. It’s equally as simple to upload images to embed in your blog post: Save the image you want to use. Click the image uploading tool. The image uploading tool is usually located at the top of your blog’s dashboard. Click Select Files and choose the image from your own files. Choose your alignment and size. Most bloggers prefer a right alignment for their images, as it’s more eye catching. Don’t size your image too big because it will take too long to load and will take away from the text. A thumbnail-sized photo is only good when you want readers to click to a bigger image. Choose a size that people can see at a glance but isn’t too big or too small. Write a caption for your image. Describe the image as it relates to your blog post and use SEO if it sounds natural. Click Insert into Post. Your image now appears in your blog post. When you save your image to your own computer, use keywords. Keywords catch the attention of the search engines, and you can receive some good traffic from Google Images from folks looking for the same type of illustration.

Step by Step / Updated 03-27-2016

As a social marketer, it is important to create boards that encourage customers to follow your brand and find out more. Try to focus on things that are specific to what makes your brand unique, rather than creating random, generic boards. To create a board, take these steps: