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One of the best tactics you can jump on to while wading through the social network streams is by imbibing Influencer Marketing strategies into your campaign. Whether they’re celebrities in real life or merely Internet-famous, people who follow influencers hold on to their every word and so trust is forged on an intimate lever.

An influencer, off-beat filmmaker Kevin Smith has over a million followers on Twitter and counting. Last February, he tweeted out in outrage about an embarrassing and insulting treatment he received onboard a Southwest Airlines plane. He even followed it up with a string of tweets that explained his frustration over the ordeal, added a photo of himself mocking the airline company and a rant episode of his podcast. This ended with a lot of press coverage and a lot of unnecessary reputation management cleanup.

On the other side of the social spectrum, Conan O’brien ’s recent jump into the microblogging platform caused a huge stir in the Twitterverse. He never followed anyone on Twitter but the hype machine went abuzz when the former late-night talk show host actually clicked the Follow button on some random fan, one Sarah Killen , and even announced it on a tweet. And suddenly news agencies and blogs picked up the story and Killen’s mere hundred of followers rose to 29,686 as of writing.

At first glance, these influencer scenarios aren’t really big deal stories to begin with, and yet they both snowballed into media frenzies of international proportions. For both Smith and O’brien (or any influencer for that matter), the audience reaction is instantaneous, even boosted by the Twitter’s real-time platform.

Then came the barrage of retweets from his followers, retweets from his followers’ followers and then the media coverage. Blogs and news sites exploded with different angles and opinions. Links got shared on Facebook and other less popular sites. And these began with mere 140-character posts.

In both the online and real worlds, there are celebrities that people look up to and most of them fervently hold on to their every word. This is why we’ll see Catherin Zeta-Jones on a T-Mobile ad and Danica Patrick constantly on GoDaddy placements. These personalities can provide much leverage on the mass’ purchasing decisions and where to go and how they consume information online.

Online marketers need to find ways to expand and optimize the social Web, adapt accordingly to different circumstances and strategically grab the opportunities as they come. When heading for influencer marketing, there has to be a crystal clear view of what the ultimate goal is and a carefully mapped out, solidly structured strategy map.

It’s not that easy to accomplish unless you’ve already established a working relationship with some of them in the past, in which case, a little bit of marketing know-how and constant communication can turn them into your own brand evangelists and things can really fall into place for your brand.

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As fun as social media is, between all the conversations you engage in online and the behind-the-scenes planning, work can really get tedious. And then stress ensues which dropkicks your office productivity even further. For this, it’s best to have applications and tools you commonly use and site locations organized to help lessen the stress.

So here, we’ve gathered a handful of addons or extensions for the Google Chrome browser to help ensure that stress does not end up getting entwined with your daily workload.

Symtica
If you’re using many of Google’s Web applications, Symtica provides a good way to access them with a single click. It integrates the icons for each application into a single bar and even includes access to some of their settings and sub-apps. With a click, you can create new documents with any of the word processors on Google Docs , send SMS through Google Voice and compose new e-mail on Gmail among many other functions.

Shareaholic for Google Chrome
Shareaholic for Google Chrome offers a quick and easy way to keep you finger on the social network link-sharing pulse. This Chrome Extension lets you share the Web page you’re currently on by automatically generating a shortened goog.ly URL for it and shares it to more than a hundred social networking sites, e-mail clients, bookmarking services and blogs.

Split Screen
Split Screen does, well, exactly that. It vertically splits your browser window into two sections which helps a lot to de-clutter your open Chrome browser especially if you’re kind of the tab-happy Web surfer (like yours truly). With it, you can do side-by-side comparisons with open Web documents, sites and tools which can obviously improve efficiency.

Pixlr Grabber
While screen capture apps usually take chunks out of your storage, the rudimentary Print Screen button on your keyboard can only take you so far in terms of image quality. Pixlr Grabber aims to solve both issues by capturing comparably good quality screen caps while, being a mere browser extension, taking up very minimal space in your hard drive. It’ll let you capture entire pages, visible parts of a page or define a capture area and ports the screen caps over to the clipboard for pasting and uploads them to imm.io for easy sharing online.

TwitterWatch
TwitterWatch is a simple tool for monitoring keywords on Twitter . All you have to do is enter a keyword and hit Search and it’ll present you with the tweets carrying that keyword. It can perform multiple keyword monitoring as well. Aside from these, you can also send tweets, retweet and reply without having to leave the extension.

http://www.socialmediamarketing.com/blog

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We’ve always said that in order for a brand to succeed in the social media marketing space, it needs constant presence online. An integral part of any marketing campaign involves having to consistently develop content for your brand’s site or blog on a regular basis. While you’d find the ideas merely fermenting at the back of your mind waiting to be fleshed out, you’ll encounter moments when the creative juices simply fail to jettison out into the online space and you find yourself staring into nothingness.

Failure to follow a publishing schedule means letting down your existing demographic and a great disservice to both the overall campaign and the brand. To prevent this from happening, we’ve listed down some proven cures to alleviate that funk—and a few tips I personally follow when my head just won’t cooperate.

Take a Break
Just when deadlines abound and time refuses to halt, writer’s block conveniently strikes. When this happens, simply take a breather. Lean back on that comfy chair, close your eyes for a few minutes and clear your head. But if that doesn’t work, your mind may need a little more substantial rest. Sleep it off of if you really can’t work out the blogging schedule, perhaps a power nap would do wonders.

Personal note:
The idea here is that the mind and the body are in a bad, unproductive fatigue and rest is sorely needed. Unfortunately even a caffeine boost won’t help. Dr. Michael Breus, aka the Sleep Doctor , recommends something he calls a Nap-a-latte which combines the benefits of sleep and coffee. What you do is chug down a cup of Joe and then take a 15-minute nap. The nap flushes down the sleep pressure and the caffeine picks you up when you eventually wake up. I do this when in the funk and it really does works for me, try it out and maybe it’ll also work for you.

Entertainment
Consuming some other forms of media other than those required for work can help jog the mind. Whip out your MP3 player and hit Shuffle, grab a really compelling book you’ve been meaning to read for some time, go to the movies or watch something truly engaging on TV. These can be burnout killers and you can also pick up some ideas for the content you’re working on. In any case, make sure that you have a pen and paper handy so you can scribble down ideas as they come.

Personal note:
Seeking refuge in other forms of entertainment can surely help. For instance, listening to discussions and inherent humor on podcasts like The 404 , Buzz Out Loud and Tech New Today helped me a lot in the past, the debates and issues helping me back on my feet. Also, in a recent bout of writer’s block, I re-read some old comic books collecting dust in my study and as I was reading each panel, a nice idea struck me which I later wrote about as the blog post What Comic Books Taught Me About Social Media .

Break Out
Sometimes, taking a break means stepping away from the computer and your cubicle and getting out of the office for a few minutes. The eyes need something else to look at instead of the menacing glow of the computer screen and then perhaps your head can start producing creative juices again. You can go to the local park, stare at the horizon on your building’s rooftop or you can even drive around the city for a few minutes. A change in scenery and the fresh air can really help, as long as you won’t take too long and too distracted to even go back to the office.

Personal note:
There are times when you can feel a burnout approaching your week. You can find a way to wind down a bit on Fridays like hanging out with your buddies in a bar for a drink or two, watch a local band play or maybe sweat it out on the gym or a basketball court. You can also use your weekends for out-of-town trips; fishing in the city’s outskirts, a camping trip—anything to get your mind off work. Also, if you can, try staying away from any technology that will remind you of your computer and work which means no TV, mobile phones and MP3 players. These can help freshen you up for the coming week.

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From helping that nice lady next door bring in the groceries to having to deal with that homeless person hanging around the curb outside your building and spewing obscenities at you, we all have social etiquette in the background prompting our every reaction. These are mostly ruled by both our social skills and good ole basic morality.

We follow social etiquette in our daily lives with regards to relating and communicating with people. Interacting with people on the online realm shouldn’t be any different. Today, we look at a rather infuriating practice some online marketers have gotten comfortable doing: spamming.

Spam, by definition, is unsolicited messages sent out in bulk to random or targeted recipients. And whether they’re occupying your e-mail inbox, piling in as instant messages or flooding your social networks’ feed, nothing’s as pissy annoying as having to go through them.

Spamming is frowned upon. While some merely raise the ire of every recipient with their incessant arrival, some are even harmful, with malicious activities brewing in the background.

Having said that, there is absolutely no need for you to join the ranks of spammers; it’s usually a one-way expressway ticket to the trash bin for you and your brand. Totally devoid of valuable information your followers can benefit from, it defeats the purpose of developing your online presence. Sure the brand awareness is there, but it’s swarmed with infamy that can repel potential clients.

Even if we only have a few people we follow on Twitter, we still tend to overlook or miss some tweets. And if a specific account continuously pumps you with tweets that are repetitive and excessively flood your Twitterstream with contexts that are purely link-happy promotional blah, we ignore them completely. Even more so if you have a hefty follow list or it’s done on Facebook where there’s an option to hide users’ status updates.

Because their posts merely occupy space and do nothing to help or solve anything online, these people are, more often than not, dropped off our follow list. Unfriend. Now say hello to potential obscurity and additional unnecessary reputation management work.

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For some of us, comic books have always been a personal staple reading material ever since childhood. Fortunately for us, our self-fashioned definition of “growing up” still involves reading comic books albeit in a slightly lesser degree. Now that we’ve been a part of the rat race, we can say with conviction what many of us comic book geeks have always believed in: comic books aren’t just for kids. What’s more, they’ve helped me a lot in my travails around social media marketing.

Yes, the funny books actually show good parallels with marketing through the online social spectrum. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Retcon.
Both Marvel and DC have rebooted titles for many reasons, sometimes changing characters’ origins in an act creators and fans have come to call retconning . The Legion of Superheroes , Spider-Man and, just recently, Wonder Woman , among many others, have gone under the pen with their stories updated and retconned. This is mostly to keep up with the modern times and, more importantly, to easily reintroduce the title and make the character more appealing to new readers.

Similarly, when maintaining a blog for your brand, you are tasked to come up with original content which you can repurpose in various ways. Perhaps you can craft a new post out of a how-to from a different standpoint, or you can provider you own take on a study you shared a week ago, or maybe even start a podcast by compiling a week’s worth of blog posts.

While repurposing content is an effective way to drive a point across while customizing your content to various formats different readers can find easily digestable, it can also be tastelessly overdone. Hakwman is an example of a fine mess an abundance of continuity reboots can do to a character- a bedlam of confusion you really don’t need in your business where there is an actual overhead and the race for the ROI.

Depending on your message, an overly repurposed bit of news can end up sounding like a shameless advertising. This can lead to a loss of interest for your site and can leave a bad taste in your readers’ mouth.

Multiverse.
Modern adventure comic books have gotten into the habit of dishing out titles outside their own fictionalized worlds or continuity. And the result is a dizzying multitude of alternate realities usually called the Multiverse . Here, each parallel universe has its own variants of the same characters from the main universe with slight differences. As a result, we have different versions of Superman , the X-Men and other characters taking place in different time periods and random galaxies.

With these characters’ presence in different universes come endless story possibilities, each with their own unique adventures and trials, giving their respective titles great mileage as far as readership is concerned. The same concept along with the aforementioned benefits can be applied to social media by giving your brand a multi-platform presence online—a practice being implemented by most companies nowadays.

Aside from your brand’s official Web site, it’ll help a lot if you’ve also set roots on the popular social networking since most Web users spend a considerable amount of their day on sites like Facebook , Twitter and YouTube . This can keep your present demographic in the loop with regards to the products and services you offer while giving your more opportunities to redistribute your content and spread brand awareness.

Fan Mail.
During the 80s, Batman introduced a second Robin after the first boy wonder retired from his Bat-sidekickdom. Readers hated the new Robin that DC Comics opted to have a poll to determine the character’s fate. The popular response was to have him die in-panel. As you can imagine, DC received a lot of negative press and swarms of angry letters over the verdict. However, in the end, Robin’s death became the single moment that heavily defined Batman’s subsequent decisions, enriching a very popular character for years to come.

Given the ensuing debacle, this showed a great amount of faith in your followers and the importance of listening to your readers. Sure, this may seem like basic social media blah right now, but it’s one that’s often overlooked. These make it even easier to engage in meaningful conversations with your followers and respond accordingly to every query while giving you the opportunity to learn more about them. And if you play your cards right, you’ll end up with actual relationships online built on trust and brand loyalty.

http://www.socialmediamarketing.com/blog