In this can’t miss closing session of Social Media Marketing Word, New York Times bestselling author Dave Kerpen will show you how large and small businesses are achieving amazing results with creative social business strategies. He’ll explore what today’s consumers expect from organizations and ways you can exceed customer expectations. You’ll discover how responsiveness, transparency, true engagement and storytelling can make your brand likeable – and profitable. The result: you’ll walk away energized with actionable ideas to take your social strategy to the next level.

The stats are pointed: Over two-thirds of Facebook and Twitter traffic is coming from mobile devices. Sixty percent of Facebook’s 1 billion users access the social network on their phones, and all of these mobile users are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. And by 2016, mobile marketing will account for 15.2 percent of global online ad spend.

Furthermore, according to Google research, right now, 66 percent of promotion views are via mobile, and 67 percent of customers are more likely to buy from a brand with a good mobile experience — while 52 percent said that if they have a poor mobile experience, they’re less likely to engage with a brand.

This fundamental shift in consumer behavior requires your adaptability — and it demands innovation. In short, without your promotions being accessible from any device consumers may choose (a smartphone, tablet, or desktop), you’re failing to reach 60-70 percent of all social media users. When you’re marketing, you’re marketing mainly to a mobile audience. It’s time to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Your customers are mobile; your online promotions, such as sweepstakes, giveaways and contests must be too. It’s not too late to embrace change and do mobile well. As you start seriously considering how your promotions will look and feel on mobile devices, follow these guidelines:

1. Make your promotion user-friendly. The most effective promotions are the ones with the least friction to enter. Don’t make consumers pinch their small screens multiple times; give them a clear look at your promotion without having to zoom in. The more user-friendly your promotion is in its user experience, the more likely consumers will be to participate. 
   
2. Remove barriers to entry. Consumers aren’t going to jump through hoops just to interact with your brand. Remove barriers to entry, like forcing users to log into Facebook to access your promotion. The more steps consumers have to go through in order to participate in your promotion, the less likely they will be to enter.
3. Simplify participation. The promotion entry form should be native for mobile devices so that consumers can quickly and easily enter their information. Keep it simple; additional fields slow down the process. Only ask consumers for information that is absolutely necessary for you to run your promotion.
4. Beware silver bullets. Not all mobile “solutions” are created equal. Often, taking your desktop experience and shrinking it down to fit on a phone is definitely not a solution, as it delivers a generally terrible user experience.  It’s crucial to ensure your solution is adapted to all mobile devices.
   
5. Optimize seamlessly. Ideally, your promotion will work seamlessly across all devices. North Social, for instance, uses smart link technology that allows you to publish one link that detects browsers and optimizes accordingly.

Not having a mobile strategy is no longer an option. If you fail to embrace this change, it will embrace you. Your consumers will happily move on to a mobile-savvy competitor, I promise you that. This is no longer a prediction, but a reality — consumers are just waiting for you to catch up.

For brands, it’s survival of the fittest, and the truth is this: to be fit, you must be mobile.

A version of this article was posted on FastCompany.com and can be read here.

In 2013 brands will realize that social media is being oversaturated with information coming from both people and brands, and even more oversaturated with so-called social media gurus, ninjas and masters. Marketers and advertisers have always relied on great content to deliver results – and now that brand marketers finally understand social media, we’ll see a returned focus on content. This requires brands to create more (visually) engaging content than ever before. In B2B, content marketing has already taken center stage with white papers, ebooks, webinars, infographics and articles. In 2013, as Instagram, Pinterest and other multimedia social networks grow, you’ll see more and more B2C brands using social media to produce and share beautiful photos, sophisticated comics and other visual aids, and brilliant, TV-level videos. Content becomes King once again, now with social media as the most powerful distribution channels ever.

CEOs

There are some interesting differences. For example, Inc. 500 CEOs are vastly more active on social networks. A quarter of the Fortune 500 CEOs on twitter have never tweeted, but 98 percent of the Inc. 500 ones have. However, Fortune 500 CEOs that are active have far greater reach and clout.

They’ve put together some of the most interesting facts from the report and about top CEOs in this great infographic:

This article was originally posted by Business Insider on December 11, 2012. 

1. Rite Aid
The drugstore chain ranks as one of the worst companies to work for in the U.S After a series of mergers and consolidations, the company’s culture has suffered. In addition to a lawsuit brought by California employees against the company for failure to pay overtime, employee surveys suggest that the company is poorly run, managers are given no direction, and employees are often faced with mandatory overtime and working holidays.

2. Hertz
The car rental company hasn’t delivered a very delightful experience to many customers this year. On one occasion, a customer incurred a spending fine without her knowledge. After much confusion and hassle, she was incorrectly informed by Hertz of its fines department’s policy not to advise customers of fines. When a company treats people like numbers, loyal customers are lost in the shuffle.

3. Long Island Power Authority
In trying times, the best and the worst of people are revealed, and the same can be said of companies. After this fall’s destructive Hurricane Sandy tore through New York and New Jersey, Long Island Power Authority failed to communicate openly with its customers who went weeks without power, causing immense frustration. Some customers were also charged their normal electric bill with no mention of a potential refund by LIPA.

4. Bank of America
A prime example of an unresponsive company, Bank of America has been criticized heavily this year for frequent incidents of lost documents, flaws in its electronic system, failure to return calls, and lack of communication between lenders and customers.

5. J. Crew
Being unresponsive is one thing, but not listening is quite another. The clothing brand J. Crew has plenty of customers talking on social media, but the company isn’t listening to a word of it. J. Crew’s Facebook page does not allow users to post, and this month marked the one year anniversary of the company’s most recent tweet.

6. GoDaddy
In September, internet host company GoDaddy came under fire when a massive outage took millions of businesses’ websites offline. GoDaddy quickly sent out apology emails to its customers, offering a 30% discount. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a case of surprising and delighting after a mistake; the 30% discount was an existing monthly offer, and the message was more of a sales pitch than an apology.

7. American Apparel
While many businesses were sensitive to those affected by Hurricane Sandy, wishing that their customers stay safe and dry, American Apparel used the natural disaster as an opportunity to make some money. In a tweet, the clothing brand offered those who were “bored” during the storm an opportune sale. Caring more about sales than its customers is unlikeable indeed.

8. Papa John’s
The pizza chain’s founder and CEO John Schnatter wasn’t shy this year about voicing his concerns over President Obama’s health care reform law. The price of pizzas will be raised 11 to 14 cents and employee hours will be scaled back. Far from showing gratefulness for its consumers and employees, Papa John’s blatantly pushed its financial burden onto its key stakeholders. And rather than transparency and humility,  Schnatter later unapologetically denied his previous statements.

9. United Airlines
Since breaking Dave Carroll’s guitar back in 2009, United Airlines hasn’t learned much about customer service. Most memorable this year, during the company’s merger with Continental Airlines, technical glitches led to weeks-long flight cancellations and delays, ticketing problems, and incredibly long customer wait times, securing the company as the most complained about airline. While glitches are unpredictable, mistakes like these offer an opportunity to exceed customer expectations, an opportunity United missed.

10. GameStop
Management at GameStop has been criticized for putting sales in higher priority over its customers or products. By pushing customers to buy poor quality games, customer experience and service have both suffered.

While these brands have demonstrated unlikeable behavior this year, the truth is, every company has the potential to be likeable. By following principles like listening, authenticity, storytelling, transparency, responsiveness, passion, team playing, adaptability, surprise and delight, simplicity, and gratefulness, any of the above businesses can certainly become one of the most likeable companies of 2013.

Update: It seems J. Crew is already working toward their 2013 title as a likeable company! On December 12th, the company sent their first tweet in over a year responding to a customer, quickly followed by a tweet simply saying, “Aaaaand we’re back.”

No matter what you do, you’re not marketing and selling to a business, you’re marketing and selling to people – to individual decision makers who, on behalf of their business, will choose to hire your business. These decision makers, like the rest of the country, are surely using social networks to connect with others and gather information.

The only question that remains, then, is where they are doing this. Our B2B company has generated the most leads from Slideshare, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter. We’ve also generated a lot of leads from our blog. Sure, we’re on every social network from Pinterest to Facebook to Foursquare, but we have to be, because we’re a social media company. You don’t. So where are your prospects and customers hanging out on the web? Where are your decision makers congregating? Go there, create value for them, be likeable, and above all else, be human.

Remember, in social media, it’s not B2B, it’s B2P.

Nothing connects us like stories–they engage us with an emotional appeal and shared meaning, leading the way for empathy and understanding. From this, comes the ability for an audience to relate with you. As people, we learn through shared experiences and narrative structure provides a gateway for that learning.

Storytelling holds the keys to true persuasion. When you can tell a great, relevant story, your points are emphasized and meaning can be discovered in the details. Great stories move listeners to action.

Stories stick. I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast last week, but I can recall a great story that I heard. Stories have the power to grab an audience’s attention–and hold it. When you have something to say, share a story to provide the context that better ensures the audience will remember your ideas and share them with others.

I remember the first time I truly embraced the power of storytelling over presenting. I was keynoting a social media conference in Long Island, New York and I was talking about responsiveness after a company makes a mistake. I decided at that moment to talk publicly for the first time about one of the largest mistakes our company had ever made.

I asked everyone politely to put down their phones and stop filming or tweeting. Then I was totally raw and vulnerable in sharing the details of what had gone wrong, and how I had personally screwed up, even in the face of solving the original mistake.

It was really hard for me to do – but my story paid off tremendously. Dozens of people walked up to me afterwards and said it was the best speech they’d ever seen. They thanked me – for my truth, for my transparency – and most of all, for my storytelling.

This article was originally published by Five Star Speakers on December 3, 2012.

For years, LinkedIn has offered recommendations as a way to get support from fellow professionals and businesses. If you received recommendations from other individuals, you garnered credibility, and were more likely to show up in searches.

But now, LinkedIn’s endorsements are much easier to get. It takes someone seconds to vouch for one or more of your particular skills, versus the 10 minutes to 15 minutes a recommendation might take. In today’s time-starved world, this is a critical difference. LinkedIn hasn’t released numbers yet, but if you look at several profiles, it’s clear that in just a few weeks, many users have generated way more endorsements than five years worth of recommendations.

If you want to give an endorsement, go to the top of a connection’s LinkedIn profile, where you’ll find an endorsement box you can click on, or write in skills or expertise you’d like to endorse (like PowerPoint, writing, market research). Lower down in the profile, you can view all current endorsements that connection has already received, and if you agree with any, simply click the plus sign and you’ll endorse that person as well. When you endorse someone (or someone endorses you), this will show up in your LinkedIn news feed (and spread the word).

LinkedIn isn’t weighting endorsements in search results yet, but it will soon. This means, the more endorsements for your skills and talents that you get, the more often you’ll appear in search results, the more trusted you’ll be, and the more leads you’ll potentially generate from LinkedIn.

So how do you get endorsements? There are two main ways I recommend:

1) Ask. Send out a dedicated email asking people you know for endorsements with a link directly to your profile. You can also send private messages via LinkedIn to your connections. Better yet:

2) Give others your endorsement. When you endorse others, they get notifications from LinkedIn, and will often reciprocate without your asking.

If you believe an endorsement is invalid, you have the option to hide it from your profile.

Remember, the more endorsements for your skills and talents you have, the more leads you can generate when people are looking for whatever it is you have to offer.

How many endorsements do you have on LinkedIn? Do you think endorsements could be a game changer?

This article was originally published by Inc in November, 2012.