Non-podcast blog posts.

BI 180: The Bright Ideas Podcast is Back!

In this episode, I share with you why I put the podcast on hiatus for almost a year, what I learned while I was off the air, how our agency won its largest contract ever, and what is in store for the future of the show.

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how to videos

“How to” Videos – a Golden Opportunity for Brands to Generate Content

What would happen if you were a novice in the kitchen but this year it’s your turn to cook Thanksgiving dinner? When you find out you’re in charge of the turkey, panic sets in. You’ve decided to break out your grill and try something new, but how do you grill a Thanksgiving turkey?

Chances are, if you’re like many Americans, you find the answer with a Google search.

You type in “how to grill a turkey” and up pops a helpful video. Your Thanksgiving is saved!

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user generated content

How to Increase Engagement with User Generated Content

Want to get your customers more involved in your business? Turn your most loyal brand ambassadors into content producers.

User generated content is any media that a customer (the user of your product) creates for you.

GoPro is perhaps the leader for user generated content with over 6,000 videos made with the cameras getting uploaded to YouTube daily. Look at a few examples of the user-generated content GoPro receives each day, and you’ll see impressive footage of kayaking in drainage ditches, flips over canyons, and jumping off tall buildings.

Although your product might not inspire daredevil videos, there are ways to get your customers creating content for your brand. But why should you invest time encouraging this type of content?

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social media truths

7 Startling Truths About Social Media

Are your social media efforts inconsistent? Is your brand identity fading? Has every network investment yielded nothing but lost time and wasted dollars?

A Not-So-Sweet Song

It’s time to face the music, brand marketers: Social media is not infallible. All too often posts strike sour chords, leaving you unable to generate the necessary traffic, sales, and ROI. Your hashtag attempts rank as double-flats on the network scale.

Why does this happen? Perhaps you, like so many other marketers, have let the Pied Pipers of social media lead you in the wrong direction?

Let’s discover seven interesting facts about using social media for branded networking.

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social media customer care

5 Rules To Help You Care For Your Customers With Social Media

Has your company been hit with the ‘slap’ of negative online social sentiment? Not long ago, the biggest fear you had when a customer was dissatisfied with your company’s service was that they would tell their friends about the experience until they forgot all about it.

Now you have to worry about those friends helping to spread the bad news with a simple click of the “Share” button.  Are you kept awake at night by the fear that a disgruntled customer will tell all their friends about a bad experience and it will spread like wildfire via social media?

To make sure your business isn’t the next high-profile victim of a viral customer service complaint, make sure you observe the rules of engagement for social customer care.

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social media research

How to Research Your Brand with Social Media

Perhaps your brand strategies are failing to produce the results (and revenue) you expect, or your sales have tended go unnoticed by customers. If it seems that your competitors forever have the upper hand, you may already be wondering how to keep up with the (virtual) Joneses.

It’s an even more frustrating situation if you think you’ve done everything right – creating social media accounts, offering a flurry of posts and pins, conducting cross-channel interactions. However, if your customer responses have been less than impressive and you’re falling behind in the retail race, it is likely that your focus is the problem. Read more

social strategy

How to Develop an Effective Social Strategy in 5 Easy Steps

Is your social media presence like many businesses these days? Do you have a set it and forget it policy, posting content every once in awhile without thinking about a strategy?

It’s time to put that practice to an end!

A smart social strategy is essential in today’s crowded social media market. With more people posting pictures, videos, and updates, you need an effective strategy to help you rise above the noise and get heard.

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decode the facebook auction

Infographic: Decode the Facebook Auction

By Hilary Givens

At first, the Facebook auction may seem like a highly complex or opaque process. However, it is very worth learning and understanding in detail because Facebook advertising is one of the driving forces behind digital advertising today.

To help give you a better understand of the auction process, we’ve designed a visual guide as a reference as you participate in the Facebook auction process. We’ll tell you:

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amplify results

How to Amplify Multi-Channel Marketing Results

Customers are interacting with your business on so many channels today that it’s hard to keep up.

If you’re like most marketers, you choose the easiest way to manage all these customer interactions by breaking them down individually. You track all the interactions from email marketing in one column. Then, you track all of the engagements you see on social media in another.

Sadly, this is not very effective.

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Why The Obsession With Visual Storytelling?

Have you mastered the art of visual storytelling yet? In our picture and video saturated world, the use of visual storytelling for business is essential if you want to capture new leads, attract new customers and ensure your existing customers remain fiercely loyal to your brand.

If you decide to ignore visual storytelling completely and bore your audience with plain text posts and a complete lack of visual elements, you will eventually have to face the consequences. Unfortunately, the consequences aren’t pretty.

If you think about the most successful brands of today you’d be hard-pressed to find any that don’t completely immerse themselves in visual storytelling.

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