Social Media Week has gained momentum over the years, spreading to cities across the world, including Barcelona, Berlin, Bogotá, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, São Paulo, Torino and Toronto. This year’s theme Open & Connected: Principles for a Collaborative World, encourages a global discussion on the economic and cultural impact of social media.

Last year’s Social Media Week Chicago brought together leaders in the industry for the five-day event, featuring more than 250 speakers, 95 free educational and networking sessions, 40 venues, and saw 16,000 registrations. With planning for the 2013 event underway, we’re excited to see what this year will bring.

Partnering with Zócalo Group, an Omnicom company and leader in word-of-mouth, digital and social media marketing, 435 Digital is “thrilled to help position Chicago as a leader in this space and offer the local community engaging ways to get involved,” said Bob McDonald, Director of 435 Digital.

Social Media Week Chicago 2013

The 2013 event will differ slightly from last year, in response to participant requests to offer advanced discussions and more hands-on opportunities. For 2013, you can expect a condensed four-day event with a heavier focus on advanced workshop events led by social media thought leaders.

Social Media Week Chicago will touch on various topics including:

• business & brands
• arts & entertainment
• technology & innovation
• government & social policy.

Area companies, academic institutions, national brands, non-profit organizations and government agencies will all be contributing to making it a fun week of learning and networking.

“We look forward to bringing Social Media Week back to Chicago for a third year,” said Paul M. Rand, President and CEO of Zócalo Group. “We are excited to present a schedule of more targeted events that will encourage thoughtful discussion about the future and evolution of the social, digital and mobile landscape.”

Submit an Event

We’re ready to get things started, and one of the first steps is gathering great ideas for events and speakers. Beginning this week, the public is invited to submit event ideas on the Social Media Week Chicago website.

Businesses: There’s also an option for you to get involved by sponsoring networking events, sessions, content tracks, and more. Please reach out to us at chicago@socialmediaweek.org to get more information.

For up-to-the-minute updates, follow @SMWChicago on Twitter and connect on Facebook.

Check back in early August for a preliminary event schedule and be ready to register for events starting August 13th.

To learn more about Social Media Week, visit http://socialmediaweek.org/.

The post 435 Digital to Co-Host Social Media Week Chicago appeared first on 435 Digital.

About the Introduction to Digital Marketing Class

This 312 Digital course will be taught at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce offices at 200 E. Randolph Street in Downtown Chicago. Each of the class sections will last for 2 hours, with 90 minutes going toward lecturing about the topics from the experts. The other 30 minutes is spent in small groups, where you can talk about how to apply what you’ve learned to your business specifically.

The experts will be covering the following topics:

• Digital Marketing First Steps: Discussing content strategy and keyword research.
• Search Engine Optimization: Introducing SEO, discussing domains, and covering on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
• Social Media: Learning how to fit a social media plan into your day, find the right audience, go beyond a like, and capitalizing on results.
• Marketing Analytics: Introducing analytics, webmaster tools, analytics set up, how to benchmark metrics, and creating a dashboard to organize your data.

This “Introduction to Digital Marketing” class is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the various branches of digital marketing. Whether you’re a small business owner, an employee charged with running your company’s online marketing efforts, or a college student who wants to be more competitive in the job marketing with additional digital marketing knowledge, there is valuable info to be gathered from this class taught by industry experts.

Special Savings and Advanced Registration Rates

While you may have missed out on early bird registration, you still have time to catch the advance registration price by January 5th, 2013.

Use the promo code “435Digital” to save $100 off the registration price. Visit 312 Digital’s Eventbrite page to register today.

The post Introduction to Digital Marketing Class appeared first on 435 Digital.

Social media is a blessing and a curse for most business owners. Done right, social media can bolster leads, help shape your brand voice, and gain you a great deal of exposure. Done wrong, social media can be downright ineffective or even blow up into a PR nightmare, depending on the situation. While you may know how to use your own personal social media profiles to communicate with friends and family, running a social media profile for a business is a different story and may require that you take a few social media classes.

Here at 435 Digital, we see a lot of different mistakes made on social media profiles run by business owners and their staff. We’ve gathered some of the common ones here and will be running through them Jeff Foxworthy-style.

You Know You Need Social Media Classes When…

1. Your business Twitter account is packed full of your personal Foursquare check-ins – You figured out how to link the two accounts, which turned out to be a bad idea for your business account. Very few people care to get constant updates about where you like to eat when they are trying to get info about your business.

2. You often mistakenly post personal updates on your business’ Facebook page – it’s easy to do if you’re the admin and can lead to some pretty unprofessional updates. Things you rant about to your close network of friends may not be what you want potential customers seeing.

3. You have 5 posts on a random Tuesday and none again until two weeks later – nothing screams spam like posting a ton of updates all at once on the same day. Most people don’t want to hear from you much more than once a day, which is dependant on your audience size, type of business, etc. Understanding when to post and being consistent about it can really help build your following.

4. You’ve never heard of Pinterest – Pinterest drives a lot of traffic these days. If you’ve never heard of this social media platform, it’d be a great idea to seek out a social media class to learn how it can be used to benefit your business.

5. You’ve gotten into arguments with customers on your social media profiles for all to see – When people post unflattering commentary on your social media profiles, it’s easy to want to respond and defend yourself. This is usually a terrible idea and can do a lot to harm your brand identity online. Learning how to handle criticism on your social media profiles can help you diffuse these types of situations and show your customers that you believe in good customer service.

Social media shouldn’t just be something that you do because you think you should. It should be something you do because you want to reach out to customers and create a community around your business. Using the right strategy and better understanding how to navigate the various social media platforms can lead to stronger branding for your business and increase your digital marketing leads.

To wrap things up, we have a few tips for anyone interested in attending a social media class:

• Take advantage of the knowledge of the instructor and ask questions.
• Take notes! You’ll likely need to review what you learned as you develop your social media strategy.
• Network with the other attendees and learn more about how they’re using social media to grow their businesses.
• If everything seems overwhelming and beyond what you want to deal with, don’t panic. You can always hire a digital marketing agency to help you get the most from your social media efforts.

If you’re interested in scheduling a social media training session with our experts, call us today at 855-687-6397. We cater our training for everyone from small to large businesses and would be interested to hear more about what you struggle with when using social media for your business.

The post You Know You Need Social Media Classes When… appeared first on 435 Digital.

Paid Search management tools are ever-changing in an attempt to keep up with the rising needs of agencies to supply their clients with advanced reporting metrics and superior management tools. It should be no surprise to learn that Google is at the forefront of making sure that their PPC management tool, DoubleClick Search, is up to par with everything agencies need to keep clients happy. A few of our team members were fortunate enough to be invited to a Google DoubleClick Search roundtable dinner last night, where Chicago area thought leaders came together to discuss DoubleClick Search in its present form and where it’s headed next.

DoubleClick’s senior product leads ran us through several demos to show off some of the newer features to address three of the over-arching goals for the tool:

1. Increased Efficiency

Google mindset has always been to make their products easy to use and as efficient as possible. Whether you’re interested in overviews or you want to dive deep into your data, DoubleClick provides advanced automation options and better bulk operations to make PPC management more efficient. The demo we were shown covered some of the ways that the tool helps to define processes and clean up workflow. Specifically, we were given a closer look at the automated rules options and an overview of how inventory management is made more simple for retail clients using Google Merchant Center data within DoubleClick Search. If you’re a big Google Merchant Center fan, this feature is extremely beneficial for you and something that few other paid search management tools can provide at this time.

2. Reporting

Google’s goal with report is to present data in a more consumable way and gear it to help agencies achieve the highest ROI possible for clients. If you’re at all familiar with Google Analytics, you know that Google gives you several options to visualize the metrics. Recent updates to DoubleClick Search provide almost real time conversion info, making you able to react to the performance of your paid search campaigns almost instantly, if needed.

3. Unified Platform

DoubleClick Search has also been focused on creating cross channel solutions between search and display. For remarketing fans, DoubleClick Search features search to display remarketing tools, increasing your ability to reach customers who have already shown some interest in your products or services.

It was great to see just how mindful Google is of what their customers think about their products, and that they took the time to hear the suggestions and concerns of Chicago paid search marketing agencies. A delicious dinner at Trump Tower didn’t hurt either.

The post Paid Search Management with Google DoubleClick appeared first on 435 Digital.

The Facebook cover photo is the largest image on your business Facebook page and is often a missed opportunity for many businesses. Before you start brainstorming what might look good in that space, you’ll want to know exactly what Facebook won’t let you post there:

• Calls to action (ex. “Call Now for a Free Consultation!”)
• Prices/Special Offers (ex. “All Sunglasses 2 for $20″)
• Mentions of the Like or Share function on Facebook (ex. “Like Us for More Info”)
• Contact info, which should be included in the About Us section (ex. “435 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL”)

Now that we know the ground rules, there are a lot of things that you can do to make the cover photo work for your business…

1. Think Seasonally – With the holidays coming up, you may want to consider getting festive with your cover photo. If you’re a jewelry store, for example, consider taking a picture of your products draped on garland. Having a festively-fun cover photo can help you appear more relevant and timely to your fan base.

2. Go Beyond Uploading a Basic Photo – The fun thing about cover photos is that you can be pretty creative when designing one. You’re not limited to just uploading one photo and calling it a day. Think outside of the box and design a cover photo that features several images to promote your products or services. Cover photos are 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall, so get creative!

3. Say Something About Your Business – The image at the top of this blog post is our current Facebook timeline cover photo. We opted to create an image that has a word cloud of all of the various services that we provide. It’s a nice way to promote a little more of what you do and still have something visually appealing. The cover photo is a great spot to help shape your brand and show your company’s personality.

These are just a few ideas to help you think differently about how to use your Facebook cover photo to better promote your business. Our main piece of advice is to great creative and try new things. Use this space to express your brand personality and keep your audience engaged with the page. As long as you stay within Facebook’s rules, the sky’s the limit on what you can create for this space.

The post Facebook Cover Photo Tips for Your Business appeared first on 435 Digital.

You’ve taken the time to verify your local accounts (Google Plus Local, Bing Local, etc.), optimized your pages with pictures and complete business information, and you’re excited to watch the reviews roll in. Despite all of your effort so far, this is usually where things can get caught up for various reasons, including:

1. You have a hard time getting customers to review your business.

2. A customer reviews your business, but it’s a very negative review and not something you really want other potential customers seeing.

Asking for Reviews

Encouraging customers to review your business online can take some work, especially if you’re a smaller business without a massive client base. Here are some ideas to get started:

• Have your employees verbally remind customers to review you online, as well as providing them with some sort of written instructions on how to find your local profiles on the web (create an instruction sheet or include your local profile URLs on your receipts).
• If you send out newsletters to your customers, include a blurb about reviewing them online and provide the local profile URLs.
• Encourage them to write about specific examples of why they enjoyed your services (2-3 sentences). “They were awesome” isn’t very descriptive and won’t be valued as much by other potential customers reading your reviews.

Dealing with Negative Reviews

We’re often asked why a business should open the door to reviews if there’s a chance that a customer might post something negative and scare off other potential customers. The honest answer is this: People will talk about your business online whether or not you decide to be a part of the conversation. It’s a much better strategy to host the conversations and be able to respond to negative comments, rather than try to pretend they don’t exist.

When you see a negative review on a profile that you’ve claimed, you have several options to address the negative comment. The first step is to sign into the account that controls the local profile with the negative review. From this dashboard, you will find the option to respond next to the review. Now you’ll need to consider how you want to respond. Here are a few tips that we like to share with our clients:

• It’s usually best to let them know that you’re sorry that they were dissatisfied with their experience, but that you’re committed to excellent customer service and would love the opportunity to speak to them about whatever occurred.
• Take the conversation offline as soon as possible by providing them with a customer service email address or phone number.
• If you can tell that the review is completely fraudulent or that you’re being spammed by a competitor, you can usually report it to Google or Bing for review. Follow the reporting options that they display within the dashboards if you’d like to try and have them remove fraudulent or spammy reviews.

As with many aspects of digital marketing, some work is involved in paying attention to your reputation online. It’s easy to think that if you don’t create a profile on the local listing sites, you won’t have to worry about people saying negative things about you online. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true. Being a part of the conversation, monitoring what is said about you, and responding in a professional way is the best strategy in combating negative comments about your business online.

Ideally, you’d also be doing your part to build the amount of positive reviews posted to offset whatever negative comments might pop up. It does take some time, but it’s crucial to protecting the reputation of your business online.

The post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Dealing with Customer Reviews Online appeared first on 435 Digital.