When talking about Social Media I've found that many companies start by asking "What's the ROI?"  When you ask an accountant about this, they tell you that marketing is NOT an asset so there is no a ROI. That doesn't change the fact that Company Executives do need to know how to measure success of Social Media. ROI may just be the wrong terminology and asking the the right questions becomes the true key to success: What do you measure?

Measurement Tools

I've…

My experiences with Social Media are showing me more and more that there are still far too many companies that don’t fully grasp the concept of Social Media. Yes, anyone can create a Facebook Page, Twitter Profile and set up a YouTube account, free of charge. But then what? Then what happens? This is where I begin to see kind of lack of respect for Social Media’s unparalleled capabilities and for what it is truly intended. In my opinion,…

See below for Feb 2012 updated data!

On March 21, 2011 Twitter celebrated it's 5th birthday: "200 million users and 1 billion tweets per week". But has it hit the mainstream audience and what is the adoption rate in the manufacturing sector? In…

I was recently talking to a headhunter who ONLY does Social Media recruiting. It was an interesting conversation to say the least. He was looking for several 20 somethings to fill positions for Social Media managers. As I tried to provide him with some names we ended up chatting about the State of the Social Media market right now and that led to a conversation about Social Media consultants.

Social Media recruiting

His problem, as he explained, was…

An awful lot has changed in the past year with regard to Social Media.  More and more companies are beginning to talk about using social media for their B-to-C and B-to-B business.  Many experienced Marketing Managers are now facing a dilemma. …

Everything changes. Yesterday I was sitting in a meeting with a client and the subject of SEO came up.  We talked about some of the black hat issues and the importance of organic growth over time: The quality vs. quantity of 'likes' and 'follows'. In the course of the discussion I pulled up a keyword from another client who had gone to a completely digital market program 8 years ago and really knows and understand the digital space. My other client OWNS the entire first page for…

As you probably are aware Rapid Production Marketing "touches" several Twitter accounts in some way.  In some cases we act as monitors in an oversight role, in other cases we act as the fully 'outsourced' social media. We cross several industries including industrial, manufacturing, automotive, medical and even music.  As a result, we tend to see innovative marketing ideas generated in one market segment successfully that we can then transfer to another segment.  That, after all, is really…

1. Why did you start using social media?

TechniksUSA is a very careful company and we like to do our homework in both our products and our marketing efforts.  We’ve moved to almost entirely to digital marketing over the past few…

When Göran Fredrik Göransson founded Sandvik in 1862, he knew nothing about web based social collaboration. He was an innovator with ideas and solutions that turned the industry up side down though, and as he was constantly visiting customers around the world, he definitely knew what important ingredient social collaboration was for success.

 …

Criterion Machine Works is a small manufacturing company in Costa Mesa, CA. They've been in business for 75 years starting as a job shop serving the movie and then defense industries. They developed a few of their own products during their job shop days and evolved into a product driven manufacturing company.  The past two years have seen the manufacturing sector in America decrease by approximately 50% and they were not exempt from that decline. They slashed their budgets, inventories, and…

Founded in 1938, Kennametal manufactures a broad range of advanced materials and components that deliver superior wear resistance and peak performance in demanding environments.  The industries they sell to are as broad as their product offering, including aerospace, defense, energy, chemical processing, power generation, and mining.

Lead instead of trying to catch up.…

Social Media is a 'new' way to sell. Selling is, after all, about relationships. People do business with people that they "LIKE" and merely having a website, literature, advertising,etc. isn't going to generate revenue.

What Social Media is doing is creating a new paradigm. I know that that sounds cliché. But I believe that it's creating a new "type" of business. Traditional marketing adapted, very successfully in the 1980's thru 1990's, to creating websites after they had experience…

A shorter version of this article appeared in the American Machine Tool Distributor's Association "…

For some time our clients have enjoyed some "inside knowledge" about their image files and their SEO ranking by working with us.  As some of the new technologies have have been implemented, as we suspected, at Google and…

Did you know that you can get updates about Rapid Production Marketing and the latest news in Social Media via SMS by texting "follow RPMconsultants" to "40404" in…