Stylo Creative Communications » marketing

Introducing: Stylo Small Biz Toolkit

juliensharp — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:17:29 +0000

We are very excited to launch our own Small Business Toolkit. Support of small business has always been a strong personal interest of Stylo founder Julien Sharp, who firmly believes that small businesses are the backbone of a prosperous society.

To that end, Julien combined her 17 years of copywriting and content management experience with the technical backup of SmartSourcing Global, managed by founder Smita Yedekar, and the support of Stylo's own Minister of Technology, Mohd Rafie Kamaruzaman, to create a full array of services aimed at helping small businesses thrive in any economy.

The Small Business Toolkit includes everything a business needs to:

Build a Brand
Promote and Build Recognition of that Brand
Grow that Brand Online via Social Media
Optimize Business Workflow/Productivity

We are all so happy to be able to help small businesses make a big-business impact!

Thoughts on Facebook’s 5th Birthday

Marco Bouwer — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:40:38 +0000

On Wednesday, February 4, 2009, Facebook (FB) celebrated its 5th birthday. Who could have guessed that this company, founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a then 20-year old undergrad, would grow so fast to become the social networking and Internet phenomena that it is today? Although not the first social media networking site of the twenty first century, FB is indeed changing the way marketing and advertising is strategized, just like social networking is revolutionizing the printed news media (See http://tinyurl.com/cvovvj).

Just after lunchtime on January 8th, CEO Zuckerberg announced on the company’s blog the near unthinkable – the website had just added its 150 millionth member. “If FB were a country, it would be the eight most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia, and Nigeria.” he wrote. Incredible. In August 2008 the site’s 100 millionth user signed up (Facebook blog). This means that since then approximately 374, 000 people have signed up… every day! According to ReadWriteWeb.com Myspace took 3 years to reach it’s 100 million members, while it took FB 4yrs and 6 months to accomplish the same milestone. However, where MySpace’s numbers are declining (Mashable), FB is fast gaining ground.

This exponential growth shows that social utility sites such as FB works better as more people become members. The more members, the more value added. This is the classic Network Effect. Some sources estimate that more than half of all FB users sign in every day. According to FB more than 3 billion minutes are spent on the site each day! A statistic to make your manager cringe! (The Network Effect again – you go there ’cause all your friends and family are there already.)

It’s a marketer and advertiser’s dream – a captive, easily reachable audience meeting in a central location. Not only that, but FB’s search options enable you to zoom in on extremely specific target audiences, or FB groups. In addition, what makes social media – and FB in particular – so unique, is the “place” - or psychological mindset of your audience – where you meet them at. “FB is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family, and coworkers…”, states the official FB Company Factsheet. Visiting FB is like relaxing on the couch and watching a TV sitcom after a day of grind at the office. Your mindset is different. You are ready to meet people. You’re relaxed and more accepting of outside influences and suggestions.

From a business perspective FB presents a definite paradigm shift with regards to marketing and brand management. FB is a platform that facilitates the sharing of information through social interaction, in a trusted environment. It is certainly not an advertising and marketing platform. It is also not a tool for listening to and tracking consumers of your brand. It goes beyond that, it is about engaging your audience and becoming one voice in a thousand. It’s about putting the “social” in front of “marketing”.
Apart from some remarkable responsive corporations like Coca-Cola and BMW, the corporate world is too slowly waking up to FB’s possibilities. Everyone wants a part of it, and no-one wants the competition to have the first say in the global discussion forum that is FB.

But fools are rushing in. Many companies, large and small, are setting up their business presence on FB, instead of tasking expert communicators with the job. The wrong message could cost you, and public opinion (read FB-opinion) is a fickle thing. Let the experts take care of your online corporate socializing. You’ll thank them.

Contact SCC for a free consultation.

By Marco Bouwer

A Blog is a Great Way to Talk to Your Customers

Julien — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:41:54 +0000

Did you know that 77% of all Internet users read blogs? Well, they do.

As posted on Brandtracks (emphases from Stylo):

Take a look at these stats as of March 2008:

There were 184 million blogs worldwide

In the US alone, there were 77.7 million unique hits compared to 41 million visitors for Facebook and 75.1 million to MySpace

77% of all Internet users read blogs

Over half of all businesses in North America don’t have a blog. That means that just under half of all businesses do. If you don’t, guess who’s talking to your customers?

Blogs offer a channel for you to provide an instant voice to the conversation. While a personal blog can share the latest pictures of a newborn baby instantly to friends and family all over the world, a business blog works on the same premise.

46% of all bloggers are professionals. They are writing a corporate blog or about their industry or offering opinions about products, even the ones you sell. This equates to just over 84.5 million bloggers that are business bloggers. That’s 84.5 million businesses talking to your customers.

Online sales in 2007 totaled $260 billion. Blogs are known to increase awareness of new products and services. That means 1 out of 2 companies are losing a large part of $260 billion dollars of online income.

Blogging is a great way to reach your audience. Stylo Creative Communications writes for blogs. We match writers experienced a specific industry with clients in that industry looking for writers! It’s a win-win.

Weekends? What are they, anyway?

Julien — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:16:28 +0000

I haven’t had a real “weekend” in over a month. As a business owner, I usually end up doing something work-related at some point during the weekend. But the last three weekends were beyond the norm. The first of these was spent entirely on addressing the copyeditor’s changes to my manuscript, and to organizing and labeling the over 40 diagrams and image files I have put in the book. The very next weekend was devoted to prepping for a major project for an exciting new client: Doing PR writing for a surgical CME meeting that would be taking place the following Thursday, through the weekend…my third weekend consumed with work.

That’s okay. I am happy to have begun work with such a great new client; I enjoyed the project. It is nice to have finished all this work right before Thanksgiving.