Tweet Facebook has published a Best Practice Guide for how to use their platform for marketing. The guide provides a great overview of the marketing potential in having a presence on Facebook as well as suggestions for some strategic steps to go through when building a presence. If you are in need of formulating some goals for your Facebook initiative – here are some clearly defined objectives: • Foster product development and innovation – Learn about your target audience and understand their interests. The Facebook Ecosystem. Engage your fans. MORE >>

Building customer and constituent loyalty is not about how many pieces of mail, creative campaigns, or Facebook fans you can muster to make THEM more loyal to your brand. There are times when marketing professionals, companies, and organization get caught up in the “industrialization complex.&# How can we get 300,000 Facebook fans in order to ask for donations? The problem is that marketing is now about two things: Figuring out what makes that individual loyal to your brand. How can we send more postcards to get a higher level of response? MORE >>

Her social networking prowess is off the charts with 35 million Twitter followers and 56 million “likes” on Facebook. She did so by engendering immense loyalty from her fans through her music, her message, and the community she has built around them. To anyone in the business community, this sounds like a classic case of loyalty marketing and customer cultivation. Here are seven lessons for building this kind of loyalty in any organization (and they don’t include wearing a meat dress): Focus on Your One Percenters. Gaga is the queen of word-of-mouth marketing. MORE >>

Many marketers out there still think that a Facebook “like” is a proof of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty can be won and kept by encouraging them to spread the word about the brand they are satisfied with and help those customers to become brand advocates. Inbound marketing offers you a strategic and smart approach to be and to stay several steps ahead of your competition. Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer. MORE >>

They use their phone to get pricing information and check their status on loyalty programs for coupons or to access their points. Now it may be a bit premature for manufacturers who are targeting the professional tradesmen to focus all their efforts on this medium, but I think it would be a mistake not to include them in current or future loyalty programs. Consider these facts from a survey conducted in October 2010 for Hipcricket by Zoomerang : 35% of those surveyed would be interested in a mobile loyalty program. Only 9% currently participate in such a program. MORE >>