Tough trading conditions requires traditional businesses to break the rules and take all of it or some of it online. Bringing your business online is fraught with challenges – from how to operate your business to how to market it.

It is not enough to just be on “Facebook” and other social media sites and even if you feel you have a connection with people on these sites you and your business can do more. You can take the social media marketing NZ relationship to another level by responding to them personally. Whenever possible address your fans by their name and respond to their comments individually.

What’s trending right now? Mid Winter, London Olympics, Rugby Finals, Batman Movie. There is always a buzz about something in the social media and the social media chatter can sometimes preempt mainstream media. While some themes and trends are best to keep away from, other positive trends can be a boost to your email marketing campaigns.

What is Project Campfire? It is a free service to help business owners that Mobilize Mail Limited is reigniting. Project Campfire is a blogging initiative that began 18 months ago, its focus is to help businesses get found on the internet and on the internet search engines. From its inception the Project Campfire has been successful for businesses and offers a popular marketing solution that has no costs to them and asks for a minimum amount of time invested to succeed.

Social media can extend the reach and participation of events and can create a far bigger impact and awareness than otherwise. Social media provides the interactive platform for people to voice their opinions before and after the event takes place. Those attending may be followed by the networks and groups that they are part of, and if all the participants are included, this could multiply into thousands.

Posting rehashed content and a mangled set of old ideas cannot do much for a blog. The challenge lies in getting such content or writing it yourself. Bloggers use both honest and dishonest means to get good content, but in the end, the successful ones are those using honest means of getting original content.

The cost of customer acquisition is high when you use traditional marketing channels. For every ten prospects you may turn one into a customer. Using social networks the ratio is a lot higher and maybe as high as one in fifty e.g. for every 50 prospects you may convert one into a customer. The good news is you can use systems to reduce the actual marketing cost when using social networks to market your business and get return on your investment.

The ‘daily deal’ email is now a firm fixture in our Inbox and this activity has changed the way consumers shop, drink and eat out.

Online give away prize draws are also in high demand with lots of entrants signing up to win all sorts of prizes. Times are definitely tougher in 2011 and consumers are therefore motivated to enter prize draws for the chance to get a decent product or service for free.

However what does the campaign owner (i.e. the Business) get from giving stuff away?

Ah the company blog, it seems everyone’s got one (this is ours!), sadly not everyone is doing a great job blogging. When Businesses get it right – their sales are more consistent according to hubspot. There is also a clear correlation between frequency of posts versus acquisition of new customers –

This is probably not really news to most of us who are of the belief that women talk more than men – however it is confirmed in a article on www.adotas.com that women use twitter to send ‘tweets’ 40 percent more often than men do. This revelation was identified on the new Twitter Follower dashboard.