Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

The same goes for online marketing. Are even managing to keep up with the small changes?

Strategies to Manage

There’s a rapidity to online marketing and communication strategies that’s increasingly hard to keep up with even for those of us who’re actively involved on a daily basis. For example, if you’re a small business handling a fairly active Twitter stream like me, your email might have been overloaded by notifications from Twitter that so-and-so has just mentioned you, another so-and-so if now following you, oh, and by the way Twitter have just purchased TweetDeck.

Of course you probably know that you can go into your Twitter settings and turn off email notifications, but doing so will take a couple minutes of your time. If you’re not too busy responding to the stream invading your inbox.

Clearly, you need to take a moment to seize back control of your inbox. My tip is to use a mail rule to syphon off all those Twitter messages into a separate folder that can be dealt with later in the day.

Strategies to Connect

New tools also seem to crop up continually. As I mentioned in my podcast interview with Leo Widrich earlier in the week, Buffer is a great way of adding a different strategy to your business’s Twitter presence; you can easily schedule tweets to appear throughout the day.

Hootsuite also allows scheduling, and is great for those Tweets that initiate conversations but Buffer works best at scheduling a link to something of interest on the web, whether it’s on your own site or someone else’s. In contrast, I find that Hootsuite is perfect for starting a conversation with someone you know is likely to be online later in the day – especially if you’re working in different time zones.

Embracing Creativity

For me the biggest change to online marketing though is the rapid move towards creativity. [Read more...]