© Business.Com Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | 888.441.4466� 8 Thought Leaders and Their Secret Weapons

Jim Kukral Chris Voss @JimKukral @CHRISVOSS

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Seth Godin Danny Sullivan @ThisIsSethsBlog @dannysullivan

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Jeff Bullas Christopher Penn @JeffBullas @cspenn Page 5! Page 9!

Jay Baer Robert Scoble @jaybaer @Scobleizer

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1 © Business.com Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | 888.441.4466 8 Thought Leaders and In the pages that follow, you will ﬁnd a number of gems; if just one inspires you to take your Their Secret Weapons marketing to the next level, then we are doing our job.

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is staying on top of the rapidly We challenge you to utilize these invaluable changing marketing and media landscape. marketing resources to immediately improve Countless apps, websites, and blogs compete your marketing campaigns. for our attention – there's something new, it seems, every day.

To help you cut through the clutter, we examined EIGHT of the most credible and dynamic thought leaders in the social media and marketing universe.

We asked ourselves the following questions:

• What are their go-to marketing resources? ! • What tools do they recommend to their legions of followers? ! • What applications helped them get to where they are now?!

• What tips and tricks could any small business use to immediately boost their marketing campaigns?!

Jim Kukral, a columnist with The Hufﬁngton Not to worry – the company says implementation Post, is smart and goes out of his way to be takes about 15 seconds, “even for newbies.” helpful. Dun & Bradstreet named him one of LeadPlayer claims to be “the easiest way to “The Most Inﬂuential Small Business People attract an audience, build a list, and generate on Twitter,” and he serves as an Online revenue.” A pretty bold claim, right? Reading the Instructor for the University of San Francisco’s reviews, it appears they can walk the talk.

Internet Marketing Program.

For landing pages, Kukral suggests Kukral is a big fan of the Unbounce, which enables users to build,

LeadPlayer WordPress Plugin, which publish and pre-test landing pages – all provides easy opt-in boxes that appear at the without an IT department. ! beginning of a video. It also offers the ability to insert call-to-actions into videos. Think it's beyond your technical aptitude? “Love this tool for building fantastic, awesome looking landing pages,” he says.

Users can build a landing page and publish it to the web in a single click and without any knowledge of HTML.

Businesses that count on Unbounce to facilitate Jim Kukral conversions include Canon, Intuit, Greenpeace, @JimKukral Amazon, and LinkedIn.

Seth Godin is the author of 17 books that Searching for a blog post image is one of the have been best sellers around the world and most frustrating and time-consuming parts of have been translated into more than 35 blogging. Godin regards Compﬁght, an image languages. His blog is one of the most popular search engine, as “a secret weapon in the in the world. Godin was Vice President of search for useful Creative Commons-licensed Direct Marketing at Yahoo! and in 2013, he photos.” The search engine also includes photos was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of available for commercial use. Godin reminds Fame. users to donate if they use the service. !

Recently, Godin shared his favorite online Then there’s FeedBlitz, an email and social tools, some of which are well known and media marketing automation service. It others that may surprise you. Have you heard, manages subscriptions, circulation tracking, for example, of duckduckgo.com? If you testing, and is compatible with all major care about your privacy, maybe you should. ! blogging platforms and services.!

! ! Godin describes it as “a smart, fast, private search engine with a silly name.” It prides itself Godin describes FeedBlitz as “a reliable, not only on protecting searchers' privacy, but in handmade alternative to Feedburner and other providing the highest quality search results corporate solutions.” FeedBlitz handles the email culled from key crowd-sourced sites. and RSS feeds for his highly regarded blog.

Seth Godin @ThisIsSethsBlog

Jeff Bullas was listed by Forbes as one of the For lead generation and inbound marketing, "Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers" in he, along with nearly 10,000 other marketers, 2013, and has been cited as a social media counts on Hubspot, which Bullas credits with expert in the New York Times and the inspiring him to start his highly rated social Huffington Post. He is a fan of Aweber, an media marketing blog. email marketing software designed to be efficient and easy to use. New social media tools and platforms are launched every year. Bullas reminds us that the Bullas, who uses AWeber for his blog, says old kid on the block, Facebook, remains the he is impressed by its “large range of largest social network on the planet. He features that can be used by affiliate recommends ShortStack, an app that allows marketers, bloggers and website owners.” ! non-programmer types to customize their ! Facebook pages.!

Key features include email newsletters, autoresponders, and converting RSS to email. Want another recommendation? Try A dizzying number of marketing blogs beckon MailChimp, which, according to Bullas, is “an us. What is on Bullas' reading list? The one easy to use email marketing platform that is constant over the years, he says, has been cost effective and easy to get up and running Copyblogger, which started as a fast.” ! copywriting blog but has evolved.!

“It is a great portal for content marketing, SEO copywriting, email marketing, keyword research and internet marketing in general,” says Bullas. For SEO, he has two rulebooks he Jeff Bullas consults on a regular basis: @JeffBullas Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land.

Baer has worked with hundreds of brands Baer uses the All In One SEO Pack plug-in, including Nike, Cold Stone Creamery, and calling it ‘a must’ to optimize posts for search Sony. He is the co-author of, “The NOW engine rankings. “This nifty piece of software,” Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business says Baer, “allows you to specify page title, Faster, Smarter, and More Social.” description, and keywords for each post.” Seems

! to be working for Baer's blog, Convince & Convert, which was named the number-three Enter Tweetdeck, a web tool that helps social media blog in the world by Social Media you stay on top of it all. Jay Baer primarily Examiner. uses it for more serious Twitter sessions and regards it as “an especially valuable and hassle-free” way to update Twitter, One of Baer's newest obsessions is Topsy, a Facebook, and LinkedIn simultaneously.! real-time search engine that he describes as “one part virality tool, one part tracking ! mechanism, one part social listening post.” ! He also relies on the Twitter app, Objective ! Marketer, for in-advance Tweets and test- marketing headlines.! Topsy indexes and ranks search results based on what inﬂuencers are saying about a given Jay Baer topic, at a given time. “I’ve moved from @jaybaer TweetMeme to Topsy on my embedded tweeting, due to improved metrics, and Topsy’s competitive intelligence capabilities are impressive,” he says.

And what is Baer's recommendation for your business? Find a tweet your competitor sent, then use Topsy to see how many times it was retweeted, by whom, and their degree of inﬂuence. “It works like bit.ly, but incorporates all URL shorteners into the data mix.

Chris Voss

A top business consultant in marketing and HootSuite allows companies to:! social media, Chris Voss was ranked 18th by Forbes in its survey of Social Media • Schedule posts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and a treasure trove of Inﬂuencers. He has been a CEO and other social media apps entrepreneur for over 25 years, building and • Analyze performance with custom reports managing a multitude of corporations. Chris Voss currently acts as consultant, speaker, • Reach targeted audiences blogger, and technology evangelist. • Discover and grow your current audience • Collaborate and streamline team While Jay Baer aligns with TweetDeck, assignments Voss gives some love to HootSuite, its chief competitor in the social media Seesmic was the other big player, but HootSuite dashboard marketplace. HootSuite can be bought them out in late 2012. Voss also uses integrated with all major social media Tweetdeck. “On my iPad I use Twitteriﬁc and on platforms.! my iPhone I use Twittelator. Love them both and ! I’ve tried all the major Apps,” he says.

This social media management system allows you to post, monitor, and analyze all your social posts in one centralized web dashboard.

Chris Voss @CHRISVOSS

Widely considered a leading "search engine guru“, Dan Ackerman of CNET wrote, "I'm pleased to see a Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, backlit keyboard, and in our brief hands-on time with marketers, and consumers understand how search the Yoga 2, it felt like a nice upgrade from the engines work for nearly 20 years. Top-tier media, previous version, and it's still one of the slickest- including the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Forbes, looking ultrabooks out there.” the New Yorker and Newsweek, regularly quote his take on the art and science of SEO. Another part of Sullivan's social media arsenal is

a pocket video camera, the Sony Bloggie. ! ! In Sullivan's toolkit you will ﬁnd the slick and ever ! thinner Lenovo Yoga, an Ultrabook-class convertible device that can be used as both a Most pocket video cameras resemble mobile phones in shape and size, and enable businesses to digitally tablet and laptop computer. The most recent version, launched in 2013, is the Yoga 2 Pro, record anything at a moment's notice. thinner and lighter than its predecessors and with a backlit keyboard. Video quality is typically higher than multimedia phones, which is a crucial feature to meet the demands of content marketers. According to comScore, 8.2 million people in the U.S. watched 52.4 billion online content videos in December 2013. And in response, marketers are Danny Sullivan quickly devoting more and more time to high-quality @dannysullivan video content.

In the age of YouTube, blogging, and podcasting, a pocket video camera is a must for any business engaged in social media and public relations.

Penn has been featured in many books and in Penn has used the following CRM systems: publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, BusinessWeek, Salesforce.com! and on television networks such as PBS, CNN, and “Salesforce offers an incredible amount of FOX. In 2012, Forbes Magazine recognized him as power, but that power comes at a price,” he says. one of the Top 50 Most Influential People in Social For starters, it's not cheap. And once you set it Media. up, “it requires extensive configuration and expertise to make it sing.” Once it's singing, According to Penn, one of the greatest gaps he's Penn says, you will find that “Salesforce can seen in small and large businesses alike is the make a huge improvement on your business absence of CRM, or customer relationship profitability.”! management systems. ! ! CRM benefits include: connecting with customers, Zoho! managing existing clients, seeking new business Zoho is a good mid-range CRM option. Penn opportunities, and support and service issues. speculates that users get 80 percent of Salesforce's capabilities at 5 percent of the price. Zoho requires When it is so easy and affordable to capture configuration time too, but integration with other customer data, there is no excuse not to deploy a services is tolerable. His conclusion? “For the small CRM system. Price isn’t an issue, says Penn. business, Zoho is probably the best choice.” “There are free and low cost systems out there with 80 to 90 percent of the functionality of the top end Sugar CRM! systems.” Penn describes Sugar as “an open-source Salesforce clone that is usually about 1-2 releases behind Salesforce.” Not quite a raving endorsement, Christopher Penn yet the price is right. It's free, but Penn cautions @cspenn users that, just to have it installed, they'll need a very competent developer and systems administrator. “If you lack the skills, pay the money for a hosted service like Salesforce or Zoho,” he says.

Robert Scoble is a technology evangelist and Field service technicians in industries such as blogger best known for his blog, Scobleizer, oil and gas, healthcare and manufacturing could which came to prominence during his time at use Glass to diagnose an equipment problem. Microsoft. The Economist once described him "Instead of paying experts and ﬂying them all as “a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, over the world, you have staff that connects with who read his blog religiously.” He previously remote experts," says Brent Blum, manager of worked for Fast Company as a video blogger. digital experiences at Accenture Technology He is well-qualiﬁed, then, to undertake his Labs. most recent inquiry – testing out Google Glass, to which he's devoted hundreds of hours. Fads come and go. Scoble insists Google ! Glass is a game changer.

“I continue to be amazed with the camera,” says Scoble. “It totally changes photography and video...This is the most “I have been telling people that this reminds me interesting new product since the iPhone of the Apple II,” he says, recalling the day back and I don't say that lightly.”! in 1977, that he unboxed it with his dad. The fact

that it was expensive and didn't actually do much didn't seem to matter. “I knew my life had The heightened media interest in Google changed in a big way and would just get better Glass, a wearable computer with a head- and better,” he says. mounted display, has focused on the consumer market, but there are business applications, too. Robert Scoble @Scobleizer Angela McIntyre, research director at Gartner, says mobile workers are among those who will beneﬁt from Glass. She points out that hands- free communication with a camera can be very powerful, especially “for busy people on their feet that need to make things come together.”

You don’t need to be a marketing specialist to achieve small business success. Simply do as the experts do. If you’re looking to revive your marketing strategy or effectively reach new customers, use these tools Business.com’s Secret Marketing Weapons! recommended by marketing’s ﬁnest. They’ve done the research and ﬁeldwork so ! ! ! Social Media Social Blogging ! you don’t have to. Management Monitoring Tools ! Systems ! Tools !

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