Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Happy new year and welcome to the first solo episode of 2016. I've been thinking a lot about skills of the best social media marketers, and what I should be focusing on this year. The answer is focus: social media marketers wear lots of hats, and the only way to maintain a strategic approach is the ability to focus and keep on track. Listen in to hear how I keep focused, and why focusing on y...

Today Neal is sharing an interview he did with Marylin Montoya of Sociabble. Sociabble, one of the sponsors of the 2015 Social Tools Summits, is an employee advocacy platform that uses content marketing and social media networks to connect relevant content to employees in order to showcase their company’s brand. Marylin is sharing her insider perspective and offering valuable information and advic...

The Social Tools Summit was a couple of months ago now, but I am still sharing some great conversations I had around the event. On today’s podcast, I'm talking to Chad Abbott, the CEO of Abbson Live, the company that provided all of the live streaming for the Social Tools Summit. Listen in as I go a little deeper with Chad, discussing how and why live video is an essential part of content mar...

Today on the podcast, Neal is sharing an interview he did at the Social Tools Summit in San Francisco with Chad McCaffrey and Daniel Hebert of PostBeyond. Listen in as they talk all about employee advocacy. This episode is full of great reminders for any company thinking about establishing an employee advocacy program, reasons to start one, and tips to help convince your team or executives interna...

Here's my advice on how to reach out to bloggers, influencers, and anyone else you want to talk about your company. It’s important to remember that bloggers and influencers are busy people being pinged by lots of other brands, so if you’re asking them to take time to use your product, and maybe even post a photo or blog about it - time isn’t free! Listen in to learn how to build a connection,...

Neal recently visited South Africa and was interviewed on South Africa FM. Last week, you heard the first half of that interview. This week, listen in to hear a continuation of the conversation about social media for business, and what it might be like if we could start over with social media. What would we do differently? Would we change our priorities? You’ll also hear more about Neal’s story an...

Neal is back! You’ve heard him talk about keeping it real in your social and your content, and he wants to keep it real. Neal’s goal is always to do this podcast regularly, but everyone’s busy! Since the last podcast, he’s traveled a lot, successfully launched the second Social Tools Summit in San Francisco in October, and spoken at a conference in South Africa. This episode is part one of a radio...

Today Neal is coming to you from Clearwater, Florida, where he actually did this podcast episode as a Periscope broadcast. And while he does talk a little bit about Periscope in this episode, what he’s mostly discussing is his new ebook which just came out on Kindle. It’s called Maximize LinkedIn for Business, and it came about from his visit to the LinkedIn Headquarters over a year and a half ago...

Neal has been in Japan these last few weeks, and he’s been thinking a lot about the power of mobile. This week Neal is talking about the social network that you can only engage in from mobile: Instagram. It’s important for businesses to find their visual voice and be original and organic on this platform. The beautiful thing about Instagram is it’s power to connect with people. So remember, don’t...

This week Neal is coming to you from Japan, and he’s talking to Dennis Owen, from Cathay Pacific. The two are talking about Cathay Pacific’s extremely successful employee advocacy program, which Dennis launched simultaneously with their brand campaign “Life Well Traveled.” Dennis explains how he got the higher ups behind him, the platform they use, what kind of content is successful, and the rewar...

When Neal first started speaking and blogging about social media, he focused on LinkedIn. But the platform has changed so much since the beginning, and of course the interactions and recommended use of it have evolved too. Today, Neal is talking about editing your LinkedIn connections. Not only is it important to comb through your current connections to edit out people who may not be relevant for...

This week on the podcast, Neal is sharing a new project with you. In his social media consulting business, he gets very broad and occasionally vague requests all the time, and there’s just no way he can help every person that reaches out. So Neal has decided to repackage the content he creates for trainings and make it available to more people. The first version of this is a 9-day online video wor...

Neal is at the Corporate Social Media Summit this week, speaking and leading panels on all things social media and content creation. In this episode, he chats with Saul Leal, the Director of the Family Share Network, a group of Facebook pages, websites, and other social media accounts. They discuss how to create engaging content, how to monetize social media content and drive traffic to a website,...

After talking with people all over the world about social media, today Neal is talking about content. Yes, content is important, but with an oversaturated market, it’s important that the content you are creating and sharing is legendary! So why not leverage successful content you’ve already created and used in the past? This week is all about why you shouldn’t be scared to repurpose old content, a...

This week, I am coming to you from Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada where I keynoted Social Media Camp . At the event, I ran into my friend Mike Gingerich of TabSite . TabSite is a great tool that helps you run contests and capture leads, mostly on Facebook, but also on the web. It integrates with tons of common platforms like MailChimp, Infusionsoft, Canva, and Hootsuite, and it’s so easy to...

Coming to you from the Women’s Business Symposium, sponsored by Comerica Bank , and benefitting Girls, Inc ., this week Neal is discussing when to listen to advice, and when to ignore it. Last week, he held the event that he’s been talking about for months, the Social Tools Summit. It got him thinking about why it’s important to be unique in the world of business and social media. When planning th...

Today Neal is talking with Pawan Deshpande, the CEO and Founder of Curata . They discuss Curata on the eve of the Social Tools Summit in Boston. Curata provides tools that help marketers curate content and publish it many channels, as well as provide analytics, best practices, and machine learning to make content curation and creation easier and more effective. Curata can schedule content, build p...

Neal talks with Glenn Gaudet, the CEO and Founder of GaggleAMP. This tool helps companies and social media manager create employee advocates within their companies, and makes it easy for employees to share company-created social posts. They discuss how employee advocacy has grown, and how you can get started doing employee advocacy if you haven’t tried it yet. Glenn will be present at the Social T...

Neal discusses an amazing tool that is used by serious social media marketers everywhere, Simply Measured . He’s talking to Ron Schott, the Director of the Professional Services Team at Simply Measured. This tool helps big brands and small companies alike reap the benefits of social media by understanding their analytics and planning future social media campaigns based on the measuring and reporti...

Today Neal is introducing you to another social media tool that can help you reap the benefits of the wide world of social: Likeable Local. He’s talking Nicole Kroese, the Director of Marketing and Partnerships, about all the things Likeable Local can do and how it’s growing and changing. Likeable Local’s mission is to help businesses, especially small businesses, grow with social media. How? It m...

This week, Neal Schaffer interviews Chad Abbot of Abbson Live . Chad will be joining the Social Tools Summit next month, and Neal wanted to talk to him about the powers of video. We know that video is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, and we know that live streaming can be helpful for events, but Chad shared some other ways that live video can be used in your marketing strategy. Use of video...

This week Neal Schaffer introduces you to Oktopost and the man behind it, CEO and Founder Daniel Kushner. Oktopost is another great social media management tool that specializes in B2B services, tracking relationships and helping you target your marketing. They’ll soon be launching an employee advocacy program as well, helping companies simplify the advocacy process. Learn more about Oktopost, and...

At the Social Media Marketing World event in San Diego last week, Neal Schaffer met all kinds of great people, one of them being Emeric Ernoult. Emeric is the CEO and Co-Founder of Agora Pulse , an engagement dashboard tool for Facebook and Twitter. Agora Pulse allows you to track the most important fans and interactions on social, gathering data unlike any other tool. Luckily, Emeric is going to...

This episode brings you into the atmosphere of the CeBIT Global Conference, where Neal Schaffer met Steven Zielke, who helped found the Rock the Blog event. But that’s not the only thing he’s founded: enter Blappsta, a new app that can turn your blog into its own native app. Neal is very excited about this app, and even more excited to share it with you. Blappsta provides yet another medium to acc...

This week is a special episode, recorded at the CeBIT Global Conference (CGC) in Hannover, Germany. Neal Schaffer spoke and participated in this great event, and had such a good time sitting down to speak with Ingo Stoll about the role information technology can play in social media. This episode takes a step back from the usual more applicable advice and looks at the bigger picture, including the...