For Immediate Release:
Somerset Mortgage Lenders Featured in Digital Media Buzz Article – Successful Twitter Campaigns Build Brands, Bolster Profits
Melville/New York/USA
It was announced today that Somerset Mortgage Lenders is featured in the Digital Media Buzz Article “Successful Twitter Campaigns Build Brands, Bolster Profits”, online now at their website digitalmediabuzz.com (http://www.digitalmediabuzz.com/2009/10/successful-twitter-campaigns/)
“We are once again humbled to be included in the conversation as a leader in the field as it pertains to using Twitter to effectively market your business” said Gregg Marcus, Executive Director, Somerset Mortgage Lenders.
Recently, an article in Computer Weekly named the Melville, Long Island (NY) Mortgage Company as the #1 bank on Twitter – their survey polled the top 10 banks actively participating in twitter and chose the winner in relation to number of followers – and since then their web traffic has increased exponentially, both on Twitter itself and on their home page located at somersetmortgagelenders.com.
Over the past few months, Somerset has also been quoted in articles written for Newsday and Long Island Business News; in relation to their forward thinking hiring procedures and to their work in the social media marketing realm.
TEXT OF THE ARTICLE:
Successful Twitter Campaigns Build Brands, Bolster Profits By John Greaves
Social networking sites are returning commerce to the days when business and personal relationships were intertwined through constant non-commercial contact. Twitter is an especially effective medium that successful companies are using to position customers and companies in the same digital media community. “We use Twitter because it helps us to humanize our brand,” says Carisa Miklusak, senior consultant for Personified, a Careerbuilder firm.
New York-based Liberty Jet Management Corporation has seen business explode in the two weeks since it began promoting charters on Twitter. “We made $7,500 in two weeks on charter flights,” says co-owner Christian Deputy. “Making $7,500 in two weeks may not be a lot of money to some, but to me making that in two weeks says we’re on to something and it’s due to Twitter.” With no ad agency or in-house marketing department, Deputy says he gets more than 30 followers daily and his clientele now includes actress Kirstie Alley and pro-golfer John Daly. Deputy posts real-time price updates and flight availability.
Other businesses value Twitter for the quick response time it allows. “We’ve been in business for 30 years,” says Robert Haufler, director of marketing for New York-based Somerset Mortgage Lenders. “We tweet stuff to real estate agents, we post up-to-the-minute interest rates, we can bring up to 10,000 hits per day to our home page based upon our SEO.”
Kogi BBQ a Korean Taco Truck business in Los Angeles, Calif., has been profiled by Bon Appetit magazine as “being true innovators as grassroots guerrilla restaurateurs.” The mobile restaurant uses Twitter to update menus with available foods and locations. Tweets back and forth between Kogi BBQ and followers include invitations to specific neighborhoods, comments on individual dishes and apologies when the food truck is falling behind.
Once companies are comfortable using Twitter as a customer service platform, the next step is often active marketing of their brand. Jones Soda’s asked individuals making road trips to send photos with the hashtag #roadtripjones to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or YouTube. In exchange they were entered to win a chance to have their road trip photos on labels of Jones Cane Sugar bottles. The grand prize was a $500 shopping spree with Griffin Technology makers of the iTrip line of iPhone accessories, the other partner in the campaign. “Throughout the course of the campaign we conservatively estimated Jones received over 5 million impressions via Twitter alone,” says Alex Hillinger of the social networking site, Good Chemistry, who helped launch the campaign.
Well-crafted campaigns can fully engage even fringe followers into positive action. A prime example is the highly successful ad campaign by Situation Interactive Marketing for the Broadway play “Next To Normal.” Instead of constant tweets advertising the play, they had a Twitter version of the play produced. It was so successful that actor Adam Chanler-Berat, who wasn’t aware of the Twitter campaign, said in an August 2009 article, “Someone at the stage door asked me if I was Twittering while I was on stage; I guess they got a Twitter message from my character while I was actually performing.”
Opinion leaders can often give a huge boost to a campaign. According to Mike Spear, eCommerce manager of Jones Soda, “It’s very important to use opinion leaders; it really helped us get more eyeballs on what we were doing.” He should know. Hillinger says when pro skater Tony Hawk volunteered to send “signed copies of his boards to the Jones RV that was road tripping across the country, it was a primary driver.” Hawk then sent a twitpic to his 1.4 million followers that, according to Hillinger, has been viewed almost 9,000 times. Also big was the traffic related to the tweet from grand prize winner, Bryan Jones. Haufler says opinion leaders can springboard a brand into areas that might normally be closed. “If I get a person interested, many of their followers will follow me. I send a tweet, he’s going to retweet it and people will then come to our site,” he says.
Many companies including established brands are wary of social network ads backfiring. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald successfully hacked Starbuck’s Twitter ad campaign by mobilizing his followers to tweet unflattering twitpics to their promo site. Starbucks soon shut that portion of the campaign down but damage was done. The best way to counter that sort of thing is to be familiar with the medium. Most companies who are doing well on Twitter say they either hired someone who was comfortable with Twitter marketing like Next To Normal did with Situation Interactive, or partnered with them as was the case with Jones Soda and Good Chemistry. Still Liberty Jet’s Deputy and Somerset’s Haufler agree that Twitter is so user friendly that any company can venture into it as long as it is careful to concentrate on meaningful content. “We’re not posting 10 times a day, make money quick spam messages,” Haufler says. “People know we’re real.” As a result of his company’s social network approach, Haufler says Somerset Mortgage Lenders was ranked #1 banking site by Computer Weekly.
Good campaigns use Twitter to create a feeling of community and brand loyalty in the mind of consumers. “Do something more than tweeting updates about essentially news stories, do something that engages people and brings them into your world,” says Tom Lorenzo, interactive director for Situation Interactive.
No matter what the next step forward in consumer relations is, it will likely involve social networks. “You need to do things that take a risk and embrace new things to get a really great, interesting idea,” says Lorenzo, whose campaign for Next to Normal won best in show for online creativity at the Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) awards. Interesting ideas translate into more retweeting, more followers and many more potential customers.
John Greaves works for Marietta Power as well as several online publications.
Do you tweet? Follow Somerset Mortgage Lenders on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SomersetMtg
For more information on Somerset Mortgage Lenders check out their website: http://www.somersetmortgagelenders.com
About Somerset Mortgage Lenders:
With their main offices in the heart of Long Island, located at 290 Broadhollow Rd Suite 310 E in Melville, NY 11746, Somerset Mortgage Lenders have been in the mortgage business for 30 years. In Somerset, you have a mortgage banking firm that prides itself on attaining the highest ethical and moral standards and is dedicated to providing quality mortgage products at value pricing to our customer. Somerset has a long-standing history of servicing its local community as a reliable mortgage company. Our goal is to establish a successful partnership with our customers, staff, investors, and markets that respect the interest and goals of each party. Somerset Investors Corp. has been built on the belief that to be successful in mortgage banking it must first begin by molding itself as a customer service firm that provides quality service to the public.
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