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Neal Schaffer

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President, Windmills Marketing

88 points

Neal Schaffer is recognized as a leader in helping businesses and professionals embrace and strategically leverage the potential of social media. An award-winning published author of Windmill Networking: Maximizing LinkedIn and frequent social media conference speaker, Neal is President of ...

Neal Schaffer is recognized as a leader in helping businesses and professionals embrace and strategically leverage the potential of social media. An award-winning published author of Windmill Networking: Maximizing LinkedIn and frequent social media conference speaker, Neal is President of Windmills Marketing, a social media strategy consulting practice that has led social media strategy creation and educational programs for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to Web 2.0 startups.

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WEB: My LinkedIn Book

April 24, 2012

Neal Schaffer and 1 other person answered this question at this roundtable

Social Media and Content Marketing For Business Q&A [4/24 @ 11 am]

Beyond consumer brands, does Pinterest have any real value?

According to Alexa.com, Pinterest is now the 16th most visited website in the United States. If social media is about being where the eyeballs are, this is one site that is no longer an option. If you are not a B2C brand, there are still ... more

Content Marketing

April 24, 2012

Neal Schaffer answered this question at this roundtable

Social Media and Content Marketing For Business Q&A [4/24 @ 11 am]

What percent of the overall marketing effort/time should be devoted to social media?

Start with 5%, and once you start to see the results, up it to 10% or higher. I think average marketing spend on social is about 10% of annual marketing budget (sorry, can't remember where I saw that number), but it's a good goal to ... more

Content Marketing

April 24, 2012

Neal Schaffer answered this question at this roundtable

Social Media and Content Marketing For Business Q&A [4/24 @ 11 am]

Why should content marketers care about big data?

Being able to analyze big data will give marketers access to incredible information about their target customers - as well as what makes them tick. Feeding this information back into your content strategy will make you a much more effective content marketer. more

Content Marketing

April 24, 2012

Neal Schaffer and 7 other people answered this question at this roundtable

Social Media and Content Marketing For Business Q&A [4/24 @ 11 am]

What are some simple tips I can implement today to enhance the "human element" of my social media strategy?

How do you converse with your potential customers? Use that same voice/tone in all of your social media communications. You'll find that it will undoubtedly be more conversational - and human - in tone. The other thing is to try to put a human face ... more

Content Marketing

April 24, 2012

Neal Schaffer answered this question at this roundtable

Social Media and Content Marketing For Business Q&A [4/24 @ 11 am]

How do you determine what content should be in a newsletter as opposed to a blog?

People read, and have expectations for, newsletters differently than they have for blogs. For most companies, they will be blogging for SEO - therefore creating truly resourceful and authoritative content. On the other hand, with so many newsletters out there, you have to give people ... more

Content Marketing

April 24, 2012

Neal Schaffer is now following sera bishop and 7 other people

April 11, 2012

Neal Schaffer is speaking at this roundtable

Social Media and Content Marketing For Business Q&A

Content Marketing

April 22, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 8 other people answered this question

How do you market your business on Twitter?

I tweet relevant content that my potential clients would be interested in. I wrote about the case study of how this brought me business (along with some other Twitter B2B case studies) here:
http://windmillnetworking.com/2011/04/14/twitter-b2b-marketing-case-studies/ more

Social Media Marketing

April 21, 2011

Neal Schaffer answered this question

How are you measuring the impact of your social media marketing efforts?

In my business, social media marketing is my primary marketing channel and is, similar to a website, part of my fixed cost infrastructure. At the end of the day, I look at how many leads I am able to obtain from each social media channel, ... more

March 2, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 2 other people answered this question

How is Foursquare doing?

I think Foursquare has 7 million users worldwide, but at this point I think that its use is limited to early adopters and heavy social media users. I also find them more popular in heavy urban areas like New York (where their HQ is) and ... more

Feb. 14, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 15 other people answered this question

Will social media make the Better Business Bureau irrelevant?

I am sure that on a general scale social media has already surpassed the BBB. That being said, not everyone around the world is using social media nor those who are using it utilizing it to search for vendors. The BBB will always have its ... more

Better Business Bureau

Feb. 14, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 17 other people answered this question

What is the best way to promote your blog and gain readership?

The best ways to get readers for your blog are:
1) Provide content that is truly resourceful and not self-promotional.
2) Do on-site search engine optimization using tools like Scribe (http://bit.ly/wmscribe) so that those users not in social media can find your content in searches.
3) In line ... more

Feb. 14, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 10 other people answered this question

Facebook or Twitter: Which is more effective for your business?

Every social media channel has different demographics, communities, functionality, and cultures. I know some B2C companies who have tons of followers on Twitter and Facebook yet cannot say that they have contributed to their sales. On the other hand, I know B2B companies that are ... more

Facebook Marketing

Feb. 11, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 10 other people answered this question

What are the top steps to take to ensure you're getting the best ROI for your social media efforts?

Hi Caty,
I hate to give a difficult answer, but as Mark pointed out, ROI can mean a lot of different things with social media. This is because social media is not just about marketing: It's about sales, business development, public relations, recruiting, customer service, et. ... more

Focus Interactive Summit

Return on Investment

Feb. 7, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 7 other people answered this question

What are your thoughts on the usage of social bookmarking sites: Diigo, Springpad and Instapaper?

When the rumor hit that Delicious was being shut down last December, I also looked for alternative sites to store my bookmarks. While there was one site I found that had some cool features and allowed me to seamlessly import those bookmarks, it didn't give ... more

Feb. 2, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 36 other people answered this question

Do you add everyone that wants to connect on LinkedIn?

I wrote a book to help convince those that only connect on LinkedIn with people they know that there is a whole potential other world out there that could help you reach your networking goals. As Thomas Power, the CEO of ecademy says, "The value ... more

Social Netowrking

Feb. 2, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 7 other people answered this question

Is Paper.li the new personalized Digg or Reddit?

Paper.li, in essence, creates a daily newspaper around those keywords and users that are important to you. There are many ways to find relevant content to read, and share, in social media through social news sites such as Digg or Reddit or social bookmarking sites ... more

Blog Best Practices

Information Sharing

Jan. 26, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 12 other people answered this question

You got their attention, they 'like' your page... but how do you truly engage your social media followers?

I believe that every platform has its own community, demographics, culture, functionality, and history, so there is no cookie-cutter multi-platform approach. more

Customer Effort

Customer Engagement

Marketing Tools

Jan. 26, 2011

Neal Schaffer and 16 other people answered this question

Social media overload: How do you deal with managing Twitter and Facebook without losing your mind

I work in the social media industry yet find myself able to manage my social media time because of the following reasons:
1) I have a clear objective for using social media.
2) I understand what the ROI of using social media is for me.
3) I create ... more

Human Resources

Jan. 24, 2011

Neal Schaffer recommends this answer by Joe Chernov

Why do people prefer content that is displayed in list form?

I've taken to saying, "We no longer want 'bite-sized content,' we want 'predigested content.'" We want the vitamins, not the fruit. The data, not the context. The characters, not the narrative. The inexhaustible fire-hose of information comes at a cost to each of us. It ... more

Content Marketing

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Data Networking

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Followed by 29 People

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