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Social Media Marketing 101, Part 2

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Social media marketing (SMM) can be a great arrow in your quiver of marketing tools. To leverage it correctly, you must consider first what you want to accomplish. How will it fit in with, or complement your overall marketing plan?

Your SMM efforts will be more productive if you take time developing a plan or strategy. Lee Odden has a nice article about social media marketing strategy where he shares some ideas that could be useful.

Listen — Conversation Mining

One way to develop a plan or strategy: listen to what’s being said. Do some conversation mining. How do people feel about you and your brand? What are their points of view?

Identify who the key influentials are, and which ones should you cooperate with. What are the various topics? Is the tone of the conversation heated? Do people favor one point of view over the other, or is it mixed?

To start the conversation mining process, you should subscribe to RSS feeds of news alerts related to your company and brands on Google News, as well as saved searches on Technorati. Then identify other blogs, forums, or review sites that are related to your business. Where possible, subscribe to RSS feeds from these sites, so that you’ll be able to keep updated on many sites at the same time. What you learn from this process will help you refine your strategy.

Social Media Types and Tools

At this point, it’s a good idea to figure out the best social media type or tool to help your campaign. In Part 1, I reviewed four types of social media tools/sites. Decide which ones can best help you accomplish your goals.

Experiment with them and see how they work. Does one have the right features or seem to cater to a more suitable audience for your campaign? Do you need special technology in place before you begin? Do you need to produce a video or a podcast before you start the campaign? What kind of content do you need to create?

As you try to answer these questions, take a look at a very nice list of social media marketing examples that Peter Kim has organized. His list can be sorted by brand, industry, social media type and SMM example. This should help you as you decide which type is best for your strategy.

Start or Participate in the Conversation — Engage

Armed with the right social media type(s), now’s the time to start the blog or launch the Facebook page. Engage in the conversation and ignite a debate or express your point of view.

As you become a proactive participant, it’s important to note here that you need to be prepared to invest the time to keep the conversation going. Social media marketing isn’t something to get involved in for the short term. Make sure you have the resources and time available before you begin.

If you’ve found that your company is being discussed, especially if it’s negative, don’t be passive. Be respectful and state your case. Many times your critics might become advocates if you honestly address the complaints, thus turning a negative into a positive. This is one of the ways social media marketing can help with reputation management.

Measuring Social Media Marketing

The ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities and calculating ROI is imperative to any company’s marketing strategy. Social media marketing isn’t as easy to measure as other online vehicles, but it can be done.

If you’ve already identified your success metrics, then you’re ahead of the game. Assigning monetary values to these metrics will help you in assigning an ROI value.

Depending on your success metrics, you might look at content consumption. Who’s reading your content and where are they coming from?

You can also look at how much or little is being contributed and the number of visitors who are interacting with your content. Take a look at a click report to see how many people are adding you to social bookmarking sites like Delicious or StumbleUpon. To get an idea of who’s talking about you, do a blog search on Technorati or search your domain name in the major search engines with “link:http://www.yoursite.com” (substituting “yoursite.com” with your actual URL, of course).

Because most SMM campaigns are designed to drive traffic to your Web site, you should get a traffic source report from your Web analytics tool. For more information, see my columns on Web analytics. From those traffic sources that are coming from SMM efforts, look at unique visitors, page views, time spent on site, frequency of visits and conversions.

If you have a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace, you can always monitor the number of friends or profile visits you have to get a pulse on the vitality of your profile.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Because SMM takes time to nurture and grow, it’s important that you follow this cycle of listening, engaging, and then measuring. Then make course corrections to your strategy and repeat. I’m sure that social media marketing will become a very powerful marketing tool for you.

By Ron Jones

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Media, Social and Digital Media | No Comments »

Social Media Marketing 101, Part 1

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

When people hear about social media marketing, many tend to think about popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube. YouTube has about 258 million users, and more than 50 percent of them log in weekly. Facebook has about 101 million users with more than 50 percent who log in daily.

If you haven’t spent any time on these sites, I highly recommend setting up an account and jumping into a conversation or community. It’s one thing to talk about social media marketing and another to experience it firsthand. You’ll be a more effective social media marketer if you’re already a participant.

What is Social Media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It’s more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people.

Kinds of Social Media

Many social media sites come in the form of a blog, microblog, podcast, videocast, forum, wiki, or some kind of content community. To help you understand social media better, let’s break them down into basic forms or groups.

Social news: Sites like Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, and BallHype let you read about news topics and then vote and/or comment on the articles. Articles with more votes get promoted to a more prominent position.
Social sharing: Sites like Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, and Jumpcut let you create, upload, and share videos or photos with others.
Social networks: Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter allow you to find and link to other people. Once linked or connected, you can keep up to date with that person’s contact info, interests, posts, etc. Many people are connecting to friends and business associates with whom they had fallen out of touch. It’s bringing the world together like nothing else has.
Social bookmarking: Sites like Delicious, Faves, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks and Diigo allow you to find and bookmark sites and information of interest. You can save your bookmarks online and access them from anywhere or share them with others.

This is just a sampling of social media sites. More are added daily. Breaking them down into these categories or groups will help you understand their focus and to consider which avenue is right for your approach to social media marketing.

Social Media Benefits

Let’s look at the general scope of social media universe. Did you know:

Five of the top 10 fastest-growing Web brands are user-generated content sites?
Sixty-seven percent of businesses say that the best source for advice on products and services are their consumers?
Forty-five percent of adult Internet users have created content online?
There are about 1.2 million blog posts per day?

So do you think it would benefit you to tap into this ever-growing universe of social media? Absolutely! Many companies are trying to figure out how to get involved. They’re shifting money from traditional marketing budgets to social media marketing because it:

Helps manage your company’s or brand’s reputation.
Builds brand awareness and helps improve how people view your brand.
Gets you closer to your customers. Learn about their needs then respond. Discuss converse, debate.
Offers creative and effective ways to learn insights not previously available.
Features new and inexpensive ways to support your clients.
Is typically less expensive than traditional advertising.
Offers various ways to measure and track performance.

A good corporate example to illustrate many of these principles is from Dell. They started Ideastorm, where people can post ideas and have them voted on. Can you say free market research? Who better to tell you how to create or improve your products and services than your customers? Cool, huh?

Now that we have a basic understanding of what social media marketing is and its benefits, the next step is to learn more about how to build your own social media strategy. That’s next in Part 2.

In the meantime, take a look at some of the Social Media Marketing columns here at Search Engine Watch to learn more on this topic.

by Ron Jones

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Media, Social and Digital Media | No Comments »

Facebook’s Plans to Take Over the Web

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

So, earlier in the week, we talked about how absorbed the web is going to get by Facebook. Based on Facebook’s announcements at F8 today, that is most certainly the goal of the company, and given the tremendous adoption of Facebook by users in general, and by important partners with content, get ready to get more absorbed.

There were three major announcements made during the keynote. These were:

1. The Open Graph

2. Social Plug-ins

3. Graph API

Essentially, Facebook thinks connections are going to become the new links. This will theoretically happen through what they’re calling the Open Graph. Zuckerberg explains this:

Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships.

At the same time, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so you can get relevant information about different types of things. For example, Yelp maps out the best local businesses and Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other.

All of these connections are important parts of the social graph, but until now it hasn’t been possible to easily share the connections you make on sites like Yelp or Pandora with your friends on Facebook. And you haven’t been able to bring your friends from Facebook to share experiences on these sites or personalize them to you.

The announcement of the social plug-ins will play a significant role in making the connections involved in this Open Graph. These include a “like” button for the web, which the company as already deemed the most important of the plug-ins. When you stick a like button on your site, that connection will be integrated with Facebook through the Graph API. The activity will go the news feed, but it will also go to other relevant places in your Facebook profile.

Taylor shared examples from partners IMDB, Pandora, and ESPN. If you “like” a band on Pandora, that will go to the appropriate bands-you-like section on Facebook. On IMDB, every movie page will have a like button, so if you “like” a movie, it will be reflected in your movies section in your Facebook profile. It goes both ways though. You’re not just sending stuff back to Facebook. For example, there will be “like” buttons associated with athletes on their profile pages on ESPN.com. If you “like” one of these athletes, you can get updates about them from ESPN, via Facebook. Expect a lot of interesting two-way things to happen with the Graph API, as more and more developers are able to harness its power.

Other plug-ins include boxes for activity feeds and recommendations you can stick on your site. You can check out Facebook’s social plug-ins here.

Basically, the gist of the entire thing is that Facebook is taking over the web, and sites will be afraid not to take part. Facebook is injecting itself into every part of the web possible. As far as I can tell, this Open Graph is essentially a web itself. While it may not become THE web, it may increasingly become the one that matters.

Are we headed toward a point that if you are not somehow connected to Facebook you are not connected to the world at large? By the way, this is not going to do anything to slow Facebook’s growth down.

Posted in Social Media, Social and Digital Media | No Comments »

Why Your Brand Needs to Be on Facebook Now

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation’s top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

With 450 million users globally (and millions more being added each week) Facebook () is dominating the web in unparalleled ways. Yet, even as the social network has steadily grown over its short but remarkable history, many brands have remained on the sidelines of the social media revolution.

Facebook was the most visited site on the web for the week ending on March 13, 2010, surpassing even Google in week-long stats for the first time in history, according to Hitwise. The shift in user habits and audience targeting is palpable and it provides marketers, brand managers, issue advocates, and political campaigns today with an age old choice: Adapt and change or face irrelevance and extinction.

A Social Media Parable

In many ways, the fundamental decision facing those looking to compete in the next decade of social media dominance is reminiscent of Dr. Spencer Johnson’s bestselling business tale Who Moved My Cheese? It’s the story of two mice named Sniff and Scurry and two “littlepeople” named Hem and Haw who find themselves facing this same predicament.

As the fable unfolds, the book’s four main characters arrive in their maze one day to find that their once abundant cheese supply has disappeared. Sniff and Scurry knew this day was coming. They recognized that their cheese supply was dwindling and set out to find a new source.

Hem and Haw, on the other hand, hadn’t noticed that their cheese was running out. Rather than adapt, they retreated into the all-too-human reactions of fear, denial, and disbelief as they hopelessly waited for the change to prove passing.

For those who have not read this late-90s change agent bible, I won’t spoil the ending. The moral of the story however is clear: Change happens. To survive it, you must anticipate it; and to be successful, you must embrace it.

Realizing the Critical Value of Facebook

In the modern day maze that is the digital and social media realm, these lessons were again on display as the online community debated the value of the new Facebook user statistics this past week.

Viewed simply, the cheese moved again this month –- and just as intelligent companies adapted their marketing and communications models for the advent of Google () over the last decade, Facebook’s dominance has forced another “change or become extinct” moment. To thrive in a rapidly changing marketplace, corporate communicators must understand that the shift now underway is just as powerful as the one that transformed Google into the modern Yellow Pages and turned a Silicon Valley start-up into a $200 billion everyday necessity.

Unfortunately, most of today’s C-Suite decision makers lack the foresight of Dr. Johnson’s furry friends Sniff and Scurry. Far too many executives still see Facebook as a vast, uncontrollable outpost for college slackers –- one better equipped for picture sharing and random life updates than corporate reputation management, crisis response, and brand bulletproofing.

But the numbers don’t lie. Almost half-a-billion users each spend an average of nearly 6 hours per month on the site –- inhabiting networks that are largely free of corporate messaging, spam, and expensive advertising. This ought to make at least a few corporate titans rethink that next $1 million Super Bowl ad buy (even if Google did buy its first in 2010).

3 Ways Your Brand can Get Started on Facebook

Facebook users are openly sharing their life’s passions, personal interests, and their affinity –- or lack thereof –- for corporate brands, political candidates, and the key public policy stances. In effect, they are openly sharing every bit of marketing data a 21st century company covets.

For those still wary of change but now ready to dip their toe into the waters and begin to understand and benefit from the power of social, there are three free and relatively painless steps to begin the journey through the social media maze:

First, evaluate your current advertising efforts and identify how they can best be tailored to Facebook. Consider allocating 10% of your current Google AdWords or online advertising budget to a 90-day trial run on Facebook. Be sure to develop clear benchmarks for success, and remember, unlike Google AdWords, Facebook ads rely on both keywords and a variety of demographic information –- information you no doubt have already identified as key indicators of your target audience(s). You can now put this information to use to further micro-target your advertising buy, narrow the net you are throwing in the online marketplace, and increase the return on your investment.
Second, conduct a survey of your employees to see who is already on Facebook and thus, who may be your company’s most social media-savvy employees. You may find that your workplace is brimming with talent just waiting to be unleashed. For now, these future brand ambassadors may be ideal candidates to develop your Facebook presence and initial advertising program.
Finally — and this may seem obvious — become a face on Facebook yourself. Become familiar with the site, its features and the value hundreds of millions of people find in the world’s most populous online community. It may ultimately not be for you personally, but as with almost every new platform, the best way to understand its value is to give it a try yourself.

For those still looking for meaning in the numbers released earlier this month, the message is clear: Not only has the cheese moved again, the entire creamery has up and relocated. It won’t be coming back. And no manner of hemming and hawing is going to change that fact.

Tags: Social Media
Posted in Business owner, Managing a Business, Professionals, Social Media, Social and Digital Media | No Comments »

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