Social Media

Social media has been through a lot in the last two years. It’s been overly-hyped, under-appreciated, been the brunt of questionable claims regarding its value, had its ROI fondled like a rubix cube, turned-over, pushed, pulled, examined, leveraged, utilized with success and utilized with epic failure.

It’s been a bit of a theme park really.

A lot of good has come out of sound social media strategies for many businesses and while the entire process of getting your business involved in social media isn’t completely free, it can be pretty cheap. Anyone peddling it as an expensive magic potion should be disregarded. It’s a cost-effective tool that nestles snugly into your great big craftsman toolbox out back.

Curious about how social media can help your business, even in the smallest way? Here are a few quick tips on how a small business owner can gain traction with social media marketing.

Engagement

Where traditional marketing tends to be very passive and disconnected, social media marketing allows you to directly engage not only your customers but your vendors and employees as well. You have access to a brand new level of communication where you can get and deliver feedback quickly.

Communication is never a bad thing.

Relationships

Social media is all about relationships. That’s the whole concept behind social networks is establishing relationships to engage people. You can connect to and forms bonds with people and organizations you never knew existed with the potential of gaining insight and information to help your business thrive. From relationship building comes trust and credibility, and your customers like to do business with people they trust.

On Target

You’ll be able to find and directly target the people you want to market to. You can stop wasting a lot of ad budget on marketing campaigns that blanket your local area or the web. That never works. Social media is an opportunity to narrow your focus and increase the return on your investment. Not sure about that? Try selling a hockey stick to someone who doesn’t have any interest in hockey. Then go find a group in Facebook that deals with Hockey enthusiasts and try to sell it. Enough said.

Reputation Management

Every business will inevitably face criticism and be questioned in a public forum. How you respond to criticism can have a very profound impact on future business. Social media allows you to respond quickly so that you can turn a negative situation into one with a positive outcome. Consider the potential of turning an unhappy customer into an evangelist by taking care of their issue.

Education

Increasing your socialization with customers and others within your market helps open your eyes and learn more about what you’re doing. You can learn a lot about who you are and how you operate your business.

This is just scratching the surface of the benefits of social media marketing. When you mingle this with other forms such as content marketing you’re broadening your reach and opening your online presence up to a lot of potential growth.

With that said, the results are different for every business, and not every network should be used by every business. Social media marketing is part of a larger strategic marketing plan and you have to ask yourself some serious questions before moving forward:

-  Which network (or networks) will provide the most engagement for me

- Do I have a strategy for building relationships?

- How much time can I spend on relationship building

-  Who is my consumer? Do I have enough information to make a buyer persona?

- What does my reputation look like now?

- How do I protect my reputation… or fix it?

- What do I want to get from social media marketing

Never be fearful of moving forward even if you don’t know what to expect. That’s where research comes into play, and information gained through trial and error. Remember, it’s better to do something than nothing at all.

We’ve read it all over the place, and plenty of us have gotten the spam emails from numerous companies – Search Engine Optimization techniques will boost your site rank within the search engines and Search Engine Marketing will bring you top-end traffic that is laser targeted. I never see anyone peddling the important of content though. At least not among the spam I receive.

Fact is a load of quality content that provides a lot of value, information and entertainment can accomplish all of those things and puts you in a great position for the future of search – contextual search and Skynet reading you bedtime stories.

There are also the ancillary benefits of putting together a really strong content marketing strategy. You can snag some amazing perks with quality content that you just can’t get with the truncated, garbage PLR that gets peddled around the world.

-Higher conversion rates

-Elevated sales

-Brand advancement

-Consumer education

-Thought leadership

There’s more, plenty more in fact, that comes from using the RIGHT kind of content in your campaign. You can pay all your want to have a link building campaign run and you can fork over thousands of dollars for SEO and SEM but the fact remains that without quality content you’ve gone fishing without bait and tackle. You’re dangling a blank line in the water and it’s just chilling on the surface.

You might know where the perfect fish are, and you might even have a great method for keeping the fish swimming madly around your boat, but without that quality content (that hook) what are the odds that you’re going to catch anything?

Take a cue from music, in any form, but especially pop and rock. The turn of phrase in a song is the hook, driving into the chorus. A good example is the popular song Boom Boom Pow from the Black Eyed Peas’. The hook in those songs is what pulls you in and persuades you through. It really isn’t important how many people hear the tune once and forget about it – what’s really important is the people who stick to it and spread the word about the song, sharing it with friends.

Content marketing has very little difference. Your content should resonate with your visitors and thereby draw them in. That hook will ensure that they share it, and by making it easy to share your content you’ll be pushing a big link building campaign from your content alone.

General SEO by itself attempts to mimic this process by creating a picture or painting a false portrait to the search engines and users a like. This can carry your for a short amount of time, and even boost site rank but when you have all form and no content you’re creating a very intriguing doorway for people to pass through that goes absolutely no where. That make it easy for visitors to hit the back button and go somewhere else.

Quality content will help position a website for future changes in search, especially as the web moves more toward contextual search. We already saw some of that change with the May Day update by Google. As these changes continue to occur, it will be increasingly important to have an established presence online with quality content – and PLR (even spun PLR) is not quality content.

We’ve heard amusing and horrifying stories of content being shared through social media that really didn’t belong there. We also know some of the risks of following people, be they friends or just people we network with, in the fact that there is often copious amounts of overshare.

So how do people stand on the issue of an execution being announced… in a Tweet?

Earlier today, the convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by a select Utah firing squad – It’s been 14 years since there has been an execution of this kind in the United States. Shortly before the execution the Attorney General Mark Shurtleff made the announcement of the execution via Twitter in a short series of Tweets.

I’m at a bit of a loss because I’m trying to decide if these kinds of Tweets are even remotely necessary. How do you correctly convey emotion and sincerity with 140 characters, especially when talking about death?

One message stated: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.”

The post before that said “A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice.”

This type of incident raises the question about what kinds of things are appropriate within Twitter, and what topics should be avoided completely. There’s an old saying that there is a time and place for everything – so is Twitter the place for discussion or announcement of a very serious execution of human life?

Some things are perhaps better left the news and other media, and a lot of Twitter users are agreeing with the notion that the Tweet was inappropriate and out of place. I admit that I do find it unappealing, but at the same time I wonder if people would react the same to others discussing the matter in the same light.

Is it less the subject matter and more the issue that the person who made the decision for the execution made the Tweet?

Interesting points and questions to ponder as we think about the we choose to speak and the words we use to engage the followers of our businesses online. What is seemingly innocent to one (or many) is also offensive and inappropriate.

The way marketing is being handled in social media has been a topic that comes and goes. Putting up a big fight are the PR agencies that have dominated traditional marketing methods for years. They aim to dominate the big brands in social media and feel that they’ve got all the guns and ammo necessary to make that happen. There also beliefs that they have something that other, smaller social media firms don’t have - time tested resources and strategies.

The question is whether or not those strategies and resources even apply to the new world that we all live and work in. It’s true that anything and anyone can adapt to changing times if they decide to do so but are the big PR agencies trying to muscle into social media as they currently are or are they adapting “tried and true” formulas to function in this new world.

Story Telling - If you break down public relations and social media marketing then you’ll find this at its source. When pre-selling and content marketing come into play you need to be able to spin an angle in order to make it click with people. People are the heart of the source. Not just the people you connect to but the people that are generating the content. PR agencies, no matter how large, have been mired for years in corporate speak and have rarely been thrust into a situation where it’s less about discussion and more about connection. Old PR was about developing a company story into a news worthy format - people don’t want news worthy anymore. There’s enough “news” circulating the web to choke a mule. People want to feel a connection, not be talked at.

Relationship Building - I mentioned that connection is important, but major PR agencies don’t typically do the kind of connection that most businesses need in social media. Connection with the individual buyer, whether that’s another business or a direct consumer. PR guys maintain connections with journalist, corporate and legal. When it comes to social media engagement, a connection needs to be made with influencers among the buyers. That means bloggers, Twitter users, YouTube dominators. You can’t treat these people like journalists or corporate, they don’t want to be handled that way.

They don’t want to be used and leveraged, they want to feel like the people that are connecting with them are doing it because they legitimately appreciate what they have to offer and they’ll give something back. That’s something a PR agency can’t really give.

Crisis Management - I’ll admit that a strong PR department can quickly snuff out some of the ugliest wildfires. History has proven that when things got ugly, companies would turn to a PR agency or internal PR group that would issue a formal statement to smooth things over and develop a strategy for rectifying the situation. PR guys were like the shuttle team in the movie Armageddon. They’d straddle a rocket and ride it into hell if it meant keeping the corporate nose clean.

Unfortunately people aren’t as accepting of vague generalizations and formal “oops” statements today. Formal statements and “Strategy” plans like “we’re working strategically with multi-level divisions of three off-shore partners to ensure a fastidious closure that will benefit all parties involved” don’t work within social media. The people that network through social media channels will retort with “PPFFFFFT!” PR Agencies are trained to deal with media, and they let the media deal with the people in one-way channels like print and television.

Most PR agencies aren’t prepared for the two-way engagement method of social media. It’s the equivalent of talking with buyers on the street. Again, this goes beyond just B2C, this is B2B as well. In social media, the “bad” can spread at a blistering pace and people won’t be quelled by a general statement. They want to know, both individually and collectively that their concerns will be heard and addressed. In social media, people hold the torch.

In order to make PR and marketing work, a firm understanding of the individual is needed. Social Media is like a complex chain of molecules and the people within make up the bonds. If you want to understand the purpose of the molecule and how to use it and manipulate it then you need to understand the strength and function of each part of that molecule.

Modern agencies that have been born with social media, that have no foundation in the old rules of PR and marketing, are having greater success because they understand people. They’re playing by new rules, and they’re not trying to game the system using tactics that are old hat.

The problem: Some of these large PR firms that are trying to muscle into social media marketing think they’ve got a secret sauce based on past success. In all actually, a lot of them bring in a new project manager and a couple of college interns that made some cool facebook pages. They think they can mingle their old PR playbook with some new talent and run the show.

The result: It’s going to be ugly if they don’t actually adapt and ditch the old playbook. Smaller agencies that understand people are going to rip those big clients away in social media because they’re eager to work hard, they’re scrappy, they make the connection between big company and little person and they just simply “get it”.

People are at the heart of marketing. Whether you’re talking about the old rules of marketing and PR where two or more people shook hands and stood around blowing smoke or more modern marketing where we engage prospects online in social media as well as in person.

In order to engage people, people need to be involved. Automated marketing doesn’t work nearly as well as true human engagement where a consumer can put a face and personality to the information and content their dealing with. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to flesh out profiles – especially on Twitter.

Twitter has become a monster source for content marketing and lead generation, particular in local or geo-specific marketing. The problem with the micro-blogging platform is simply a limitation on space so you have to optimize the space you have in order to convey the message that you are human, you’re relevant and worth following.

Since you’ve got about 15 seconds to impress someone examining your Twitter profile, there’s no room for error.

Write A Bio The Moves People

You can’t write a short story, or even a paragraph. You’re limited to 160 characters on your Twitter profile, so the space you have to wow someone leaves a lot to be desired. Make every character count and use them all. Often people overlook the importance of a bio, no matter how brief. It’s true that all your closest friends know you kick ass. Your mom has been reassuring you since you were 10 that you’re cool but everyone else probably needs some method of persuasion to get the point.

You should place information and keywords within your Twitter profile bio that you want to be found for. Twitter is a massive people-based search engine and you’re a search result. If you want to appear for the words “copywriter” and “marketer” then they should be included. Use them as the foundation of your bio and write around them.

Try to maintain some personality and keep in mind that others don’t want to connect with a spambot. Show that you’re human by adding something personal, personable and perhaps even amusing. Real people are what other real people are looking for.

A Picture Speaks A Thousand Words

Custom backgrounds are such a big deal with people on Twitter. While your bio might be 160 words and it’s longer than a tweet it’s still not enough space to show your stuff. And prove that you’re in fact pure, 100% awesome marketer.

A custom background can be setup so that additional information, bio, contact details, extra pictures, logo etc can be mashed into the background. Anyone examining your Twitter profile would find all that information in plain view.

Whatever you do, avoid the default Twitter backgrounds and create something that is unique to you. When you’re marketing, you want to brand yourself and do all you can to engage people and develop trust. A custom background helps people connect with you on a more human level.

“Who Be You”

You can’t ever go wrong with a head shot picture that makes eye contact and utilizes a smile, unless you’re trying to post a mugshot. I’m not sure how effective that would be. It sells magazines, so it might work on a Twitter profile. It’s a good idea to avoid other logos or stock photos/clip art. People connect more readily with a human face and it helps build credibility.

Freebie Weblink

The link above your bio on Twitter is pretty much the only place you can squeeze off a good URL without having to utilize a URL shortener. It’s certainly helpful if your web address plays a part in your branding.

Don’t leave the weblink location blank. Even if you don’t have a custom website, you can still link to other social media profiles like Facebook or a Google profile. Use this as a way to help people get to know you.

When you’re marketing on Twitter, it’s all about engagement. People want to know that you’re not just another bot cycling RSS content into the fold. All of these factors play apart in delivering a bit of your personality to people so they understand who they’re networking with, but nothing is more important than the tweets you post. Be human in all that you do, starting with your Twitter profile setup as we’ve covered here.

When it comes to social media, I’m always amused at how it can profoundly impact people after little slip ups are made. The whole “foot in mouth” usually ends up being a great case study on how not to act.

You really can’t get away with anything anymore thanks to the number of eyes on the web and how quickly information can be shared. With that said, I’m surprised that someone in such a major position within the .com industry would be so willing to drop an F-bomb.

Shocked? I was a little, as well. But apparently at TechCrunch Disrupt, Carol Bartz (CEO of Yahoo!) felt the need to tell Mike Arrington (Techcrunch) to F*%K off.

I can appreciate people who speak their mind, especially when they have no fear of exposing themselves (please carol, don’t expose yourself). While the video is hilarious in its own regard, and people love gritty, hilarious content (this is spreading like mad) I always have to wonder over issues like this.

I’m certain that it’s going to polarize executives and investors. Like the many people in the audience, including myself, I clapped good and hard and practically laughed right out of my seat. Others may be less forgiving of her loss of control.

My question is – was it a loss of control or was it calculated? We know that controversy can breed mad publicity when used properly, and not all content has to be sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes the best way to market, brand and get eyeballs locking on you is to slaughter a carebear.

What are your thoughts?

We often talk about the need to have the right kind of content on your site and spread throughout your marketing campaign. We talk about the need for content to be valuable, relevant, informative, entertaining, etc. So which is it? Which should you file your content under?

Should your content have a focus in being informative, so that it educates the average user on your products and service?

Should you lean toward a position rooted in humor and entertainment? After all, laughter is the best medicine and most of the content that goes viral is often geared towards the entertainment sector.

Truth be told, there’s a fine line between both of them that should be followed, with a slight canter toward one side or the other based on the user base you’re working with. Your market will have a lot of say in how you deliver your message, but so do the people that do business within it. Regardless of the market however there is a certain expectation among people, a minimum standard that they apply to their information searches online.

If any brand falls short of social media marketing basics (providing helpful service and info, an education stance) while seeking to entertain the lot of the web, then it usually just winds up coming off as inappropriate and campy. Any traffic you do get will bounce right back out, and few people will share what you’ve created.

An example of this is Eurostar hosting a Facebook page for their ‘Little break, big difference’ campaign, then failing to respond quickly enough to consumer needs during their pre-Christmas disruptions. Sure, the company learned from their flub but it’s a great example of why entertainment alone isn’t enough for brands in social media marketing and outreach.

One way to ensure that both ends of the spectrum are hit (education and entertainment) is to consider the third “E” word. Engage. If a brand can manage to consistently engage their user base through social media marketing by making their content interesting, relevant, thought provoking and ensnaring then brands will develop the tactical advantage over competition in social media marketing and other social conversation.

Keep in mind that you can engage a customer and still offend them to the point where they feel like you just yanked up your digital kilt and performed your own rendition of “The Scottsman”. It all centers around the type of content you’re working with when you engage your user base through social media marketing.

Ideally, you should blend everything I’ve mentioned. Entertaining and relevant content will combine to help you reach targeted groups, regardless of the medium you’re using. Whether you’re pushing press releases, blog posts, articles, reports, ebooks, etc it doesn’t really matter. In terms of proportion, you can find the answer in the personality of your brand. This points back to leaning slightly toward one side or the other. The theme that fits your brand well should carry more weight than the other.

This doesn’t mean that one is excluded in favor of the other. A right handed person doesn’t cut off their left hand because they find it useless. While the right hand dominates activity, the left hand compliments and supports it. This is the mindset you should have when crafting content. While you may heavily favor educational content, there is benefit in using entertainment to support and compliment it and vice versa.

A lot of research has gone into the creation of the perfect message in reaching out to sizable audiences without taking a heavy loss on personalization. That’s all well and good, but you can craft the perfect “Dear Molly” content and still suffer a dramatic, Broadway worthy death from losing your education and entertainment edge.

Social Media is one hell of a rock concert.

I absolutely refuse to put a band name to that concert as any kind of reference because I know without a doubt that I’ll be showing my age. (ignore the fact that I have a picture on my own blog, I stopped aging at 25 and there I shall stay). We’ll just say that it’s a concert for your favorite rock group so I can save a little face.

Do you remember the last time you went to one? What about the FIRST time you went to one? There’s a lot of mystique around concerts for someone who has never been because you have a vague perception of what goes on there based on what other people exaggerate. You rarely get accurate stories, and they end up being something that you just have to see for yourself.

Social media is just like that, especially for a business or individual that’s never been involved. I had a discussion with one of our clients just yesterday when he revealed that he has a Twitter account he’s never touched, no facebook account and zero presence in social media. He asked me if I thought he should be involved in social media, and why.

I’ve read entire books that answer that question. I’ve been to conferences where that question is answered time and time again. Despite that, I didn’t feel like there was any appropriate way to reason it out to him except for this entire reference to a concert. What it boiled down to: You just have to be there to understand!

Social media is a blast, everyone (almost everyone) is there, doing their thing. Businesses are involved, consumers are milling about, everyone is enjoying the show. Then the question pops: “what can it do for me?”

It’s not what can it do FOR you, it’s what you can do in conjunction with social media when you work within it. And you know what you can do?

You can crowd surf.

When it comes to doing business online, you are your content and your content is you. That could never hold more true than within social media as you share information, experience and more with the people networking with you through content syndication. When you begin engaging everyone in social media, you’ve managed to climb to the stage and you’re standing in front of the entire crowd as the party is going on around you.

When you launch the content that you’ve carefully created out into the social media megaverse, you’re throwing yourself off the stage. Don’t think for one second that people are going to move.

You will get a crowd surf in on many attempts. Sometimes that crowd will catch you and your content and hoist you around, bouncing you along for just a few short minutes and sometimes you’re gonna start wondering “how in the hell do I get down?!” because it doesn’t seem to stop.

People love valuable content in social media, and when you use content syndication to serve that to the crowd they will carry you around at the top of the party.

Yup, there will be the occasional attempt where the crowd does move to the side and you land face first in the dirt. While that can leave you feeling a bit broken, it’s not something that should get you down. Learn from that experience, take the knowledge of what doesn’t work and try again. That’s how content syndication works online. We never know when the crowd is going to carry us, or for how long, or if they’ll even be there to catch in the first place but thankfully, the possibility of a crowd surf is always high if you’re pushing valuable, informative and especially entertaining content.

Couple that with a content syndication network like SYNND and you’re almost guaranteed a massive crowd surf.

Gene Simmons would be proud.

There have been some common discussions regarding the role that people play online compared to technology. Some of the focus has been on the use of automated systems that have caused debates in whether or not the web is being driven by people or being driven by machines.

The rise of these discussions doesn’t really surprise me, and in fact speaks positively towards how the social media industry is developing, maturing, growing, etc. As the whole of social media becomes a lot more widespread, I expect that there are going to be a lot more discussions about who is behind the names, the “what” and the “why”, and will foster further “man vs. machine” debates.

You might be wondering where the whole “machine” comes into play when talking about social media. That’s probably the farthest thing from the mind of most when you think about the posts being made on many sites and the information being shared in social bookmarking.

Some of the discussions are motivated by the fact that technology is taking over important positions that people have been sitting in for many years. Before the web grew popular, before there were web services and social media sites for searching and info aggregation, a number of companies had to use clipping services to have information from print media and other media stored and shared properly.

Technology has pushed these positions into extinction, at least from a human standpoint, and computers are being used to handle the grunt work. Social media monitoring and publishing services can handle data collection and info processing of millions of conversations. That’s something that people just aren’t capable of doing.

This has a lot of people fired up about how social media could potential lose its “humanity”. With the further blossoming of the semantic web, we’re being dished content more and more by computerized services. There’s a big But to slip in here – technology simply can’t replace people completely, and it shouldn’t be used to do so.

While we can use technology to dish that content, it can’t (at least not anytime soon) be used to produce that content.

While automated services can really fuel social media to a positive end, such as with using SYNND as a content syndication network, people will continue to play a vital role in not only producing the information that is being passed along but in providing insight, advice, contextual recommendations and more about what that content means, what should be done with it and how it should be used strategically.

Technology might be able to recommend key people to you through social media, but it’s the human who has to step forward into the fray to make the connection and develop relationships based on the content being seeing.

People also need to realize that technology will never be perfected as a means for taking over content in social media, because regardless of how well software is developed or how powerful the computer is you can’t fake things such as sarcasm and nuances. Emulation is not perfection, the human mind and the beauty that’s within is far too elusive.

The bottom line is that social media as it is now, and where it should continue to grow, is a partnership between people and technology. Content syndication networks are driving social bookmarking services like Digg, Reddit and more. Syndication fuels services like Twitter. These automated services aren’t taking away from the concept of “social media” and it’s certainly not killing the humanity.

If anything, it’s increasing our ability to process and share information that is valuable, informative and entertaining. People and technology serve different roles but in many ways they wouldn’t be able to operate well (if at all) without each other. The whole concept reminds me of the release of the new movie Iron Man 2. A perfect example of co-dependence.

The “Man vs. Machine” discussion is always a healthy one, because it reminds us of our advances but this really is a “Man and Machine” world that we’ve come to live in.

Microsoft might be late to the game, but they are pushing the envelope to punch through the throngs of other aggregator services out there as they stomp on the gas coming out of the apex of the next turn in social media.

Microsoft has recently announced the release of Spindex, which is aimed at bringing together varied strands into one big loom that will recreate and redefine a users online experience. The intention is to take away the need to jump from site to site to site – users can get all their favorite feed content and site information in one central hub. Microsoft’s Fuse Labs is taking a stab at cornering the interest market on dynamic social media aggregation tools.

According to Lili Cheng, General Manager of Fuse Labs, “Spindex…aggregates your social streams (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what’s new, see personalized trending topics, and generally make the most of the time you spend being social on the Web”

From the information that’s been released thus far, the Spindex system will set out to learn from your online behavior and will harvest relevant data from the web that it will deliver to a central page for you. Bing search will also be integrated along with Evernote, another Fuse Labs innovation.

The system is still in tech preview and hasn’t fully launched, which has left a lot of tech bloggers and social media peeps on the edge of their seats trying to figure out how this is even remotely different from other aggregators.

It’s not a new concept, as friendfeed and various others have been available for some time but there’s some brand loyalty to be had here and Microsoft knows it.

After reading numerous blogs on the topic, I can’t help but chuckle at the general response of the people within social media over this. Everyone has hung their hat on it and stood back with flare saying “look at this! ….we don’t know what this is but.. LOOK!”

These aggregator services are one more tool to simplify the web for the individual user, but that also simplifies the marketing of businesses within social media. For the most part, people have to come and find your content. Even with syndication networks like SYNND there is still a requirement that the content be relevant, valuable, entertaining, etc. People still have to pick it up and run with it.

Aggregators like Spindex are paving the way to simplify content deliver. There’s great opportunity here for syndicated content to be picked up by the aggregator and delivered to your target audience because the system has learned what the consumer/user likes. It scours social media sites (like Digg, Mixx and other sites like Twitter) to find content relevant to the needs of the user. If you content sits there with a red flag on it, the Aggregator will dish it right to the user.

That can mean a lot for syndication, and even more so for sharing content across social media. There are a lot of people poking this foreign object with a sticking asking “why….” While I’m pounding on the door for Fuse Labs begging them to launch the damn thing.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this is a cool launch.