Tag Archives: Social Marketing

9 Questions To Consider Before Developing a Social Media Strategy

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By  and first published on business2community.com.

Most marketers already understand that the biggest benefit to adding social media to their marketing strategy is that a brand can join its customers where they meet and exchange information.   One billion people are talking to each other on Facebook.  They’re discussing everything from the movie they saw last night to the horrible customer service person they just dealt with on the phone.  Brands can sit back and let their customers control conversations related to their product or service – or they can join the discussion and become an active participant in the shaping of their brand’s image.

If you’re a marketer who hasn’t implemented a social media strategy (yes, they do exist), the first thing you’ll want to do is develop a written strategy.  By developing a strategy, you’ll avoid common pitfalls down the road.

To develop an effective social media strategy, you’ll need to address these 9 questions:

1.    Who is your target market?

This seems like an easy task, but you’d be surprised how many new business owners don’t know who their target market is.  Spend time giving this some serious thought.  If you already know your target market, think about additional markets you can tap into.  For example:  You currently sell women’s shoes.  Have you ever thought about developing a specific strategy that targets African American women?  Once you’ve determined your target market, do you know which social networks they use?  Establish a strategy for approaching your target market without coming off as a pushy salesperson.

2.    Who are you?

Do you really understand what your organization does? Do you understand how your organization’s product or service benefits the consumer? I’ve trained a lot of marketers at the senior level who didn’t comprehend the full scope of their organization’s products and services.  A marketer can’t successfully promote something he doesn’t understand.

3.    What are you trying to accomplish?

There’s a reason you decided to use social media as part of your marketing strategy: what is it?  Are you trying to launch a new product?  Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to build brand awareness?  Whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish, set specific and measurable goals that will help you determine the success of your social media campaign.

4.    Who will create, implement and manage your campaign?

Some organizations are large enough to afford a social media team that consists of marketing professionals on all levels.  The executive level person develops the strategy, the senior manager implements the strategy and the entry-level person manages the day-to-day tasks of posting updates and responding to community members.  Some organizations outsource one, or all, of these tasks to a third party.  Regardless of who you choose, those people (or that third party) must have extensive knowledge of social media and must be passionate about building and maintaining relationships.

5.    What tools will you use?

There are hundreds of social media tools on the market – many of which are free to use.  Some of the tools you might want to consider using are blogs, your own website, video sharing websites, social media press releases, content management and tracking tools, apps developed for your smart phone or tablet, and content curation tools.

6.    Where will your content come from?

The one concern I hear often from business owners struggling with their social media campaign is “I sit at my computer and try to figure out what to post on my business page, but I always draw a blank.”   The main reason these business owners sit staring at a blank screen is because they didn’t establish a social media strategy before they added social media to their marketing strategy.  If they had, deciding what to post on their business page would be simple.

I always advise business owners and marketers to establish a content marketing strategy as an addendum to their social media strategy.   This content strategy will include a plan for developing content and it will include a content calendar.  Your content should be a good mix of your own content (blogs, pictures, videos, promotional items) and other people’s content (OPC).   Before you post any content, you should always ask yourself:  will my community find this content useful, informative or entertaining?

7.    What milestones will you establish?

Establish time-frames for accomplishing short-term (3 – 6 months) and long-term (1 year) goals.  Consider timing your milestones with product launches or major corporate initiatives.

8.    How will you measure your progress?

Measuring your progress is extremely important, especially since you probably have a boss you have to answer to.   Besides having a boss who will want to know exactly how the company’s social media strategy is progressing, you’ll want to know your progress so you can build on the activities that are working well and discard any tasks that are wasting time and money.

Use Bit.ly or a similar URL shortener to track clicks on links you’ve posted on your social networks.  Tracking tools, like Bit.ly, will help you track how often your content is shared and these tools will help you monitor the level of engagement with your content.

You’ll also want to track any leads generated by your social media activity.  And of course, you’ll want to track any revenue related to your social media activity.   Tracking other conversions, like the growth of your e-newsletter, will provide you with a clear picture of the success (or failure) of your social media strategy.

9.    How will you manage your brand’s reputation?

Assign a person to assume the responsibility of monitoring the social media sphere for mentions of your company’s name.  That person should also watch for mentions of any key executives at your organization.  There are dozens of social monitoring tools that will help you stay alert.  If a problem arises, your brand manager should put out that fire quickly.  She should respond to questions, comments and complaints from your social community.

Brands that take the time to write a solid social media strategy will develop a great relationship with their social community.  Those brands will also avoid common pitfalls that damage a brand’s reputation.  By establishing an effective content strategy, brands will generate content that gets their community engaged and keeps them returning to the brand’s web properties time and time again.  A successfully implemented social media strategy will turn a brand’s community members into brand evangelists who, by default, sell the brand’s products or services to their friends and family.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/9-questions-to-consider-before-developing-a-social-media-strategy-0468673#xhGbckEVKXRAibx4.99

Are You a Digital Native or Digital Immigrant?

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by Mike Dickman

 

Have you noticed that in the last 5 years, electronic gadgets no longer come with user manuals? If you want to learn how to use your new iPhone or Xbox, you jump on your computer and ‘Google it’. That is because the majority of users are considered to be Digital Natives – those whom have grown up with electronic devices. The rest of us are Digital Immigrants, those whom have had to immigrate into the new world of technology. That is why this thing we refer to as Social Marketing seems to be so foreign, so scary, and childish. And by the way, when did Google become a verb?!

Recently, I spoke before a group of business people regarding Social Marketing and how they could become engaged, without being overwhelmed. The first thing I wanted to clarify was the difference between Social Media, Social Networking and Social Marketing.

Social Networking is something all of us have been doing for years. We all have been participating in local Chamber events and fundraisers. And, while some may think they are doing it to support the cause, the real motive has been to network, right? The only difference is with online networking, you don’t need to leave your home or office. It’s quite a bit less personal from what we are all used to, but it works. And, in some cases, it can actually provide the social courage to join a group or participate in a conversation.

Social Media can be defined as the software which is used to participate in social networking. So, think of the Media as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the latest, Google+. These are the tools that marketers use to market their brands and products, socially, online.

Social Marketing is the act of preparing a marketing plan based on the use of Social Media and incorporating the social aspect with the business’s overall marketing objective.

Notice that the words ‘Networking, Media and Marketing’ are all words that we have used as part of our Marketing dialogues for years. However, the key to Social Marketing is in the word ‘Social’. Social Marketing is just that – SOCIAL. It is word of mouth marketing, peer-to-peer. It is all about a conversation, referrals and sharing.

So, some of you are probably thinking that you don’t need to be chatting with a bunch of high school and college kids on a social network. “They are not my client or prospect demographic.” But did you know that the fastest growing age group on Facebook is 55-65 years old? And, a new user joins LinkedIn (considered to be the ‘professionals’ social network) every second. This year, more than 93% of marketers are using social media for business. And it’s major brands that are doing this. Why? It’s because they can have a persona. They can appear to be human. They can influence thoughts and behavior because we think of them as peers or friends – because we LIKE them.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because you are participating on a social network on your computer that you have everything covered. Social Marketing goes far beyond the social networks and desktop computers and extends your marketing into the mobile realm. Are your business and personal reputations mobile ready? In my next article we will discuss taking your marketing mobile. And we don’t mean sticking a magnet on the side of your car!

This Is Google Changing All of Information Sharing

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This post originally appeared on gizmodo.com

Google announced a new social sharing project today called Google+. It’s among the company’s most ambitious ventures to date, up there with Gmail, Android, Chrome and, yes, Search. It represents Google’s very future. It’s going to be huge.

Google+ is a concerted effort meant to turn the ship around. Google famously has a poor social track record. Buzz and Wave were failures, so it needs to get this right. But Google+ goes far beyond just sharing status updates or photos with friends: It aims to change the very way we share and communicate. As it notes in a new blog post today, “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests.”

While there is much more to come, there are three major pieces announced today:

Circles

Circles let you share selectively with certain groups of people. You create a new circle, add contacts to it, and can share with just those selected people. As Google says “[t]he problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in friend paper—and sharing really suffers.” This seems to be somewhat like Facebook’s friends lists. But the big difference is that it isn’t a walled garden. You don’t have to opt into Google+ to be included in a circle. If I want to add someone to it who’s not a Google+user, I can do so via email and they can still take see the things I want to share with them.

Sparks

Sparks is essentially a topical section that delivers news videos and blog posts on subjects you define. But moreover it lets you discuss those things with other people, or as Google puts it, “nerding out and exploring subjects together.” This is something that Google is almost uniquely positioned to deliver. If you think about your Facebook feed, or, say a Tumblr tagged feed, they contain items placed there by humans. Google can deliver an endless supply of newly relevant items using an algorithm.

Hangouts

Hangouts is an online meetup space with live video that includes up to ten people. But it’s designed to let people come and go, dropping by at will, rather than be locked into scheduled meetings. It sounds a bit like Campfire with video.

Mobile

Mobile is the last major component announced today, and it has several moving parts. The table stakes are that you can always add your location (or not). Instant Upload automatically adds your photos to a private album online. Finally, Huddle is a group messaging tool that lets you communicate with a self-selected circle on your mobile device.

But these are just the beginning stages, the initial rollouts that are part of a much larger project led by Vic Gundotra. Wired’s Steven Levy followed Google+ from the inside for more than a year, and has the inside scoop. As he notes, it’s a huge drive by Google. In fact it is, more or less, Google’s future—an internal Manhattan Project meets moon shot.

Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, it is a result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company’s products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.

The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. In an approach the company refers to as “rolling thunder,” Google has been quietly been pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy—there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren’t ruffled at all—lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.

That overall strategy will begin now, with the announcement of the two centerpieces of Google+. But even this moment—revealed in a blog post that marks the first limited “field tests” outside the company—will be muted, because it marks just one more milestone in a long slog to remake Google into something more “people centric.”

“We’re transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we’ve never attempted – orders of magnitude more investment in terms of people than any previous project,” says Vic Gundotra, who leads Google’s social efforts.

The entire story is worth a read, complete with outsized personalities, massive stakes, and secret murals. But the takeaway is that this isn’t just about social networking. As Levy notes, it’s much bigger than that: It’s about organizing information around people.

As Tim Carmody points out on Twitter, “Google doesn’t actually care about social. Google cares about identity. Social (such as it is) is a means to an end.” And: “Not accidental that social, identity, apps, & browser are all linked. This is Google’s play to control the whole stack like Apple does.”

I agree. Google’s biggest screwup wasn’t ceding social space to Facebook. It was ceding identity.

Google wants to get to know you, and help you to get to know yourself. It wants to be the go-to place where you show who you are and what you care about to your friends, your family, your coworkers and the entire world. It wants to be the key you use to unlock the Web and the internet as a whole, the passageway through which all your interactions flow. Today is a big step in that direction.

DEAD OR ALIVE: The World Wide Web

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by Mike Dickman

Is the Web Dead?

I just finished reading an article in WIRED magazine which really got me thinking: Is The Web Dead? To get a better understanding of this position, think about how you use the Internet each day. You get up in the morning, log in to Facebook, check your wall, check Twitter and see if you have any more followers, and log into Pandora so you can stream your favorite music all day at work. You’ve been all over the Internet, but you have yet to hit the Web.

Today’s Internet visitors are spending most of their time on Apps such as Facebook or Twitter. Facebook has now even surpassed Google in the amount of visits and duration of visits. YouTube is the largest search engine on the Internet and you’re reading this article on a Blog, on the Internet and off the Web.

With the growth of social sites, the Web is losing steam and lots of traffic. And, with the likes of Starbucks and Coca Cola gaining more than 90,000 new Facebook Fans PER DAY, it would seem inevitable that the reign of the Web, could be dead.

The Web is just one of many applications that exist on the Internet, which uses IP and TCP protocols to move packets around. The revolution is the architecture, not the specific applications, which is built on top of it. Today, the content you see in your browser (largely HTML data delivered via the HTTP protocol on port 80) accounts for less than 25% of the traffic on the Internet – and that is shrinking. The applications that account for more of the Internet’s traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, corporate VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, online games – including Xbox Live, iTunes, VOIP phones, Netflix movie streaming and more.

In April, I re-posting an article released by Morgan Stanley which stated that the number of users accessing the Internet from mobile devices will soon surpass the number of those accessing from PCs. This will only accelerate the rate at which the Web is left behind as more applications, which will make web browsing from a mobile device easier, are accessed by these users. For the sake of an optimized “web” experience, users will forgo their general purpose browsers.

So, as the Internet moves from our desks to our pockets and our view history confirms that we are an application minded social society, where do you see the Web is headed and do you believe THE WEB IS DEAD?

The Next 5 Years in Social Media: What We Can Expect

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by Adam Ostrow

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Over the last five years, social media has evolved from a handful of communities that existed solely in a web browser to a multi-billion dollar industry that’s quickly expanding to mobile devices, driving major changes in content consumption habits and providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.

With that framework in place, the next five years are going to see even more dramatic change. Fueled by advancements in underlying technology – the wires, wireless networks and hardware that make social media possible – a world where everything is connected awaits us. The result will be both significant shifts in our everyday lives and a changing of the guard in several industries that are only now starting to feel the impact of social media.

The Technology

The growth of social media in the past five years was fueled not just by innovation from Internet entrepreneurs and developers, but by several key advancements behind the scenes. The rise of YouTube – which I called the most important social media innovation of the past decade – would not have been possible without the wide availability of broadband and the advent of Flash 7. Similarly, the rapid rise of mobile apps in the last few years would not have been possible without major advances in smartphone capabilities (jump started by iPhone) and higher speed mobile networks.

Jumping ahead to today, consider for a moment that the first smartphone to run on 4G (the successor to 3G mobile broad and capable of significantly faster mobile broadband speeds) – the Sprint HTC EVO – hit the U.S. only this past June. Sprint’s 4G network, however, only covers about 40 million people. Similarly, wireless broadband ISP Clearwire reported in May that its network – which is also used to offer service to Sprint, Verizon, and Time Warner cable subscribers – only reaches 41 million people. At the same time, mobile broadband subscriptions are expected to surpass 1 billion worldwide by 2013.

Add to that a surge in public and private investment in wireline broadband that will give 90% of homes in the U.S. the option to have 50 mbps downstream broadband within the next few years, and the bottom line becomes clear: There’s currently an enormous supply and demand gap to be filled, and when that happens, it will enable a whole new wave of social media innovation.

Read more . . .