This is the fifth post in a series about Social Media Strategy. You can read all of the posts here: series one – social media goals and tactics. Dosh Dosh ran a series on the Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing late in 2007, and I believe that it is worth taking another look at it in light of the changes that the Social Media marketspace has undergone since then.

In the previous post we talked about improving search results through social media networking. This post will concentrate on increasing the level of relevance for those that visit your site.

Drive Quality over Quantity

4. Increased Relevant Visitor Traffic. If you are only interested in getting interested visitors or users for your website, you should invest more time on social communities which have a high topical relevance.

The social site’s topical focus should be inline with what your site covers/offers. For example, instead of promoting your internet marketing articles through wide platform like Digg, try pushing it on more appropriate communities like Sphinn, because it will get you people who are more likely to follow your site.

Participating in blog conversations and forums relevant to your business are the number one way to draw in the most relevant traffic to your site. Whatever business you are in you need to find those communities that already exist and get involved. The number one mistake that many business make when beginning to get involved with social media is to attempt to create a new community around their business from scratch. This takes a lot of time, money, and effort with no guarantee that it will pay off. Unless your company already has a large amount of brand-recognition this type of exercise will most likely fail.

Get involved with existing communities

My friend Ryan Rasmussen is an extraordinary example of this. Though Ryan has moved on to another company, what he did at Levenger should serve as a textbook example of how to engage a community. In fact, is is an example that Andy Sernovitz uses in the revised edition of his book, Word of Mouth Marketing. Here is part of an article that Sernovitz did on Rasmussen last year:

How to Become a Word of Mouth Evangelist

His job is to do all the cool social media stuff that we all talk about.

He represents the company in social networks and Second Life. He schmoozes bloggers. He encourages real consumers to help design and develop products. Basically, he does all those things that big companies are struggling with. While marketing departments and agencies are debating the optimal word of mouth strategy … Ryan just does it.

Oh, yeah — Ryan is also the manager of their Chicago store.

No one made him do this stuff, no one paid him to do it, probably no one even knew. He did it because it was a great thing to do, because it’s fun to interact with real customers, and it’s a truly creative activity. Most of what he does is on his own time.

Do you know where your customers are?

This is the fourth post in a series about Social Media Strategy. You can read all of the posts here: series one – social media goals and tactics. Dosh Dosh ran a series on the Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing late in 2007, and I believe that it is worth taking another look at it in light of the changes that the Social Media marketspace has undergone since then.

Search has become vital to every business interest, from marketing to sales to customer service. Using social media networking tools is one of the best methods for improving the results for your business. In fact, real-time search is the newest concept that marketers and news organizations are looking at:

Real-time Search Results

…take a simple example of how Twitter Search changes everything. Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set. [Silicon Valley Insider]

People are talking to each other about your business and you. What does this mean for your business?

3. Improved Search Engine Rankings. When considered within a larger SEO and link building framework, content can be creatively developed and promoted for the purpose of obtaining links from the members of the social news websites.

This means you should primarily target social sites with the highest potential to give you links, instead of smaller-sized communities which only offer interested traffic. While important, your site’s profile need not be entirely relevant to the social media website in question; content can be created specifically to appeal to different audiences. [Dosh Dosh]

Your social media strategy is about creating a connection with other people that leads to a relationship. Building these relationships is the number one thing that you can do to build your business. The internet is a fantastic tool for doing business, but it is only a tool. It is a cheap and easy way to get your name and brand out into the world, but you still have to be there in a very real sense. It is up to you to use the social media networks out there to engage the people that find you online with your friendliness and authority on the topic of your business.

I am not going to dig too deeply into the idea of friendliness, as that is something that you should be pretty familiar with. Essentially it boils down to one concept: Be nice. Authority, on the other hand, can be a little trickier.

How do you showcase your authority?

Give value first, prove your reliability second. It is as simple as that.
Well, there is a little more, but those two points are a good start. Let’s begin with “Giving Value“.

• What value is involved when people meet you?
• What value do you provide with your business?
• What is in it for the people who visit your website?

Take a moment to consider the answers to these questions. While you are at it, think about how you feel when you meet other people. What do you like to get from them? I have found that total strangers generally have at least one thing in common with me, whether it is geography, background, work, skills, hobbies, or interests.

It is your job to find that common ground and plant a seed of interest there. The relationship that grows from that seed will provide the backdrop for many of your future interactions with that person. Even if the relationship begins with something as basic as a common interest in a hobby, you will always have something to talk about before you start talking about business.

Hold the conversations in public

The key to harnessing the power of the social networks is in the fact that these conversations are open to everyone. The topics of these conversations become search results, search results that point back to you or your business!

Mark at M-T Hacks has put together “a Greasemonkey user script that does exactly this. It displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are search for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page:”

Twitter Google Mashup

Get realtime Twitter results on your Google searches:

1. If you don’t already have it, install the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox.
2. Click the “Install” button on the “Twitter Search Results on Google” page on userscripts.org.

This is a fantastic tool and I highly recommend that you install it and start using it to guide your social media marketing.

This is the third post in a series about Social Media Strategy. You can read all of the posts here: series one – social media goals and tactics. Dosh Dosh ran a series on the Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing late in 2007, and I believe that it is worth taking another look at it in light of the changes that the Social Media marketspace has undergone since then.

The goal here is to positively influence the way a potential and existing customer/audience perceives your brand. Work of this nature is less push-orientated and may involve the creation of social media profiles and wikis that rank well on search engines for your brand name. This also includes monitoring public forums and feedback channels to track and address what is said about your site. Some view this as social media optimization, although I would classify it as pull-marketing. [from Dosh Dosh]

Reputation Management and Reputation Monitoring

Keeping an eye on what people are saying about you online is an important part of your marketing effort. Ideally this job is handled by someone at your company that surfs the internet and looks for mentions of your company, good and bad. When they find a compliment, they thank the person and add them to the overall conversation. If this employee finds a complaint or negative comment, they must be empowered to get the complaint fixed and trained on how to respond in a positive way (see a little history at “Responding to Negativity“).

Reputation monitoring is made fairly easy by the use of Google Alerts:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

You can sign up for as many Google Alerts as you would like, using your Google Account. Search for your name, your company name, any other appropriate keywords, and your competitors.

The benefits of getting involved

First, the people writing and posting about your company are not always going to be the big names. Most of the time they are going to be “regular” customers and they will be thrilled that you took an interest in what they had to say, good or bad. Especially bad. Thanking people for compliments will build up its own reward in loyalty and goodwill, but fixing a problem for a customer pays even greater dividends.

Irate customers can become brand evangelists if they are handled properly. And by properly I mean with respect, courtesy, transparency and professionalism. There is an old saying that goes something like this:

“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” ~ Mark Twain

Well, today, all of our customers can buy “ink by the barrel” in that they can publish something on a forum or blog and (theoretically) everyone in the world can see it. If you work hard at making ethical behavior the foundation of your business you will be able to earn trust and respect – the most valuable currency in the internet community. (I wrote about this a while back – “The importance of trust in the Web 2.0 economy“) and my friend Dave Seah made some great points and describes a five-point evolution of this process:

1. Trust has always been part of any successful social endeavor.
2. Our naïve trust in organizations and what they say has been eroded over the past 30-40 years because what they have stood for and said was good for Americans has proven to be a façade built from special interests.People have had to adapt by separating trust from authority and success, whereas before trust was automatic.
3. Trust is the “gut check” that people are now applying to their daily interactions, and they are growing increasingly canny. Kids today, for example, are incredibly media-savvy compared to their grandparents. The emphasis has shifted from “I trust that company” to “I trust what that person is saying is true”.
4. The next stage of actualization would be, “I trust that person to do what he says” followed by “I have seen what he said and did, and it was good.”
5. Companies that reach to consumers have had to adopt this model, an interesting combination of business brand and public relations work.

Culture serves as a beacon to more easily find a certain type of trust and compatible mindset. The social need to flock together, however, is what Community is all about. Culture is the surface expression of values, and community is the underlying sense of belonging. That’s my hypothesis, anyway.

Share your thoughts in the Comments.

This is the second post in a series about Social Media Strategy. You can read all of the posts here: series one – social media goals and tactics.

Content can be created and spread through social media to improve public perception of your brand by evoking specific qualities which make it distinct from others. For new websites or businesses, this pervasive visibility generates brand familiarity. Social media channels can rapidly generate word of mouth and buzz for most brands.

Having a brand-name, whether it is a logo, image, or simple text is extremely easy to create and showcase in the Social Media marketspace. A fun place to look at how people are using and experimenting with brand images is at Twitter. Take a look at some of the avatars that people use to identify themselves:

(Get your twitter mosaic here.)

Images get noticed

Mostly faces, with some logos and artwork. Some of these folks change their avatars from time to time (or daily like Chris Brogan seems to do) for special occasions, marketing programs, or just for fun. If you are beginning to use Twitter as a tool for your business, it is best to choose an appropriate avatar and stick with it until people learn who you are by name.

Use the same avatar everywhere you go, and on every social network that you join. You can even go to gravatar.com and enter the image there in order to spread it around on blogs that enable the service in the Comments area. Then you have the ability to present a consistent branded image everywhere that you get involved with your clients and peers.

If you decide to use a picture, you can simply choose one from your collection. If you prefer a logo, be careful that it can be re-sized and still be recognizable. Whichever image that you choose you should go ahead and upload it to your flickr account (in appropriate sizes) so that the image is readily available to you wherever you are.

Be more than the image

The second part of increasing your brand awareness has to do with what you are saying and how you say it. Your avatar and your name should be enough to let people know who you are (in terms of your business), don’t turn your Tweets and comments into sales pitches with links to your sales page. People get involved with social networking sites for the conversation, for the discussion. You can and should “share links to recent news and updates, but it needs to show that a real person is sharing something of value. Contextualize it. The link is interesting only if the person posting it is credible, and is showing that they are making a judgment call about what is or isn’t worth posting. [from Mashable, ed.]”

Tweet example

In this example Kelly Olexa had shared a blog post that she found, then I “re-tweeted” it after I read it. It was a very good article, and I quoted a little piece of it above. As I told a client earlier in the week, “Don’t get sales-y, just pass on some value or say thanks.”

Focus on building awareness rather than leads

By building your credibility and value as a source of information you will increase the visibility of your brand and enhance its reputation. Let the power of the network work for you in bringing in new leads and potential clients. Get involved, create a conversation, and the business will come.

The next post in this series (social media goals and tactics) will look at reputation management. You can subscribe to these posts by RSS or via e-mail.