Posts tagged ‘social media’

Social Media Marketing is an Investment, Not a “Free” Marketing Channel

Written May 14th, 2012 by

Free Marketing Tools Are Great! Who Doesn’t Love “Free”?

Social Media is a free marketing tool, isn’t it? In the very basic sense of examining it, yes “social media” can be seen as a free marketing tool because there’s very little to no outlay of monetary funds.  Participating in social media, if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging.  The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account.  Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful!  I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept?  That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run.  They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized.  At the end of the day it isn’t free.  There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately.  A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come.  Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different?  The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy?  Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium.  Is it increased buzz or brand lift?  How about increased sales or traffic to the site?  Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution?  Become part of your own community?  Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

  • Investing in Understanding:   “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere

    Do people even know who you are?  Is there any buzz about you?  Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?

  • Invest in Finding Your Audience

    Where are the conversations happening?  Who’s doing the talking about you?

  • Invest in the Approach

    How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services?  How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”

  • Goals & Measurement Need Investment

    Free tools verses Paid Tools?  Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information?  What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions?  Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?

  • Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right

    You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you.  If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means.  However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

 

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why.  The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail.  Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit:  Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit:  Flickr User Pfala

Every Business is Different Especially When Dealing with Social Media Marketing

Written May 9th, 2012 by

A Flock of Sheep (Are You Just a Social Media Sheep?)Just because the media is hyping how the biggest companies or well known celebrities are using the latest, greatest social media site, doesn’t mean that every business should be doing the same. If your competition has a blog that doesn’t mean that you need to have a blog. There’s a lot of  hype around so many different types of social media marketing tactics, from Twitter to Friend Feed, it’s tough not to automatically fall into the trap of the “ooooh, we need that too!”

Unfortunately for a lot of companies, even the most conservative ones, that lure is too strong and they slap up a Facebook page or a Twitter account without thinking about forming a strategy around it.

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Are You Afraid of Loosing Control in Social Media?

Written April 18th, 2012 by

Fear. Fear of Negativity. Fear of Social Media.

Don't Let Fear Paralyze Social Media Efforts

Don't Let Fear Paralyze Social Media Efforts

Almost every company has it when they take one look at what’s going on in social media. The question is whether you embrace it or run from it.

Fear of the unknown, of what “could” happen stops a lot of companies right in their tracks. It also has them making a lot of crazy decisions when it comes to their own internal social media policies.

There’s two pieces to fear in social media that can really hold a company back from being successful with their online marketing strategies. The first piece is being afraid of what your employees are doing online. This fear causes companies to restrict access to the internet. At Search Engine Strategies in New York in March 2010, keynote speaker David Meerman Scott said that 25% of companies restrict their employees access to the internet. Instead of looking at it as an asset, these companies are fearful of what “could” happen.

The second piece is fear of what people are saying in these social media communities, fear of them getting the message wrong or saying something bad. They site this as their reason for not getting involved with social media, or taking an approach of “telling” their customers online things, instead of listening and engaging. They are fearful of how customers are engaging with their products because they want it to be all about those carefully crafted and fine tuned messages they put out.

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Social and Viral Tips from Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 17th, 2011 by

Social marketing succeeds because humans like to share. The “Like Me! Social & Viral Content Tips for Making Your Brand Look Sexy” session on Tuesday at SES San Francisco 2011 had plenty of examples to back that up.

Li Evans

Li Evans, of Libeck Integrated Marketing, explained that a social campaign that goes viral is accidental. It’s nothing you can plan for (this was repeated by Greg Jarboe in a panel on YouTube today.) When thinking about a social media campaign, the goal is show everyone that you or your company are a valuable resource.

Some Social and Viral Tips

When posting to Twitter or writing a Facebook status that links to a web page or video, offer a brief reason about its value to your readers.

Sometimes the point of a social marketing campaign is not exactly about getting more sales or traffic, but rather, changing the perception of a brand. For example, you may recall Proctor and Gamble’s new Old Spice commercial’s featuring the muscled and gorgeous, Isaiah Mustafa. P&G knew the image of an Old Spice man was of an older man, or less modern. To change the perception, they created ads aimed at women by featuring Isaiah, Fabio and other male models. The response was spectacular. The commercials were placed in YouTube and women shared them with their friends. They didn’t sell products as much as it changed perceptions of the product.

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Social Marketing on a Budget Brings Millions in ROI: Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 16th, 2011 by

Social media solutions on a budget was the topic today at 11am for the Social Media track at Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco today. The biggest proof of a low cost approach that rocked was presented by Jeffrey Harmon, of OraBrush.

Harmon, the Chief Marketing officer for OraBrush, told his tale and shared several humorous videos about the surprise success of marketing OraBrush on a tiny budget. Invited by a 75 year old man, who had spent several years trying to market it, without success, Harmon believed he could create a social media campaign that would work. It began by the creation of a $500 video that was released to Youtube about the tongue cleaner product.

Prescribe If You Like Tongue

At the time of the launch of the first video, YouTube had offered a promotional program that where the video would be promoted for $30 a day. The hope was to sell $35 worth of the product for each day the video was promoted. In record time, they got 422.153 million views and in 6 weeks sold out of 10,000 units of the OraBrush. Some of his key points:

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Do We Need ANOTHER Social Networking Site, Google+?

Written July 1st, 2011 by

Who better to help test and spread the word about the new Google+ social networking website than the marketing and user experience industries? I’ve lost track of how many social gigs I’ve joined. Do I need another one?

Google Opens the Gates to Google+

Faster than the speed of sound, the moment Google opened the gate to play with their new toy, I received invitations, and sighed. Sure, it’s Google. But do I really need or want to join another social networking site? What does Google+ offer that Facebook, Linkedin, BranchedOut, Quora, and others don’t already do?

Who is their target user?

Firstly, if you receive an invite to test Google+, go ahead and take it for a spin. It’s free and from a usability perspective, easy to jump in and start using right away. So many people accepted and shared invitations that for a time, the gates were closed. While frustrating, I understood this to be part of their beta testing. Performance testing covers server stress, traffic volume and the stresses on an application by a surge of users. Google may have needed to stop and make adjustments. I got in last night.

Google+ has something for everybody and it looks like they took bits and pieces from other social sites and found ways to incorporate those ideas into their own property.

They ramped up Google chat by adding video.

Just as Facebook has categories for topics like Gardening, Books, Science, etc., Google+ does the same thing, but calls it “Sparks”.

Like Twitter, they show a row or two of tiny profile photos of who you have connected with in your circles.

 

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Social Media Is Everywhere – #SESNY Session Coverage

Written March 31st, 2011 by

On Wednesday at Search Engine Strategies, New York, Li Evans delivered a solo presentation called “Social Media 101″. The foundation of her talk was “Social media is everywhere.” As the author of Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media and CEO of Libeck Integrated Marketing, Evans understands how and why businesses might want to learn more about social marketing.

Liana Evans and her Book

Li Speaking and Showing off her book on Social Media Marketing

Social marketing “gives us a way to talk back”, she stated. The Internet is no longer about one-way communication. People are voicing their opinions more and this provides many marketing opportunities to companies who want to know what you’re listening to, reading, researching and purchasing. Companies know that when something is valuable, it will be shared.

 

Sharing of information is nearly everywhere today and constant. Some examples are instant messaging, social profiles, message boards, forums, blogs, and social sites. “When people share, Google shares.” Be careful when you jump into any Read the rest of this entry »

Integrated Marketing and Rapid Change

Written March 9th, 2011 by

It used to be that you could divide change into three groups: what I can change now or easily, what I can change later, or what is out of my control.  Now that so much is virtual, entire landscapes can change with a single Google update. Does that mean everything is out of our control?

Everything is an awfully big word.

Social Media Marketing Moves at the Speed of Like

working online

Google Me!

Consider the massive numbers of people accessing Social Media and sharing different items all the time. Compared to Search, Social Media is pure quicksilver. In Search, we can optimize medium-to-high volume keywords for a target market and feel we’ve done the basics. Social Media demands pre-emptive preparation. When there can be a new trend every few days, optimizing those target market keywords is not enough. SEO has to anticipate trends stirred up by Social, optimizing terms to guide possible future traffic. The audience for tomorrow’s keywords may not exist yet. That’s the thing about humans – we move around at will. A couple years ago there were no web sites about Justin Bieber, but google him now! One minute there was Justin Bieber and his mom, putting a few videos on YouTube. The next, he was being courted by the agencies of big names like Read the rest of this entry »

SES London – Keynote with Jeffrey Hayzlett

Written February 23rd, 2011 by

SES London opened up on February 22, 2011 with a bang as Incisive Media’s Global VP of Content, Mike Grehan, paced back and forth behind the stage seemingly appearing to talk to himself as he did so. One would think, not knowing him, that he was nervous. Mike will tell you however that he is just trying out the jokes on himself before subjecting the crowd to them.

After a quick housekeeping update letting us know the location of fire exits and giving us the WiFi login and password (to everyone’s delight), Mike then relayed a  quote which I think may very well be the best way to sum up Social Media.

“Social Media is a bit like teenage sex. Everybody likes it but no one knows what to do with it.“

In his opinion, and mine as well, truer words could never be spoken.

The lights dimmed for a moment and then a video presentation began. It was an old timely look at one of the great companies of the 20th century – Kodak. In this video Kodak manages to pack in all the memories we remember. As we all reminisced with our childhood, Jeffrey Hayzlett, the former CMO of Eastman Kodak, and our keynote speaker took to the stage.

After more than a few attempts at making the crowd laugh at what were some Read the rest of this entry »

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