Marketing
successfully on the social web, can be compared to cooking your
favorite dish. If the ingredients are just not right, or are missing,
you are left with a sub-par product. It’s imperative that you get the
dish correct. Lack of a little salt and pepper can make or break a
dish. The same can be said for social marketing, to be effective with
your campaign, you can not leave out any of the key ingredients,
because if you do, you’re left with a sub-par marketing campaign.
Sub-par is just not acceptable on the social web. After all, marketing
is selling. If you’re not doing it effectively, you can certainly bet
the next person is, your competitor.
I recently wrote a good primer called 40 key elements to getting started in social media. It’s mainly for beginners, but the majority of the elements,
ingredients applies to marketers as well. That should be a good
starting point for anyone just getting involved with social media, and
marketing on the social web.
When I got involved with Internet marketing back in 1997, the game
was completely different. There were primarily three forms of
marketing back then. The first was marketing for search or what’s
commonly called SEO nowadays. We optimized our own sites with the
guidelines that still hold true to this day. You can read about a few
of them on a post I wrote called 15 tips on improving search engine visibility.
Of course PPC campaigns was around then, and was very profitable and
cheaper than it is today. There was less competition jockeying for
keywords and the big name in town for search was Overture. This is
before Yahoo bought them out, and way before the days of Google.
The second form of marketing was email. Today it’s commonly called
spam. These were the days before opt-in existed. These were also the
days where you could do a mailing to a million people and average close
to 100 sales. Those days are long long gone. These were the early days
of the web, keep in mind it was truly the wild wild west. Thankfully a
decade later, the web matured and for the most part cleaned itself up.
The third form of marketing was the traditional media buys of banner
advertisements. It was all about CPM back then, a model I never liked
and still don’t.
That was then. Today is a completely different ball game for marketing:
While the same avenues for marketing still exist. Today the social
web needs to be factored in along with the traditional mechanisms for
marketing. The traditional marketing methods of one-way, one-sided
communication simply do not work when applied to social media. Social
media is all about two-way communication.
What social media is:
The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation,
community, commenting, collaboration and contribution. These are the
five fundamentals that companies and marketers must understand to be
able to successfully market on the social web.
What social media is not:
Social media marketing is not about spamming. It is not about list
building with the intent to spam them with your wares. It’s not about
one-way communication.
Social media is not Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Social media is
about the conversations that are taking place on these platforms, some
may be about your brand some may not.
Social media is not about the tools. The tools are only facilitators of the message.
Starting with the basics first, a blog:
Establish your identity and presence. This starts with a blog. The Twitter
and social networking accounts come second. Your blog is your home
base. You might already have a website established as your home base,
this is fine, but you need to attach a blog onto it. Your blog is your
voice, your website is not. The website is your secure point of sale
for your product. Your blog is not used to spam your product, but to
promote it. Create newsworthy, thoughtful, intelligent content that
has immediate usefulness. Offer tips, tricks and informational content
relating to your product and or industries. Your blog affords you the
opportunity to become an expert and authority for your related product
field, use it wisely. You know your product best, be passionate about
it and let people know . Blogging is an open tw0-way forum of
communication, encourage commenting as often as possible. Your blog is
a tool for getting the message out there, in time others will pick up
the message and spread it.
Be creative, add product videos, tutorials, and other forms of
user/customer generated content. Answer customer questions and feedback
directly and openly using your blog. Your blog is about promoting your
product, finding the necessary hooks should be easy. By doing this
you’re also establishing a footprint with the search engines. Blogs are
an excellent source for search engine traffic. Be consistent with your
blogging, optimize each and every blog post correctly, and you will
start seeing the benefits from search engine referrals. Remember Google
does not discriminate, on the same hand you need to tell Google you
exist, and that your blog is an authority on a subject matter. Telling
Google you exist is the easy part. The authority part comes from
inbound links, quality at that.
Change your blog permalink structure immediately:
By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and
lots of numbers in them. This will severely limit the amount of traffic
you will see from search engines. Make sure any content you publish on
the web has the keywords of the subject or story headline formatted in
the permalink/web URL. As an example, look at the url of the last post I published, it was called “Netvibes: The New Social Media Dashboard. ” The permalink for that post is, michaelfruchter.com/blog/2009/01/netvibes-the-new-social-media-dashboard/.
Your permalink structure should look like this at the very least. You
can also take it a step further and completely eliminate the month and
year from the url structure. The point is keyword placement, every
thing you publish needs to have the relevant keywords in the URL. This
will make you or break you in terms of search engine relevance and
rankings.
Go where the conversations are taking place:
Your customers are on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
and so forth. Establish identities on these networks, groups, and most
importantly a following. Simply creating an account on these networks
with little or no interaction is pointless. If you are going to use
these tools as a one-way form of communication, then you will
accomplish nothing. That equates basically to spamming, and you will be
ignored rather quickly. Gain insight into the communities of interest
and actively participate in them.
Venture into new territories:
News flash, the social web is not just Twitter, Facebook, and
MySpace. If you plan on successfully marketing, you need to constantly
be expanding your horizons. There are tons of other opportunities you
need to be looking at and establish a presence on. The first that
comes to my mind is Ning. Ning is very niche and targeted as it allows users
to create their own social websites and social networks. This is not an
opportunity to spam, but rather an opportunity to join the
conversation, participate and add value to it. The marketing part comes
later, only after you have earned the trust and respect of the
community, never beforehand. Ning is also a place to create and form a
community around your product, that is if one does not exist already.
There are also alternatives to Youtube and Digg, see what I mean? Never
limit yourself, that’s foolish.
Create, build and maintain a following:
People who express interest about your product are either friends,
followers or fans. It’s vital that you friend these people and follow
them back on all the social networks you are on, and will be
participating in. Friending anyone and everyone is list building, this
is meaningless. Only friend and follow the people back who are
conversating about your brand. Anyone who has even the slightest
interest in your brand, follow back. You need to be receptive with
people who are trying to engage you positively. Without a following you
don’t exist, it’s that simple. Remember social marketing is basically
word of mouth marketing, these are the mouths that will be spreading
the word. These are the people who will be Twittering your content,
Digging your content, sharing your content and so forth. I can’t stress
enough how important it is to have meaningful relationships with these
people. They are for the most part loyal brand endorsers. You need to
be as loyal to them as they are to you. This is done by engaging and
replying to them in conversations, wherever they may be taking place,
Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Blogs etc. Send them free stuff every
once in a while, people love the free perks. You get the picture.
Forget email marketing. Your fans and friends are your opt-in marketing list.
I won’t say email marketing is completely useless, but this is not
1997, 98, or 99 anymore either. You should definitely set up an opt-in
email list for customers or potential customers who legitimately want
to be notified of product updates. Do not rely solely on email
marketing or email list buying, it’s a waste of time in todays Web 2.0
era. On the social web your followers and friends are your opt-in
email list. Lets face it, email marketing ends up as spam, either the
user who opted-in marks it for spam, or spam filters marks it as spam.
There is also a cost involved with sending emails. The costs are for
the list leads, sending the emails, and the cost involved with possibly
getting shut down for a brief period of time by your web hosting
company. How much does it cost to send updates to your followers on
Twitter, Facebook and so forth? That’s right, you guessed it, nada,
nothing, zero. Your followers don’t have the option of marking your
messages as spam. Sure they can ignore it or unfollow you, but that’s
about it. If they are following you, it’s for a reason. You will
always have their attention for the most part. Do people forward email
marketing messages to other friends and family? Highly unlikely. Now
can we say the same thing about Twitter, one word, retweet. You get the
picture now?
Content is king, be creative with content creation and promotion:
Create content that matches the channels you are trying to market
to. Social media content is primarily user generated content. Your
marketing content and strategies should focus on a mix of
professional and user/customer generated content. Visual sells, visual
is also what goes viral. Create content that will get people talking,
sharing, digging, stumbling and forwarding emails. Your content should
be remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. Simple static content was good
in the Web 1.0 era, but not the Web 2.0 era. Take a look around on
Digg, Reddit, and Youtube, pay attention to what’s hot and what’s not.
These are good indicators to follow. Your existing customers are a good
source for user generated content. There are so many directions you can
run with by using your customer base. Encourage and give people the
tools to promote your content as well. The tools exist and they are
free.
Target, readjust and maintain your branded campaign pages:
Take a look at your profile and landing pages and adjust them
accordingly to the communities you are targeting. Maintain these pages
as often as possible with content updates. All to often, companies have
abandoned their branded campaign pages, that were part of a larger
marketing campaign often setup by PR firms. Most of these pages signed
up thousands of friends, fans and followers. When the campaign ended,
these pages became ghosts. Thousands of friends and followers are left
in limbo. You see this time and time again on every social networking
site on the net. Every follower and friend is a value target, each and
every single one of them, treat them as such.
Track everything:
Measure everything when possible. Anayltics is key for measuring and
tracking visitor information. Use tracking URLs in your marketing
campaigns and social profiles. Guessing simply does not cut it. A smart
marketer is an informed one.
Create a social media dashboard:
Tracking website anayltics is easy. You also need to track and
monitor what is being said online about your brand. Twitter mentions,
blog posts, comments, and so forth. Create a central hub to monitor all
this activity. You have two options, use a company such as Radian6 or Filtrbox, or create your own monitoring dashboard as I have outlined in this post using Netvibes.
Your dashboard should also integrate your website anayltics, tracking
url statistics, follower counts, bookmarks, video plays etc.
There are obviously a few more ingredients to throw into the pot.
This post just touched upon a few of the essentials. You can read more
of my thoughts and insight for marketing on the social web for 2009, in
this eBook, that I recently collaborated on with 11 other marketing professionals.
By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)
Image by Chotda under Creative Commons License.
