Frederic Martin's List: Social Media

• Despite the optimism, the social web and the practice of better connecting with customers through social technologies is new territory for most companies. Traditionally, communications between companies and customers has focused on marketing, sales and customer service.
• According to analysis of Peter Kim’s social media examples wiki, early adopters of social media are focusing on blogging, social networking, microblogging and video in the Retail, Consumer Goods/Services, High Tech, Media/Entertainment, Automotive and Financial Services industries.
• There are over 900 examples on the wiki.beingpeterkim.com site.
• SEO for most companies is tough enough. Add social media to the mix and many are lost.
• According to Marketingsherpa’s Social Media Marketing & PR survey, adoption of social media is low mostly because of uneducated/in experienced staff along with difficulty in measuring direct ROI.
• It’s hard to win management buy-in and budget without those resources.
• Even when companies do implement social media or SEO tactics, they tend to do so independently or siloed from each other.
• Core objectives for social media efforts tend to focus on building community.
• In contrast, company SEO efforts focus mostly on generating leads and sales.
• The realization that implementing SEO best practices with social media content creation/promotion can actually extend social reach via search as well as compliment an existing SEO program is where the SEO and Social opportunity lies.
• A good example of social popularity turning into good search visibility is Blendtec. The video where they “blend” an iPhone has over 6 million views, 6,000 inbound links and ranks top 10 on Google for the search phrase, “blender“.

• What parts of social media content should you optimize with keywords? For situations where you are the one creating the content, optimize:

   
   
  • Titles
   
  • File names
   
  • Descriptions
   
  • Anchor text
   
  • Annotations, show notes, transcriptions
• In cases of consumer generated content, you can influence keyword optimization through the content management system and tools used by consumers to publish.
• Examples include: keyword rich categories built in (and required), suggested keyword rich tags, sorting top content using keyword lists, and many others.
• Of course, SEO isn’t much without links and the ability to promote, share and attract links is one of the most significant SEO benefits from social media.
• The key thing to remember about leveraging social media for link building is to create content worthy of getting a link in the first place.
• Then measure content stuctures, formats, media types and sites that work best and refine.
• The kicker with creating great content is that no one will know you’ve created that exceptional content unless you tell them.
• So, promotion is very important as is the development of channels to distribute your content.
• RSS works well as does building out networks on relevant social media sites ranging from Facebook to StumbleUpon to YouTube.
• Working search and social media tactics together can amplify many of the core objectives.
• The bottom line is that companies who make the effort and investment to figure out how to test, build expertise and mangage though a strategy, will achieve a distinct competitive advantage over companies that wait.

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• Social Media Best Practices:
• Start with a plan, not tactics.
• “Give to get”
• Commit resources & time to be successful
• Be transparent with intentions
• Understand, you do not control the message.
• Welcome participation, feedback and co-creation.
• Metrics should roll up to objectives
• Social Media Worst Practices:
• Being fake in any way
• Not listening.
• Being oblivious to formal & unwritten social rules.
• Being pushy or overtly salesy in messaging
• • Approaching social media channels as silos

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• Social Media falls between the cracks inside many consumers’ brands because it is so new and it is not funded properly. Inside the major corporate agencies, they are just getting their heads around the web and haven't event started to understand this medium, nor how they can make money off of it.
• What are the opportunities of social media?
  
• Social media is part of the same "sharing" meme that has brought us the open-source movement, open APIs, Wikipedia and other examples of mass collaboration.
• Instead, consumer ecosystems have the power. Marketing + Communications is no longer a "broadcast" or "mass media" model. Consumers expect a dialogue with marketers, and reward those companies that subscribe to this philosophy.
• Consumers now have the power, not marketers. Once marketers release their messages "into the wild," they no longer have as much control over what happens to that message.
• Social media has changed the balance of power between marketers and consumers.
• How has social media changed marketing and communications?
• There are also opportunities for brands to develop new online social structures that complement those already found offline and also opportunities to monitor, control and influence reputation on the Web.
• What are the opportunities of social media?
• Opportunities also exist in the creation of new business models in which companies "outsource" tasks (i.e. marketing, R&D) to consumers.
• An opportunity exists for "sharing" to penetrate into new areas of society and business via new innovations in social media.
• How should a major consumer brand use Social Media? What are some practical tips for senior marketing management?
• What is social media marketing?
• Social Media Marketing is the act of a brand spreading its message through various social technologies.
• SECTION 2: STRAWBERRYFROG’S APPROACH TO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
• Step 1. Define the ‘Social Strategy’ for your brand.
  Many social networking marketing activities fail because they do not define the social strategy ahead of executional concepts.
• a) Define the key social behaviors of your target online – where are they socializing?
• What are the social habits, (e.g. Forester has social networking consumer profile segments such as Critics, Spectators, Sharers etc) on line?
• There are also differences in usage by demographics and lifestage. You've got a few groups of people heavily active in social media on a daily basis. Sixty-seven percent of young adults visit their social networking site once a day or more – these are people who are on their computers all day (20s to mid 30 somethings; folks with lower to mid level positions) and people with time to kill (high school, college students).
• b) Identify your brand’s social behavior and objective in the social space – how should it socialize with your target? What is the brand’s primary purpose in the social network?
• Facilitating self-expression? Listening? What is it’s role at this social party and what useful tools can it create to facilitate this?
• STEP 2. Create social media content, don’t advertise on it. If you’re not providing content, ensure you are providing a useful service.
• If you look at what Social Media does, it helps people with a certain aspect of their lives. And that is managing their social life. It ENABLES them to DO something they are already interested in. It GIVES them the tools to allow for this. Social media provides a service - information, connection points, etc.
• Brands are often interrupting that message. They need to figure out how NOT to do that. How to either become part of the service, provide their own service or just limit their level of annoyance on the playground.
• I'll listen to your marketing message if you're providing me a service. Because people aren't interested in advertising per se - they are only interested in what it can do for them.
• Call it utilitainment, interactive digital or whatever you want, your brand idea has purpose.
• Social marketing DON’TS
• 1) Don’t violate the rules of social media
• Often marketers and brands violating basic rules of social media. For Facebook no matter how targeted the message (or fancy or clever), it was still going to cause a revolt because Facebook wasn’t meant as a platform for marketing – it had a 100% social purpose.
• 2) Don’t duplicate established social communities– if your audience is using a strongly established community (i.e. recipe sharing), why re-create a duplicate, marketing based branded version of the same community?
• 3) Don’t hijack consumer’s social networks
  One of the failures of Facebook marketing was that it hijacked the existing culture of the community.

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• Facebook Pages present a massive opportunity for brands to directly engage with their existing and future customers, even the occasional passer-by.
• Below, I have outlined 10 tips for creating engaging Facebook Pages. These are only the top 10 and there are many other lessons to be learned but this should serve as the ultimate starter guide for any brand/company looking to make their entrance into Facebook.
• 1. Develop Custom Tabs for Custom Ads
• Advertising your brand’s page is always extremely important. One of the greatest features of Facebook’s new pages product is that you can link directly to specific tabs. That means you can separate which pages a user views by default based on the ad that they clicked on.
• 2. Don’t Let New Users Land on the Wall
• Seriously though, there is a huge opportunity to present users with engaging information and while the content provided by fans of your brand can be engaging, you have absolutely no control over it. That’s why it’s much better to have new visitors enter a controlled environment and then proceed to navigate through areas with less structure.
• 3. Create a Unique Page Image
• Recently Rob Banagale, a guest author on AllFacebook, published an article entitled “5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo“. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you check it out.
• 4. Integrate Applications To Increase Engagement
• There are currently over 55,000 applications on the Facebook platform and a relatively large portion of them can be directly integrated into your fan page.
• For larger brands I highly recommend that you develop a more robust experience for the user. Games, quizzes, and other types of dynamic content in general can help keep users on your Facebook Page for longer durations of time.
• One thing you should make sure is that your application has a call to action so that when a new user lands on the page they are immediately engaged.
• 5. Join the Conversation, It’s Not Optional Anymore
• That means every time someone comments on your new status, a photo, a video, a discussion thread, or anything else, you need to comment on it.
• Gone are the days of a one-way conversation in which the brands talk down to their customers. We are in the midst of a conversational revolution and your company needs to be part of it. At this point, you don’t have the option not to participate.
• They’ll ask you questions that you can reply to and you can ask questions as well. Ask about what would improve their experience with your company.
• Also, ask them about the world in general because at the end of the day, they’re humans just like you.
• 6. Publish Interesting and Relevant Content
• By regularly referencing other relevant content, your fans will keep returning to your page.
• In virtual economies, one of the most effective measurements of the state of an economy is repeat usage.
• you should be able to find relevant content to your readers by doing a search on Google Blogsearch, and leveraging an RSS reader like Google Reader
• 7. Repost Comments By Other Users
• By reposting a person’s information, you are complimenting them and they will be more likely to pay attention to you.
• Don’t overuse this though!
• 8. Update Regularly!
• Just as I’ve emphasized the importance of quality content and engagement with your fans, the most important thing is persistence.
• 9. Post and Tag Users in Photos and Videos
• Tagging users in photos and videos is probably one of the most effective promotional activities that you can do.
• The best way to get photos and videos of your fans is through hosting events as I mention in the next tip but if you can’t host events, you’ll need to come up with creative ways to tag your fans.
• One way would be to introduce a contest to your fan page and then tag the winners of those awards in a trophy photo. If you want to take that idea a step further you could actually integrate your fans’ photos into the trophies.
• Tagging users is a naturally viral process because as soon as you tag one person, their friends see it and then users are driven to that album which in this case, resides within your fan page.
• There is one extremely limiting factor about fan page photos though: you must be a friend of a user to tag them! Yes, it’s unfortunate and honestly I don’t think it makes much sense. While Facebook should enable fan pages to tag members of the page, they haven’t done so yet. Theoretically I could suggest leveraging “guerilla tactics” or overly aggressive techniques to tag members. What are these “guerilla tactics” that I speak of? Well you can figure it out on your own but one example would be adding a fan as a friend for the sole purpose of tagging them in a photo.
• 10. Leverage the Power of Facebook Events
• Events provide an amazing opportunity for brands to reach out to their fan base.
• I’ve only touched on ten strategies that can be used to drive new fans to your page but ultimately, the more time you invest in your brand’s Facebook page, the better response you’ll get.

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