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Giving my First Presentation on Social Media Marketing

Since I made the move to South Africa, life has certainly been a lot different for me. Getting to devise strategies for some of the worlds biggest companies into how they can go about getting Social Online is a pretty big responsibility at the age of 18 but definitely something I love.

The thing is, the real reason I’m here is to head up the Social Media team, so now comes the time when the training begins. With 2 months down and just less than 4 weeks before my flight back ‘home’ to England, I’m doing my first of many presentations to the gang here from the basics to advanced sectors of Social Media Marketing.

Here’s a look at some of the presentations I’m going to be doing:

Building Social Media Profiles & Understanding Viral Content
Reputation Management
Writing Viral Copy (this one is for the copywriters)
How to Create Social Media Proposals (we seem to get new business on a daily-basis)

Now for those who don’t know me, I’m not the most confident person in the world so while I’m sure ill be nervous (there’s only about 10 people watching) I think it’s going to do me the world of good and I will have gained a lot of confidence after doing so. You never know, it may even help me build up the confidence to apply to speak at a much bigger event.

I’m doing a test of the presentation today (Building Social Media Profiles & Understanding Viral Content) and doing the full thing on friday, here’s a look at what it will cover:

What is Viral Content
Examples of Social Media Success
Sites to Register On (for our team of staff to get busy with)
How to Use These Sites
Reasons for Using Them
How This Can Relate to Your Clients

I’m still debating my future over here in South Africa but it certainly won’t be the work that puts me off coming back; my life is in the UK afterall. I’m hoping I’ll have some new found confidence after all this and help BlueSouth have a stronger team that understands more about SMM than any other internet marketing company out there.

I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes!

9 Comments / November 20th, 2007 / Social Media

Social Media Marketing is Not SEO

I think we’ve all been guilty of the onslaught of social media information these past few months. A quick look on Sphinn even shows you how popular the subject has been within the majority of online marketing blog’s. Don’t get me wrong, Social Media Marketing can produce some great results for clients, but it certainly shouldn’t be used as a substitute for other marketing channels.

Positives of SMM

Can send a large amount of traffic to a site over a short-time period
Enables people to share information faster than ever before to the masses
Backlinks can be gained by the thousands if a content-piece ‘gets out there’
It allows anybody or anything to get on the map quicker than ever

Drawbacks to SMM

You can’t guarantee results and success often relies on the participation of others
It can take an awful long time and a lot of work before any results are seen
For big companies it can appear to be ’spammy’ or ‘unethical’ and give them a bad name if not done correctly
The Process of getting involved in communities and interacting with others is time consuming and when working for clients it can be hard to show where your work went

SMM & SEO Fuse Together

Those who understand both of these marketing sectors well, will understand that Social Media Marketing and SEO compliment each other in many ways. We certainly aren’t saying that they can’t be offered as seperate services, but to get the best bang for your online marketing efforts both should be considered and at least mildly utilised.

So how do / can they work together?

Blogging - Although blogging is a completely seperate thing on it’s own. It gives you a platform on which you can add viral / linkbait content that you can then have promoted around the web. Blogging was offered as an SEO tip to me nearly 2 years ago and I have been doing it ever since. It gives you more pages on a site that can be indexed by Search Engine’s and allows you to rank for less searched keywords but that can still drive a lot of traffic overall (long-tail).

Community Participation - Blog Commenting, Forum Posting and content creation on other sites not only helps you increase your brand online and helps leverage traffic from within the community but any links that you are getting on these sites are obviously also going to help with your link-building efforts. With this in mind you might want to check your on-site SEO is up to scratch so you are getting link-weight pointed at pages that have some form of decent web design structure (titles, meta-data, relevant content), and linking with relevant anchor text.

Keep Your Viral Content Relevant - One of the reasons SMM is so popular is that it can bring a massive amounts of backlinks to a content piece, for e.g. Google Webmaster Central reports over 450 backlinks for our post on the Top 50 StumbleUpon Users. If you are a company that offers something like ‘conservatory building’ or ‘window cleaning’ it can be difficult to think up some viral content. That still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to create a piece on ‘The World’s Ugliest Dogs (and Owners)’, even though the backlinks might help generally it would be much better to stay in the home improvement / development niche when thinking about content. This can help with specific rankings for certain keywords as people often use link anchor text that is the same as the title of the story they are linking too and it’s likely to get more backlinks from the relevant niche.

In Conclusion

Social Media Marketing has been viewed as an easy way to build backlinks, it certainly doesn’t replace making titles unique, setting up a nice internal linking structure and cleaning up those duplicate pages. Who would really benefit from links pointing at a page with the title ‘Home’ or ‘Company Name’? If you want to read more on the subject stay right here on our Social Media blog, or check out some of our favourite blogs on the subject which include Social Desire, Collective Thoughts, Blogstorm and the Ignite Blog.

7 Comments / November 19th, 2007 / Social Media

Social Media Marketing Ebook - What would you like to see?

With my deep interest in social media, creating viral content and watching it spread; being paid to do what I love is pretty awesome. I’ve been in South Africa for 2 months now and have gotten to work with some pretty huge clients, one’s that I certainly couldn’t imagine working with at the age of 18 and certainly not leading their Social Strategies.

I’ve come to love the topic after finding it to be a great way to build backlinks and buzz, and basically want to get everything written down in an e-book or site section that will be updated every few months (a bit like SEOBook). Whether this will be free or paid I’m still unsure, I’m thinking towards the free option.

I have a lot of topics in mind and a lot of them have already been written but I would like to know what else you guys would like to see in the Ebook, so please feel free to leave a comment below, you might just get a mention in the credits and thank you’s.

16 Comments / November 13th, 2007 / Social Media

Case Example: Social Media Marketing Campaign

I don’t think there’s enough commentary on the web about SMM campaigns and how companies who offer Social Media services really go about doing it. Therefore I thought I would put up this post as an insight to how I personally do things, the approach I am using here has been done effectively for many companies and I know similar campaigns worked well for a huge motor company.

Knowing Your Goals

If you are going to do a Social Media campaign for a company, you have to find out what they hope to achieve, whether it’s branding, whether it’s for links in order to increase Search Engine rankings or just to build a known communication hub for them.

Only when you know what you want to achieve can you start to do research into your market, knowing that is crucial. One of the most popular requests or reasons for companies to engage in Social Media is not in order too increase website traffic but to have a voice. Have somewhere online where people can see you are human, you acknowledge what is being said about you and you try to give back to the online community.

Dell did this with IdeaStorm, they allowed their users to have a voice and also gave themselves one at the same time. By no means are all these operations successful as you will learn about Walmart in our post about Social Marketing failures but when done properly they can work.

How we would give ______ a voice

There are thousands of companies out there who are yet to really embrace online communities and increase brand awareness via social mediums, therefore this case study could apply to any one of them.

Have a Platform

Having a platform does not mean that one has to be on a companies own website, a platform could include a video sharing site like youtube but most commonly it is an application on their own domain. Blogs are a very popular choice, and that is because they work. They allow a company to get information out there and they allow users to give feedback, no longer is it a one-way conversation but it allows companies to show they are ready for the two-way channel.

Cadillac have a blog that updates very regularly and has been around a few months. As you can see from post’s like this people want to get involved and want to be able to ask for information. This allows GM to know where they are failing to give out information and what they can improve upon. Without asking in a human manner for this kind of feedback how would they have known?

Lesson: Not allowing direct feedback may work for some, but overall it’s not a good idea. Social media is about having a conversation and allowing others to interact. Blog comments can be moderated and you should let a company know this, and inform them that they shouldn’t try to ‘control’ the conversation. Anything irrelevant however can be controlled unlike a platform such as a forum where this becomes more difficult.

Give someone passionate, Control

When working with a company on getting involved in Social Media, you wan’t to make sure they don’t treat a site like a press release. Blog’s are there to be easy going, not corporate. People don’t want to read press releases but they do want to read about something they are passionate about from someone who is passionate about it.

People who tend to best suit the role aren’t necessarily the CEO’s or the Directors but people who have been with a company for a long time just out of the love for doing what they do or who they do it for. This ’someone’ needs the permission to be honest and it needs to be explained to a company that being so open can lead to both negative and positive feedback. It’s in their best interest to use their voice to deal with the negative and expand on the positive.

Lesson: Companies sometimes need help in understanding why they can’t just release press-like news and why giving someone who knows the company well, the opportunity, is important.

Learn How to Listen

Using Dell as a further example, they started off their Social Media journey with an absolute nightmare.

Last Thursday, Consumerist.com posted a list of tips submitted by a former Dell sales manager that told, among other things, how to get the best deals and even get a free laptop replacement at the end of a warranty cycle. This kind of stuff is Consumeristâ€™s bread and butter - and Dell one of its favorite targets - so the site gleefully ran the secrets, along with commentary from a current Dell rep.

Dell must have been ripped, but it then threw gasoline on the fire. On Friday, Dell sent a corporate lawyer after Consumerist with a cease-and-desist notice. What a boneheaded maneuver that was. Naturally, Consumerist posted the lawyerâ€™s threat along with a response. The exchange made the Dell lawyer look clueless, particularly since she never disputed the accuracy of the Consumerist information

(via)

Dell learned how to listen and created a platform to help them listen specifically. Of course not everyone has the money and / or brand recognition like Dell so for smaller companies you can be a little different. Personally I like to use ‘Buzz Monitoring’ tools and then feed these through to the company directly. This is often a combination of services such as Google Alerts for news in the blog-o-sphere or using Serph to find information on the likes of Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us as well. It’s a good idea to scour search results to see things that have been said in the past that may be noticed by regular searchers that may want ‘pushing down’ in the SERPs.

Listening out for your brand doesn’t even have to be automated, simple search queries like “brand” “forums” allow you to see discussions of your company that have been made on a public forum. I’ve seen many examples of some big companies interacting with people via message boards and receive a lot more respect from members for doing so.

Lesson: Teach the company how to do this themselves or give them the option for you to do it for them. Make both options clear and explain why listening is important if needed. Using Examples such as the Dell case here tends to help companies understand where they are going wrong.

Audience Engagement

Just simply giving your visitors the opportunity to engage, it certainly doesn’t mean that they will. Theres a few ways to ‘get involved’ in Social Media, some of my favourites include linking back to other bloggers and joining in ‘their conversations’. For companies who have received a lot of cricism I would even go so far as to tell them to respond to it in the open and let people continue the discussion on their site.

Just like any form of online engagement you want to encourage people to take action and do something. Tell people that their comments are likely to be heard, responded too and make an impact on your decisions. Other engagement possibilities could inlude adding a rating system on products / services to make it easy for people to get involved and give you feedback in the simplest forms.

If you plan on taking part in online conversations or starting ‘hot topics’ yourself then make sure it’s kept up, there’s nothing worse then a fly by showing and then nothing coming from a company

Lesson: Make engagement easy and encourage it. Nobody wants to take part if they think they are talking to themselves or their views aren’t going to be heard. One step further from linking to other bloggers is responding to criticism or comments directly on your blog to show you are listening and to show you are ready to answer. Too many companies are afraid to take these risks but they have a lot to learn.

Check the Results

If somebody really did take the time to go out there and work out what they want a company to gain, find out whether it’s being achieved. If not work out what strategy ideas were thought up at the start of the process, where they may have went wrong and how they could have been changed. I recently showed how not all attempts will work successfully, but as in personal life you learn from mistakes and come back with something better.

Some of the things you might want to look back over are:

Engagement
Website Traffic / Branding
Monitoring what is being said
How much of the feedback and ‘noise’ has been answered
How is the current system working out

Lesson: Realise that not just having goals, but regularly checking to make sure they are working is important. This allows for fast changes that don’t need business meetings to be put into place to improve the conversions and effeciency in which the desired output can be achieved.

Summary

This is just one example of a full Social Media Marketing campaign. Just brand monitoring can well be a huge full-time job for a large company, analysing what is being said, working out what needs attention first then getting then continuing the conversation out there on the web.

We don’t just perform SMM services but if you are starting to get into them yourself, I hope this gives you an idea of how some go about it, and how you can consider going about it aswell. Look out for other posts of ours relating to viral content creation and distribution.

5 Comments / November 8th, 2007 / Social Media

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Giving my First Presentation on Social Media Marketing

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Social Media Marketing Ebook - What would you like to see?

Case Example: Social Media Marketing Campaign

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