Here’s my post on what I got out of Tom Parish’s SM Marketing Metrics panel. If you’re looking to read about the Meebo/Tweeter mini-revolt, it’s in posts below. Email me or drop a comment if you have any questions or want clarification on any of these points. I’m sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com.I’m here in the audience listening to experts discuss and debate social media strategies and metrics. I had always thought SM would be easier with bigger companies. They already have brand following and a huge number of users. If 1% of the Microsoft or Apple users create content and interact in meaningful ways, that’s a heck of a lot of people. Those are the kinds of things to look at and wish for when you’re approaching SM for a small or medium sized business. The audience size makes it easier. However, the giant gnarly corporate structure makes it incredibly hard to get things implemented–and you have a lot more pressure to prove the value of something. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are some things that hold true.

• You can’t start by hosting a fancy, new platform for interaction. You start small, build a reputation and experience. Then you can move into the next phase.
• Blogs are where to start. It’s not unusual for the page views of the blog to surpass those of the site. The buzz that a blog can generate may very well be the push the C-levels need to give the go-ahead to moving into further SM programs.
• The other way to go might be an internal effort. If people start interacting and being more productive through the ease of social media interactions, how much more valuable will the interaction be once it introduces feedback and input from customers? Internal, firewalled blogs like Dell’s are one option, but really anything where you get people from different departments able to be talking to each other is a good thing.
• Moving customers out of the marketing loop and into one for retention risks losing their customer evangelism to their friends because they stop being marketed to. The message becomes that you’re not as valuable anymore, when, in fact, these people are incredibly valuable assets that are seriously under-utilized. SM is a way o keep them in the marketing loop while giving them tools they need to evangelize to their friends.
• Regarding reputation and crisis management… A press release is not a platform. When these things happen, you have the opportunity to demonstrate how it could have been avoided and how you can fix it through social media. Companies that had been hesitant or resistant before are often suddenly very receptive once they understand how helpful using SM could have been.

The last question was awesome: Regarding the net gen who uses social media and networks constantly and in a totally integrated way, there are billions of dollars at stake going forward. What needs to be proved and how do you utilize these for marketing in an authentic and provable way? The panelists talked about creating things of lasting value that are actually useful–i.e., actual content and not ads. I agree, but what do you think?

No, not by the IRS. We’re talking about having an SEO agency do an audit of your site. It’s something we believe in so strongly that it’s become a policy for us to start with a site audit. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what’s broken or why or how to fix it. Starting a web marketing expedition without the audit is just like taking your car to the mechanic and saying, “It’s making this noise sometimes, and I smelled something funny.” Then him saying, “Oh, that’ll be $3,000.” And then you pay it. If it doesn’t work, you can pay him some more or chalk it up to those cars and their confounding mechanical systems.

You don’t do that, though. No! You get it diagnosed. That’s why there’s a diagnostic fee–they really do have to do some work and look around to tell you what’s wrong. If you’re debating about whether the money spent on a site audit is worth it, the answer is yes. This great little article from Search Engine Land covers the stages of search marketing and SEO your company might find itself in, then explains how an audit would be of assistance wherever you are. Go forth and read!

Susan the Meticulous has had a relationship with social media like those little birds with twiggy legs at the beach have with the water. They run toward the incoming wave, get a little bit of a leg or beak wet, and then turn around and run away fast. While I believe in the power of telling, and believing a priori is not a strong suit of mine, I go through periods of resistance to blogging, filling out the “about me” part of the social network profile, saying any more than absolutely is necessary. I struggle between desire to share and fear of exposure. Personally, it’s the fear of saying that one very wrong thing. Professionally, well, it’s exactly the same.

What do you think - do younger people, people who have been blogging or reading blogs since their teens and are now in the workforce - have that same fear? Privateness - it just seems to be so, like, out. Controlling who one is to others by self-editing, holding back, playing cards close to the chest…who needs that layer of faking it? Hey, duh, we change, we evolve, we adopt new perspectives. Yesterday we were blue and today we’re red. If we’re smart, we are where our customers are and trying to figure out if orange is next and if so exactly what shade.

Here’s another wonder: for seo agency client companies marketing to people young enough and social-media-centric enough to assume that a transparent evolving personal or corporate identity is the norm, what are the limits of the fabled transparency?

Corporate competition always has been secretive. Will businesses seeking to prosper in a social-media public relations framework adopt a norm of carefully spawning yet another public corporate image - people creating characters whose purpose it is to be real people on social media? Perhaps a persona of a CEO telling all or an entry-level worker climbing the ladder, personas we’re drawn to… personas manufactured as distraction and to give the appearance of transparency.

Or will social media be able to do what it seems like it could do – through sheer volume of uncontrolled communication, be able to establish a fairly enforceable terrain of true and customer-mandated transparency?

Immediate engagement starts before your prospects visit your site. Maybe they’ve listened to those enlightened podcasts you’ve been cranking out for the last few months, or seen the wacky videos you’ve posted on YouTube.

The more you focus on drawing prospects from social media, the more likely they will get to know you on a personal level before they know you professionally. Once they’re engaged, don’t loose them with corporate speak.

BAD, BAD HOME PAGE
Consider the following example from the home page of the fictional Happy Baby Megacorp website.

At Happy Baby Megacorp, makers of Happy Baby Cloth Diapers, the rashless diaper solution, and H.B. Powder Ups, the only baby powder with added vitamins, our goal is to be the global leader in portable infant waste entrapment and removal solutions for working mothers, in-home infant health care workers, and government-supported and private health care facilities.

Seriously, nobody cares what your goals are. They just want their babies’ butts to be clean. Building loyalty comes from helping people meet their needs. As marketing professionals, you already know that.

The danger for us as marketers is the potential disconnect between the personal voice we use with social media and the professional voice we use on our website, particularly the home page. So how do we maintain our professional dignity without losing their interest?

First, be consistent with your message. You can’t just go off on some obscure diaper example without having an underlying message that matches the message on your site. Have fun with the social media, but stay on message.

Second, always talk to your prospects on their level. That gives a consistent feel to the conversation as they move from connecting with you “out there” in the social media universe to their interaction with your website and eventually with you.

Third, engage them at every step. Your vision statement sounds like the Happy Baby Megacorp example above. Keep it to yourself. Consider how your home page sounds to the person who only knows you from your quirky blog posts.

Finally, use excellent organic seo practices. People may be entertained by your social media content, but they will likely use search to find the right solution.

SEO’s flexibility gives you the advantage of being able to quickly change as the market changes. Suppose a competitor posts an obnoxiously cute video on YouTube for their “Super Baby rash-free diapers.” Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapers”… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.”

Incorporating new terms in a way that sounds natural is the cornerstone of ethical search engine optimization. When your message is consistent, talks to your target audience on their level, addresses their needs, and when your site uses good seo copy writing so people can find you, then you can connect with them effectively with social media and search.

We have been talking an awful lot about social media here at the old RefreshWeb world headquarters. While a lot of this is either theoretical or the critical examination of how what’s out there actually fits in with our clients’ goals, there’s an aspect that really doesn’t get discussed. You can feel the question radiating off of people in meetings. For the people that don’t already use social media apps in their own lives, they don’t really get the point of marketing by not marketing to people. What’s with all of this giving away information just to have educational resources?

Start talking social media strategies with clients, and they’re very likely to ask a lot of questions about where the ROI is and why on earth they would want to invest time and energy. These questions don’t get asked outright by marketers much. Nobody wants to not know how to use the hot new thing people are so excited about. It’s pretty obvious, though, that the majority of marketers don’t know how to leverage it well. They cram traditional techniques into places people have created to not be barraged by marketing, then they’re surprised when the angry masses revolt.

People are willing to do the work to make something that can be distributed through social media outlets, but the part about doing even more work to build the community connections to make their social media efforts? No way are they going to go around reading blogs and Digging posts. That’s fine. People used to think it was stupid to put up websites. Just like not every business actually needs a website, not everyone is going to benefit from being involved in social media.

If you are thinking about making forays into social media for strategic marketing purposes, I would suggest reading a couple of posts:

• Marketing is NOT Social Media - Social Media is NOT Marketing by Chris Brogan is great. It’s part of his Social Media 100 project–100 posts about social media. He’s not a marketer, and I find his to be an excellent perspective. I love Eric Weaver’s analogy about pushy selling in the comments.
• Tamar Weinberg’s post on becoming immigrants in the social community is super. It’s an analogy that would serve you well explaining how much work and commitment is involved in these endeavors.
• These were both linked (as are other good, relevant posts) in a post on Internet Bard, Social Media and Marketers: Learning to Play Nicely Together

The Houston Interactive Marketing Association (HiMA) is bringing Geoff Ramsey to Houston. He was the speaker at our inaugural HiMA meeting last January, and I remember being in awe of his presentation style and what he had to say about the future of the internet. He’s witty, smart, and a great presenter. I bragged about my recently acquired wisdom for weeks! This time around, he’s going to talk about social networking, mobile marketing, online video and virtual worlds.

For those of you that don’t know him, Geoff is an Internet and Digital Marketing Visionary and is CEO and co-founder of eMarketer. They do market research and trend analysis on all things Internet.

If you’re even slightly involved in Internet marketing, and located somewhere close to a major Texas city, you don’t want to miss him! You can register to catch his presentation in Houston (lunchtime) and Dallas (evening) on Wednesday, 1/23, and in Austin (lunchtime) on Thursday, 1/24. If you’re attending in Houston, stop by and say hi to me. RefreshWeb folks will be attending the Austin event, too.

Each week I get ‘invitations’ to join somebody’s online network. More and more invitations…to more and more networking sites. Almost always (so far), the invitation is from somebody I actually do know. If I don’t, they are often a recruiter looking to grow the world’s largest online network for themselves and their wallets. (Hint: if the person has a gazillion contacts, join at your own risk.) I feel strongly that having a good network is THE best marketing you can do for yourself. And, there’s some evidence that the links from networking sites are good for your SEO.

I’m not new to online networking. In 1999, I built a website for ex-Compaq employees. Over margaritas and nachos, two friends and I traded stories of people we used to work with “in the old days.” We wondered where everybody had gone. Where they’d landed. What they were doing. That evening, we pulled together a list (a whopping 40 people) of names for whom we had email addresses. We sent out ONE email and wrote a couple of pages of copy for the site. The site grew to over 1500 members from that single “invitation.” I know it’d still be growing if the back-end software guys hadn’t moved on to bigger and better things. Our site for ex-Compaq employees grew very quiet — but it’s still there.

One thing that fascinated me was the quantity of executive-level folks that took the time to join the network. Executives (maybe it’s instinctive) knew better than anybody the importance of networking and staying in touch.

There are several people I spoke with after finding them again– and we got to know each other even better than we had while working together. Amazing that you can be in a meeting with somebody every single week and not know a thing about them outside of their job. As people were laid off or “retired” from Compaq, the emails would fly between those of us trying to help each other out. One thing is certain– especially in the business world: “it’s who you know.”

LinkedIn soon became my replacement networking site. They made it easy for me to start building my network by integrating with Outlook. I now respond to requests from Plaxo members (and most recently from Spock.com members). And, I have a MySpace site (my niece insisted) that I never, ever visit. And there are a couple of other networks that I just haven’t taken the time to investigate.

So, my question is (and I ask myself this with almost every invite I get from a non-LinkedIn site), how many of these networking sites can there be and how many of us have the time to grow and maintain multiple networks?

Yes, the sites themselves are doing everything they can to make it easy for us — combing through Outlook contacts, checking against your other networks, reminding you to update your profile, nagging you to answer an invitation, etc., etc., etc. I just wonder how much time we can spend actually networking when there are so many places to be?? Anybody have the same feeling??

As you would expect from a marketing company working on our direction for the future, we have been homing in on our differentiation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of search marketing companies which don’t have much real marketing experience. Because it’s web marketing, companies tend to skew young, to have a hip, wired, energetic company. However, a company full of marketing newbies may not be a good fit if you need a business partner entrusted with bottom line performance. It isn’t hard to do PPC, and any web person can add tags to a site, but real agency- and client-side marketing management experience is hard to come by. Since we happen to have a lot of that (and some of us have some gray hair to go along with it), it’s an important part of our identity. And, we’ve realized that a lot of our joy in doing our jobs comes from helping our clients understand how web marketing works, so we are focusing our future on education, strategy and reporting.

From this most recent study from eMarketer, it looks like marketing executives are really coming up to speed on two important issues: marketing basics (any economic downturn spurs both a drive toward “back to basics” in budgeting and an emphasis on measurement and then reporting on ROI) and, surprisingly, search engine optimization. From our viewpoint, SEO is the foundation of modern marketing, especially if you are marketing to businesses…it’s nice to see our client-side marketing peers mention it as both a trend and as an almost fundamental emphasis.