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.

One of the things we all struggle with is building relevant links to our sites. “Relevant” being a link from a page that’s actually related to the site content, and “building” as opposed to “paid,” which has become a no-no in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Assuming you are a professional marketer with search as one of your many responsibilities, we certainly understand the need to outsource. But since you can’t throw money at this problem any more, and it goes without saying that you have better things to do than spam site owners asking for reciprocal links, what now?

PR is a great way to get links. For us, links outweigh ink in terms of the benefit. A story gets interest for a day, but press releases with links to your content stay out there forever. Because we’re active in social marketing, we’ve watched very carefully as online press releases have become, for some, the preferred way of getting news. A Google Alert takes a minute to set up, and you immediately get updates on any new web content relevant to your interest. Take that and add optimized press releases, and you have a much more energized public for your public relations. (You may also may be keeping your competitors more informed than you would like.) However, public companies have fiduciary responsibilities that sometimes get in the way of aggressive marketing with PR…so PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Taking the next flight into cyberspace, why not look into promoting your site, your product, your expertise with articles? The intent of the article submission sites is to provide non-copyrighted articles for use by publishers doing newsletters, blogs and periodicals, so they prefer that the article be for a general audience, and not self-promotional. But you can easily explain the benefits of using your product or write a brief educational piece (400-600 words) that gets people thinking. In the “resource block,” you can place a short bio and a link to your site. When someone picks up the article and includes this resource block, you get another link.

As an experiment, I wrote a couple of articles in November and submitted them. Within 30 days, I found that we had 42 new links to the site, picked up by Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Now, we have 51 links from those articles. Considering that investing an afternoon in writing and publishing increased our link total by about 11%, article submission is definitely my new best friend when it comes to getting links. I control the content of the page, and I control the keyword phrase used to link to the site. The only thing I don’t control is where and when the article runs, but one did get picked up by a national search marketing newsletter. I found that one by searching on my name…because they didn’t include the link. Running a Google Alert on your name is a great way to see where the article gets picked up.

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??

Lots of good thinking out there on how referrals are becoming the new filters that sort out the good stuff from the “90% of everything that’s crud.” (Chris Anderson, The Long Tail) It’s not so much the wisdom of crowds (remember Howard Dean?) but the “nichebusters” that break to daylight and someone casually gives you a rendezvous with greatness. That’s the power of social media, and why it is so important to the future of search marketing. Even for B2B. Thinking future perfect, we are already becoming a social media agency, courtesy of our teaming with leaders like Tom Parish, Cynthia Baker and Deltina Hay. (These would be the people you would HOPE to have in your network!)

As marketers who are in the business of helping people find what they are looking for, it’s nice to know that we are both helpful and contributors to the bottom line for our clients. It’s so much better than being in advertising and trying to figure out how to persuade someone that one brand is better than any other option, just because of the cool person who is using it in our TV ad! (for a cool $250K)

I love this quote because it can explain to your CEO why nobody ever searches on your tagline:

“Marketers now have to compete with the conversations customers are having with one another about the products they buy. None of those conversations consists of customers repeating the same three word phrases over and over. This is one of the main drivers for (the market’s) interest in “customer-generated media”: Not only are customers more credible—a 2006 study by Edelman PR showed that customers think the most trustworthy source of information about a company is “a person like me”—they’re also more interesting. Customers are now “mashing up” marketing materials—re-editing them into parodies, mixing them up with totally inappropriate soundtracks—turning commercials back against their creators and in the process making them far more interesting than they were originally. Think of it as customers’ revenge for all those years of being treated like simpletons.”

The truth is that advertising stopped being smart and tried to win by being clever, and fell away from relevance. As David Ogilvy said, the consumer isn’t stupid, she’s your wife. For this next gen of search marketers, the lesson should be clear: don’t try to use tricks to outsmart Google, because in the long term, you will never win. Talk to the people! Open up and let them in…they are smart enough to see through corporate speak, and they ARE talking about you behind your back. If you are honest, responsive and reliable, that will be your reputation. My view? You don’t really manage your reputation–you earn it every day.