Social Media

Social Media: What It's About, How To Think About It

There are some concepts here that are just fundamentally new and at first tricky for people to grasp. But it's really important to incorporate all the points we are mentioning for an effective strategy. Otherwise you end up with implementing just bits and pieces that do not have much momentum and become rather costly over time with doubtful effectiveness. You become prey to vendors chipping away at you for 'this and that' services. You want a plan that you can build on, and grow the effectiveness of it over time as you refine it. If you would like our help in developing a plan, or simply to ask a question, drop an email to .

A social media strategy is not a marketing campaign

Each social media strategy is unique and quite specific to a business, and as a result takes time to evolve. It's just the nature of social media marketing. A social media strategy is not a marketing campaign that starts and stops. Though you can use elements of social media in a traditional marketing campaign, what you want is a more long-term process that builds over time and brings you valuable feedback. In traditional marketing campaigns, you typically don't get any feedback. You just get sales or you don't.

It's about customer relationships

In a social marketing strategy, you build in ways to get feedback from your blogs and podcasts and comments and so forth to shape and refine (or redefine) how you are reaching the public. In effect, you're building social capital (trust) that translates into more word of mouth advertising. It takes time, and you have to participate to make it work. You're starting a conversation—to not participate (by moderating comments, responding, etc.) is equivalent to calling someone up then setting the phone down and walking off when they start talking to you.

A social media marketing strategy incorporates text, audio and video elements that are informational, entertaining and thought provoking. You start with blog(s) and podcasts that you either create or sponsor or both. The social media goes not JUST on your site (blogs) but on other blogs that become part of your ecosphere (related bloggers and readers). If you read and comment on other good blogs in your area, link to their good content, then the favor will be returned. It's much more than a press release that you just put out into the world: it's being part of a community.

It's not about quick solutions or gimmicks

What we are recommending for clients is to go slow on social media. It's important to decide what the goal is, of course. Some discussion is needed. But this is all so new, it's important to just be willing to test, and experiment with ideas and use what you learn shape an effective effort to bring in more leads (or more brand awareness of that's the plan). Don't be shy about moving forward on some ideas but be careful of vendors promising results and causing you to worry if you don't act now. There is time, plenty of time.

Resist the urge to think of social media as paying an ad agency to just create something that you put up on YouTube. That's a point solution, not a strategy. For the most part, it's likely to be wasted money. Though you enjoy the ego rush, resist moving too quickly. Good creative is needed, but a more modern Web 2.0 platform to distribute the creative is also important. Buying some content and super-gluing it into your website looks cool but severely limits who will ever see it. Focus on building a social media strategy that you can build on, and learn how to use it incrementally to leverage business growth.

Social media contributes valuable content to your customers and industry-both by creating new content and by actively participating in the ongoing discussions and issues

Start with blogs. Yes, text. These are your baseline tools for getting the word out about your company. It takes time to develop a flow and a set of topics. There are issues to sort out around comments. There are discussions to be had around how many blogs, for what purpose, and where to host them. Sometimes, it’s better to support a blogging effort at other locations. The point here is that your blogs, and the ecosphere of other bloggers that pick up your articles, will be what you use to help distribute your audio and video-based media from the creative group. In addition, your blogs and your ecosphere of bloggers will give you feedback over time as to the acceptance and impact of the audio and video-based media.

Begin discussing and testing ideas for audio podcasts. Look at doing 1-2 shows a month of 10-15 minutes in length. Interviews and how-to things are great. An alternative approach here is to look at what podcasts are already being produced to see if there is a show you can host as an advertiser or a sponsor that would bring you leads. This is an alternative that should be considered. We can help you get ideas and implement a plan.

Begin discussing and testing ideas for video products 3-5 minutes in length—how-to, informational, and thought provoking topics. Have something to say that gets people to think, don't sell them or tell them. Encourage them to think and give them intelligent thoughtful insights to consider. You could also do testimonial-based videos.

At the point at which audio and/or video media begins to happen, then we look at a publicly accessible platform like YouTube and Blip.tv to place the shows (audios and videos). This way you get greater visibility ultimately for all the content over a long period of time. You don't have to pay for the bandwidth and most importantly, your blogging community will be able to directly incorporate the media (with a small code snippet) into their blogs. You've seen blogs that have things like YouTube or other players that just 'play' right inside the blog entry. What you want over time is for their bloggers and blogging ecosphere to incorporate these shows directly into their blog entries. This causes your content to float out further onto the edges of the Internet finding more people to influence. We want everything to show up on iTunes as well, via a dedicated channel. People can subscribe to your iTunes podcast and videocast feeds easily.

Research and discuss if there are already audio (or video) podcast shows that have an existing audience that would be useful to sponsor to influence that audience. Need to keep an eye on this possibility. Refine, test, learn, think even more out of the box and refine again.