Getting Social Media to Work

This week has proven to be the one where people want to know about social media and what can be done with it. Thanks to all the inquiries that motivate me to write and share!

Social media is a group of tools that engage conversations about a person, product, company, movement, attitude, and anything else people are willing to share. Before you start your social media engagement, there are decisions to make, especially if you want to use the tools for marketing (and, the tools and their popularity change all the time). Since the popular tools are free to use, sometimes they don’t connect well on any given day. So the amount of time allocated to using the tools can vary wildly for any number of reasons. You will need to decide which of the tools are important to your business, how much time you will allocate to the initiative, and what results you hope to achieve.

When defining your success criteria, think about what can logically be achieved:

• Brand awareness reach
• Brand perception
• Buzz about a product
• Traffic to your Website
• Subscribers or followers
• Knowledge about your customers
• Brand champions
• Lead generation and sales

I’m an advocate of social media. It is driven by the decision of an individual, which when compounded, creates a movement for a society that is too darn busy to actually get ‘out in the streets’. But stats representing followers don’t necessarily equate to sales, so it’s important to maintain your strategic focus and integrated marketing approach. A balanced and reinforced message will get better results than a single initiative.

This can only be achieved with a dedicated social media plan that encourages intelligent dialog from participants to adjunct your offering. Social media participants want knowledge, resources, and the ability to contribute and be recognized for their contributions. You need writers and editorial staff that ‘get it’ and time the releases according to your overall marketing and PR schedule.

The Social Media Plan

• Define success criteria and how it will be measured
• Identify your ideal audience(s)
• Define and implement social media guidelines
• Research what social media currently says about your industry and company
• Build a project plan and timeline, including review schedule for metrics
• Review what technologies and tools should be considered
• Establish a budget (time and money)
• Document performance criteria and responsibility as part of job description
• If you want to invite employees to participate, create an editorial calendar making it easier for people to budget time and participate
• See if your social community wants face time. Some people enjoy the ease of communicating remotely, never developing the relationship. Others, however, can be developed into die-hard brand advocates if you take time to meet them in person.

Social media guidelines

• Guidelines should be a natural extension of existing business guidelines and should follow the rules already in place
• Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws
• Protect your privacy and the privacy of your colleagues and clients
• Don’t disclose confidential or proprietary information
• If you are making a statement as an industry or company expert, indicate clearly who you are, why you are relevant, and your role at the company.
• When you make your statement, indicate that the postings are your own and not necessarily representative of the company’s offering, position, opinions or strategies
• Don’t cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval. Link back to the source whenever possible
• Respect your audience and your company
• Make a record of where and when you have posted. Whatever you publish will last a long time on the Internet and you might want to revise your position at some point in the future.
• Don’t be antagonistic unless that is your job
• Be the first to correct your mistakes and indicate when you alter a post or admit that you stand corrected
• Research who else is publishing on the topic and cite them. Link back to the source whenever possible

Tools for work

This does not mean that I do, or do not, endorse these tools...

Flickr

Digg

YouTube

FriendFeed

Technorati

Icerocket

Google Blog Search

Twitter yes, I do

Facebook here I am

MySpace

Del.icio.us

StumbleUpon

LinkedIn here I am!

RSS - your site issues the feed, the user reads through an aggregator

Blogger NJAdClub NJ MarCom Murray

SecondLife

WordPress

PitchEngine

Wikipedia

TypePad

Diigo

Gabcast

What does social media success look like?

• We learned details about customers that added to their purchasing profile and tendencies charts
• We told our brand story and it was shared with others
• Our brand has the confidence to allow for a self-supported online community that allows for innovation and reduces help desk costs
• We learn through use of technology and are not caught off-guard by customers and competitors
• We create brand champions with a handful of customers as they talk back and we listen, respond and act

Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an initial and ongoing process that involves tweaking various aspects of your website. It deals only with organic search results (not paid positions). How sites are ranked by Google, Yahoo, and other engines involves elaborate, independent, and constantly-evolving algorithms. Murray has put together ‘best-in-class’ suggestions that can work (this month ;) to improve your positioning in organic search results. Keep in mind, how frequently your site is ‘refreshed’ by engines is affected by the number of pages your site has, your site traffic, referrers to your site, and frequency of content updates.

Alt Tags
Images can’t be read by a spider unless labeled with ‘alt tags’ that are representative of the content of the image as well as the corresponding keyword(s).

Anchor Links
Anchor links helps users to navigate between pages and helps the spiders track a content thread.

Content and Descriptor Tags (i.e.: bold)
The content of your webpage needs to contain primary keywords of density between 2.3-3.5%. Many sites push this envelope, and some have demonstrated the value of loading keywords. However, you want content to be reader-friendly and not repetitive.

Heading Tags
Heading tags are designated in the code to represent the content headlines and subheads on a page. Heading tags rank in order – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. These tags should only be used as appropriate.

Meta Description
The Meta description (part of the unseen HTML) gives a brief description of the page content. An expert copywriter should minimize this description to less than 160 characters including keywords and relevant content from the visible page.

Meta Keywords
Meta keywords (part of the unseen HTML) should relate to content on the page and ‘bubble to the surface’ those words that people might use to search for your offering on that particular page. Keywords should be coordinated with the Meta Description.

Page Redirects
Page redirects for outdated, renamed or retired pages of a Website prevent broken links to already indexed pages. Also prevents broken browser bookmarks.

Page Title
Page title or ‘title tag’ of each page should be unique. This tag is cross referenced by search engines against other descriptions on the page and behind the scenes. It should be short and concise to tell visitors what that particular page is about.

Robots.txt
A robots.txt file is used to stop a page or folder or entire site from being indexed by spiders.

Sitemap
Use of HTML and XML sitemaps help spiders to easily crawl and index your website.

URL Structure
Many Content Management Systems (CMS) automatically generate dynamic URL strings with random alpha-numeric sequences. For pages you want ranked by search engines, it’s important to create a friendly URL structure using appropriate filenames and folder directory on your Website.

Website Navigation
Our first real question of possible visual compromise… the most SEO-friendly navigation structure is created from descriptive ‘live text’ that helps search engines index pages. Most drop-down menus and Flash-based menus are not necessarily indexed.

Website Promotion
Driving traffic to your site with keyword links from other sites is an essential part of organic SEO. The volume of traffic and credibility of the site generating the traffic ‘counts’ toward the validity and ranking importance of your content.