Online Marketing Blog

As I’ve been able to travel and meet marketers all over the U.S. and in other countries, I am always interested in learning how companies are viewing the value of their social media efforts.

Marketing investments should be predicated by more than chasing the competition, satisfying someone’s ego or acting solely on a gut feeling. A good handle on goals, resources and target audience help determine strategy and tactics as well as how outcomes are measured. This is the case with even the most fundamental of marketing programs. With that kind of basic framework, implementing and measuring value from social media shouldn’t be that different.

Because so much actual marketing is tactical, many companies see social media simply as another of those tactics and evaluate one-off promotional efforts for ROI without considering the bigger picture. It’s very much a situation of not seeing the forest for the trees.

In a little over a week I’ll be giving the opening keynote at a social media conference in Auckland, New Zealand called Social Media Junction. The topic? The answer to one of the most common questions asked about social media:  ”The Truth About Social Media ROI”.

New Zealanders aka “Kiwis” are an active bunch on the social web with more than 2 in 5 interacting with companies via social sites and 84% of mobile social networkers there having visited Facebook (Nielsen). The social media momentum is growing and companies are hungry for information and perspective.

I’ll follow up the keynote presentation with a workshop, aka Masterclass Programme, the following day focused on Social Media Content Strategy that drills down into the mechanics of social media marketing, content marketing and SEO.  Here’s a bit of a preview on what I’ll be presenting in the workshop:

As companies test and deploy social media marketing efforts, the organizational structures for effective social media teams begin to evolve. On the client side, Public Relations often leads social media but that doesn’t mean other functional areas of the business aren’t involved as well, especially Marketing and Customer Service.

Being more social and by proxy, engaged in social media, is new territory for most organizations and hiring outside expertise is pretty common. There’s a challenge in vendor or consultant selection, because so many consultants and agencies have added “social media expert” to their repertoire without necessarily having that expertise. The whole “social media user is not a social media expert” topic is something I’ll talk about in another blog post.

While putting together a presentation recently, I assembled a simple check list of considerations for a social media marketing effort.  We’ve written quite a bit about developing a social media roadmap, strategy and measurement in the past, but there are some important questions to answer when it comes to realizing what’s involved.  Companies can test and run tactics in silos but eventually, there will come a time when efforts need to be coordinated.

You  may notice that this checklist isn’t that concerned with SEO. Don’t take that to mean Search Engine Optimization isn’t to be heavily considered with a social media marketing effort.  At the same time, not all social media efforts need to be SEO focused.

Organization

Assess the human resources and internal political situation

In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit and impact from social media marketing, the pre requisite for goal setting must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications.  Unrealistic expectations based on a lack of knowledge about the social web is far too expensive to ignore.

At Search Marketing conferences, you’ll hear a lot about driving website traffic and links through social media linkbait – a SEO tactic that is distinctly different than what goes into building customer relationships. Companies like Proctor & Gamble are paying for engagement, not eyeballs.

Companies that want to take full advantage of better customer engagement, online word of mouth and influence on sales should ask themselves a few key measurement and related questions while developing a social media strategy:

While companies are hiring consultants, internal community managers, testing social media marketing management software and making other kinds of investments in social media marketing, there are a number of things, despite making those investments, many businesses are doing to sabotage their social media success. We could probably list a lot more than seven of these social media sins, but I’ll focus on some of the most important things I’ve been observing.

1. Fear - Of course we know fear is all in the mind and by the looks of it, there are some pretty vivid imaginations out there. Remember when companies feared putting up a blog with comments because, “What if someone says something bad about us?”.  In contrast, companies successful with social media are celebrating such criticism and showing how well they address customer concerns – in public.

With every online marketing channel and discipline, there must be tools to make the task of marketing more efficient and effective. Social Media Marketing is no different. Over the past 6-9 months, I’ve been researching and reviewing a variety of social media management tools that help with everything from source network connections to campaign & social content management to monitoring & measurement. While there numerous tools that manage single platforms (like Twitter) this list includes services that manage multiple social network accounts, content and measurement.

At some point we’ll do more with individual reviews, but in the meantime, here is a list of 22 different social media marketing management tools, platforms and services to help manage and scale your online marketing efforts on the social web:

Even though a company sees the value of social media, it doesn’t mean the organization or its members are ready for it. Have you started something you really weren’t ready for? Sometimes it works out and other times it doesn’t.

In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit from social media marketing, there must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications. One of the most effective ways TopRank Online Marketing has found to assess a company’s awareness, capabilities and resources for social media marketing is to conduct an external audit and an internal survey.

With the growing momentum of content marketing, a lot of companies get hung up on making investments in quality articles, white papers, videos and other media only to find they’re not getting much traction. I’ve heard it time and time again at conferences in discussions with brand marketers where they’ve invested in creating great content and digital assets but are frustrated at the lack of reach.

Over the past 6 1/2 years of blogging, followed by contributing articles, posting videos, photos, PowerPoint slides, reports in PDF format and other types of content publishing for our own agency and for clients, here are a few guidelines that stand out for helping content get better reach.

Army Golden Knights: SFC Dave Herwig (@gkdave), SGM Steve Young (@gksteve), LTC Joe Martin (gkjoe)

My presentation on how to leverage Social Media SEO to improve the reach and effectiveness of blog content for marketing at OpenCa.mp DFW this weekend ended up being a lot of information in a very short period of time. The use of a video interview I did with Brian Clark as the segue into my presentation ate into some of the 30 minutes I had to present plus I simply had too many slides.

(Thanks to Lt Colonel Joe Martin for the photo taken right after the presentation. His team were literally sponges for information at the event.)

Facebook Marketing is a topic we’ve covered for several years and with the significant increase in Facebook users there’s even more interest in how to make sense of what people do there. I’ve seen a significant increase in referring traffic from Facebook to web pages over the past 6 months and while a lot of that lift comes from marketing activities, I don’t anticipate the trend in Facebook users leaving to visit websites slowing down any time soon.

Participation on Facebook has traditionally been behind the login or confined to your network. With increasing amounts of content available “to the entire internet”, it’s worth exploring. Here are a few tools that you can use to search and visualize what’s happening on Facebook.

Last night I had an enjoyable conversation with Scott Monty of Ford, Jeff Hayzlett (formerly CMO Kodak), Mike Monello from Campfire and our host Bob Knorpp of the famous BeanCast about a variety of topics including foursquare, Facebook, Hulu, social gaming and even small logos. One of the topics that emerged from that discussion was the astute observation of how many companies “suck” at social media.

The current iteration of what we all call social media has been around for at least 3-4 years but apparently brands are still irrelevant on Twitter and companies continue to blunder on Facebook and show a lack of understanding of what makes social media conversations succeed at reaching business goals.