Online Marketing Blog

Day 2 at SES NY kicks off with a lesson in Social Media for the little guy.

The purpose of the session is to find out how small companies with small budgets can freely tap the world of social media to improve business and increase sales.

Here’s what we learned from Jennifer Evans Laycock:

Take the ‘marketing’ out of Social Media Marketing because it isn’t about marketing, but rather about conversations.

In addition, there is a reason social media is called the bleeding edge, because it can hurt especially if approached in the wrong way.

Remember, when you are developing marketing plans, that the goal is not to integrate the latest big thing but rather to integrate what works. As a small guy, the people on the leading edge are other marketers and not likely to be your prospect. There’s nothing wrong with leveraging pre-established social tools.

Social media is hot, just take a look at Google Trends to see the comparison between topics like “search marketing” being eclipsed by “social media” in terms of search volume and news references – at least according to Google. Along with all that “hotness”, there’s good and bad when it comes to the way companies are beginning to engage social media channels.

On Twitter, the difference between mentions of  ”search marketing” and “social media” are even more pronounced. Of course this is by no means a formal assessement, but it gives you an idea of what people on the web are paying attention to and in some cases, what they expect.

Central to the notion of effective social media participation is the ability to create, publish and share content. The sheer volume of information on the topic of social media marketing makes filtering and prioritizing what’s most important to a specific organization a challenging task.

There’s a lot of excitement from marketers and companies but not everyone is exactly sure how to go about it.

I think it’s important to focus on the key components of what it takes to deploy an effective social media strategy individually and as a whole. By understanding the social web as it relates to fundamental marketing principles, tactics, tools and best practices, you can create a framework or roadmap for the development of a working strategy.

Recently internet marketing legend, Larry Chase of Web Digest for Marketers asked for a contributed article on marketing with social media. Unlike many SEO focused social media marketing practitioners which tend to emphasize promoting stories to go “hot” for traffic bursts and ancillary links, TopRank focuses on a long term mix of Branding/PR/SEO tactics to engage in discussions and promotions within social communities.

To make the article more social, I asked several social media savvy friends and industry contacts in the public relations, direct marketing and search marketing business for their tips and resources.

Contributors included: Brian Solis, Neil Patel, Chris Winfield, Mike Moran, Rohit Bhargava, Jeremiah Owyang, Muhammad Saleem, Jason Falls as well as sources: Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, Charlene Li, Andy Hagans, Pete Cashmore, Chris Brogan, authors Huba/McConnell and Emanuel Rosen. Thank you to all who particpated!

Social Media Marketing Strategy

There are many reasons social media can be a productive marketing channel or platform. Rather than emplying it as a tactic du jour, the purpose should dictate strategy and the tactics used for reaching desired goals. A few common outcomes for social media marketing efforts include:

• Gain insight into a community of interest -You can run all the customer surveys you want, but some of the most interesting and progressive market research can be found within the social communities where your customers interact, share information and make recommendations. Tapping into the streams of dialog is a great start to engagement and social participation with your brand.