Why Your Potential Customers Want To See You Social Networking

It’s a burning question on small, medium, and large business minds while considering getting started with Social Media: What use can my company make out of Social Networking? After the proverbial, “Just do it!” wears out its usefulness, the question can easily spiral into a long winded investigation into best matching your marketing goals with your company’s current web 2.0 aptitude, with your bandwidth to spend time investing in social networking, with what you want to measure, with how to even measure it, with your website’s readiness to incorporate social media elements, and on and on and on.

Before rolling down that slippery slope, take a breath. It might be easier than it seems.

To a degree, this spiral of questions certainly deserves answers, or at least some initial pondering about what you want to get out of Social Media in the first place. But that core question might lead you to an easier answer if you turn it on your audience: What does my marketplace want out of Social Media and my potential activity therein? That answer is easy. They want useful information. Far more than looking for someone to spend money with, your audience uses social media to gain and share in information, insight, and the exchange of topic-specific content. Let that answer your question of how to make use of this space. Give your audience some useful content.

While setting up a Twitter account could offer the fastest way for you to start spouting off 140 character tidbits covering everything your business knows, developing a twitter persona that can artfully share topically relevant content in the world of micro-blogging can be harder than it seems. And the path toward getting that content found by your audience adds an extra level of complexity. When it comes to getting started down the path of sharing your industry specific knowledge as a resource with your potential customers, you might find that a traditional blog becomes the simplest way for you to step into the Social Media mix.

Do you know your space? Are you passionate about your industry? Do you find yourself in a position to educate and enlighten people curious about the subject matter you know? You’re ready to blog. From your reader’s perspective, a blog is nothing more than a rich source of topic-specific information, followed very much like a magazine subscription. It doesn’t matter how narrowly focused your subject matter is (in fact, often the more narrow the better), even if there’s only a small population of interested readers out there, they are *your* population. They can be people from within your industry, as well as consumers of your product or service. Don’t get hung up on that. Just share insights and open an exchange of information. This can be an ideal entrance into the space of Social Networking.

While we could also unravel a seemingly endless discussion about how best to market your blog so it reaches its audience and leads them down a path you want to measure, forget that for now. Write topic-specific content about what you know. Share some of your passion. Forget the marketing message. Be valued for the information you are willing to share. That’s what builds a solid audience of followers in Social Media. You have to be willing to do social media activities as much for the sake of others as you might think you are doing it for yourself.

Setting up a blog can be completely free. Whether you go to Wordpress or Blogger, or some other plugin for your website, it doesn’t matter. I just encourage you to do it. Become a content producing part of your own Social Media experience. And without going down a path that could unravel into days of discussion, here are a few quick guidelines to getting started:

1: Plan out some topics to write about before you get started. Part of building an interested follower base that will keep coming back is going to require that you post to your blog regularly (a few times per week at least is recommended, in the beginning). Before you get started, brainstorm yourself a number of topics to make sure you have plenty of subject matter to write about.

2: Write some posts before launching the blog. It can be handy to have three to five blog posts ready to go after you turn on your blog. You can stagger out publishing these ready made posts over the first week or so. Because of the critical nature of the next point, you will do yourself a favor to see if you can draft out your first three to five posts before ever launching your blog online. In doing so, you should quickly gain a sense of how easy it will be for you to maintain a blog.

3: Don’t stop blogging. There is only one thing worse than not having a blog, and that’s starting one and letting it die. And this rule applies in all areas of Social Networking. You have to keep at it, and step two will help you test the waters before committing.

Don’t fret over whether you will be able to keep up with blogging. You can learn as you go. It really need not become an all consuming effort, unless as you are doing it, you begin to see how powerfully it is helping you build your business in other areas. That’s where a good blog sees its payoff – reaping the rewards for having taken the time to share useful content on a subject you know intimately, and seeing your audience of interested followers grow around you.

The rewards in Social Networking come from *doing* good Social Networking in the first place.

The Social Networking Cake Recipe

I think I ate a piece of the greatest chocolate cake of my entire life last night, and it got me thinking deeply about tracking statistics in Social Media and the challenges posed to businesses as they try to get into this space. What, you don’t see this connection?

It was my son’s birthday, and because he shares my intense passion for chocolate, and my wife is one of the greatest cooks/bakers in all of creation, we were all treated to another in her ever evolving refinement of chocolate cake perfection. We get at least two of these cakes a year, one here in the Spring on our son’s birthday, and the other in the Winter on my birthday. As I reveled in the experience of chocolate cake nirvana, I began to marvel at the way this cake was more than the sum of its parts.

For the most part, businesses are now staring at their Social Networking marketing landscape like a wonderful chocolate cake. It calls to be enjoyed, and once in, it reveals itself to be something you’d never want to do without. After the buzz wears off and their eyes begin to focus again, many businesses will (and should) begin to ponder what exactly makes this cake taste so darn good? How can the next piece of cake be even better? But it can be a frustrating endeavor to stare at a delicious slice of cake trying to determine what perfect balance of ingredients went into making it so, let alone what would improve upon it. Looking at the mouthwatering beauty that is chocolate cake, you can’t see the baking powder; you can’t count the eggs; you don’t know how many tablespoons of water might be in there, nor whether they went in cold or warm. And while you might notice a hint of coffee added somewhere, you’d be hard pressed to identify the precise espresso ratio.

Does any of that matter? Is it like learning how a magician does a magic trick, killing the mystery and mystique? It’s not just the list of ingredients, but the artful way that they are assembled, right? There are those who would say that we should step up and eat the Social Media cake for its own sake, and not dwell on how the ingredients are balanced, nor how we might tweak and manipulate them further. Blogger/web guy @youngfook points out this concept in his well written study of the world of metrics in Social Media:

“Some people believe that social media is not a channel to sell things but it is something that should be used purely to engage with your customers. An extension of ethics - something so core to your business that you should be just “doing it” and not thinking about what you get back from it.”

He goes on to say Social Networking is an equally valid channel to use as a marketing tool, and I agree. There is no reason not to attempt to unravel and understand the intricacies behind this medium which calls to businesses from a purely ethical standpoint. And digging deeply into your online business marketing vision and goals becomes extremely important as you explore the metrics and details lurking below the surface. Knowing where to measure, what those measurements mean, and how to adjust the ingredients moving forward to improve the end result is a long standing tenant of good Internet Marketing. And yes, Social Media does demand participation at a certain ethical, human level. This merely demonstrates its potency as a communication tool. And at the end of the day, communicating with clients and delivering your message effectively is at the core of your business goals – a sum worth far more than its parts, indeed.

Perhaps we can have our cake and measure it too (sorry, couldn’t pass up the cliché). I’m just excited to get home for another piece tonight.

Those Silly Kids And Their Social Media

Do you find all this endless brouha about Social Media thoroughly tiring? Are you holding off on forcing your business’ marketing arm to get involved so you can maybe look back when this Web 2.0 thing falls on its face and say “I told you so” to everyone else who invested all that money and sweat equity as early adopters? Do you wonder if there are still businesses out their holding their breath that this Internet thing will eventually fade away proving it never really was a critical key to business after all?

It’s okay to have opinions. In fact, it’s okay to have a lot of different opinions on one subject considering the varying degree of issues surrounding Social Media. But certain opinions should be considered more influential and valuable to you than others as you face making marketing decisions for your business today, tomorrow, and beyond. In the case of Social Media, there is one particular entity you ought to allow your opinion to be influenced by heavily, if you can gain its collective insight. That entity is the Social Media user base itself.

Did you know these bits of information, published by Cone Business in 2008, offering a window into the mindset of Americans?

93% of Americans who use Social Media believe a company should have a presence there.

85% believe a company should not only be present, but should also interact with its consumers via Social Media.

Here’s the thing: The Social Media turf does not belong to businesses. It belongs to the users – the people on the other end of this “new dawn” of dialogue happening online. And these users seem strongly of the opinion that businesses should be getting in the game with them. An invitation from your target market to connect with your target market? Insane!

So, like it or not, the window for “I told you so” has already closed on you. And what’s even more scary is the fact that your business is probably already in the Social Media space even if you’ve never tweeted or written a blog post. People talk, apparently. Your decision is now one of whether you want to be aware of what’s being said, and potentially have the opportunity to influence the opinions which are forming online.

These are two core facets of Social Media: to monitor your business reputation, and to control your business message/image. Add this to the fact that your audience is expecting you to engage with them online beyond the one way push of content you have on your website, and you’re probably quickly becoming aware of the fact that you might have some catching up to do.

The way in which the user generated content landscape of Social Media is meshing with the world of business marketing is as fascinating as it is confusing. Getting involved in Social Media is important, not just as an advertising vehicle, but even more so as a simple function of online “society.” It seems that businesses need to take on the social responsibility to play their role in this new landscape, regardless of the ads they might one day buy there, and the resulting traffic they might turn into sales.

Despite the absence of answers to all the questions out there regarding what works best, and how to measure it all to a return on investment, being an active part of the Social Media landscape is now a given.

Taking On The PPC Model

There’s word on the street that the downturned economy looks to be forcing a mass exodus of businesses’ marketing budgets out of Pay Per Click Advertising. Some industries are reporting a 20%+ decline in current PPC ad spending against this same time last year. What does this say about the health of one of our most “traditional” online marketing models? Unfortunately, I’d venture to say, very little.

Due to the economic swing timing out nicely with the sizzling hot rise in Social Media’s popularity, we are left with too many factors at play. We can’t pinpoint precisely why things appear to be swinging so wildly in the Search Marketing space, if they really are at all. And I’m not so sure these trends provide anyone the basis from which to predict a conclusive shift in the industry toward or away from anything in particular. We can be sure that it is WAY too soon to herald Social Networking as the David who brought down the Google ad platform Goliath. I’m not saying there’s not a change in the air, but we’re a long way from a paradigm shift. One thing is for sure: we are in a time of flux. For any newcomer, trying to find a path into Search Marketing at this time is clearly more confusing than ever. For those that have been successfully advertising online for a while, it’s a time of experimentation on top of what is known to be working. But it isn’t time for panic.

Living up to my eyeballs in the Search Marketing world for the better part of its entire existence, there’s one thing I know for sure – if you have a fully optimized PPC campaign running, there is little reason whatsoever to pull budget out. The proactive searching audience on Search Engines has always led to one of the lowest costs per lead/acquisition. If you’ve mastered your budget such that you are making a significant measurable Return On Investment in Paid Search – often the highest ROI of all your marketing channels – there’s nearly nothing short of your own business infrastructure collapsing (your main supplier going out of business; half your fulfillment crew walking out the door) that would stop you from spending that money.

When it comes to the hyper-granular level at which you can (and should) manage activity in PPC, you continue doing it because it just works so gosh darn well. Tightening your bootstraps because of the economy? We all fully grasp that. Easing off your PPC budget because the economy is drying up your buying audience is easy if you don’t have a clear cut picture of how well PPC is working for you. If it’s just lumped in with the good old “50% of my marketing is working and 50% isn’t, I just don’t know which is which” mentality, then the decision to kill PPC is easy. For those businesses who have mastered Paid Search, they might stop paying the light bill before reducing ad spend. A drop in search is a call for more keywords to reach more deeply into a target market, a time to split test ad copy more aggressively to improve Click Through Rate (CTR), an invitation to optimize landing pages in an effort to boost Quality Score.

Consider this: right now the businesses who have a fully optimized PPC campaign are drooling like wolves as the average Cost Per Click (CPC) goes down while their competitors, made up of the more clueless managers of ad budgets, run for the hills. And the clueless outnumber the well-informed by a very wide margin. Even today I’m constantly dumbfounded at how I can consistently come in contact with companies whose long running PPC budgets are managed with no concept of “best practice” at all. So, in a medium where doing it right means fully understanding the profitability of every click purchased, seeing the field thin out is only a very good thing.

Clearly great droves of people are still on Google searching for stuff. Paid Search won’t break until the eyeballs go away. Twitter is growing fast, but it’s got nothing on Google. And with Google’s propensity to scoop up eyeballs (i.e. YouTube), Twitter might never see the day where it aims that rock right between the eyes of the giant. The giant is one crafty fighter who can smell eyeballs from miles away.

Social Media Marketing is a wonderful tool for both the experienced Search Marketing advertiser and newcomer alike. But it is young, and requires more complex and diverse measures due to its intrinsic ties to being a natural, conversational, and even more human platform to manage. Based solely on its ability to provide a connection to your target audience of both potential and existing customers, it’s critical to get your toes in the Social Networking water, but not at the expense of lopping off other channels if they can demonstrate consistent ROI.

Try a balanced approach. Learn if your business niche is one more profitably server by Social Media over our more traditional methods. Trust me, we’re all trying to figure that out, and the answer isn’t coming really soon.

The Social Integrity Of Social Networking Platforms

I don’t know what to make about these Twitter tools that promise to gain you tens of thousands of followers in 30 days. I mean, I get that having a large following on Twitter has its advantages. No doubt, follower count is a certain measure of ones experience in the Twittersphere. But when tools look exactly like the pyramid schemes where you send a single dollar in the mail to five people on a list, adding your name on top, and then wait for the beauty of math to turn around and send you 10,000 dollars within weeks, you gotta start to worry. Is Social Media such the wild wild west that we will soon see people offering to deposit a few millions into my bank account from an African country’s prime minister’s family member if I only Twitter-follow these ten friends? Could the integrity of Twitter’s pure “social” advantage be suffocated right out from under our noses?

What is intriguing here is that there are tools geared at gaming the natural, viral experience of building a Twitter following at all, somewhat like there have always been tools out there promising the top spot on Google in two weeks. Do hackers feel compelled to write code simply because there’s a new game in town? Apparently so. Black hat tactics are running free in the world of Twitter, and right now there seems no sheriff bent on stopping them. Twitter doesn’t appear concerned over users who might produce a three day surge of thousands of followers despite tweeting nearly nothing. Maybe things would be different if Twitter established a clear revenue model for the platform. But even without one, you’d think black hat tactics like this would get you banned from Twitter completely (kind of like being removed from Google’s index), simply because you’re faking the point of the entire system itself. Perhaps it doesn’t matter precisely because there is no established revenue model. And I’m not counting the third party, non-Twitter tactics of trying to get people to click on a link you put in your tweet that gains you some money per click.

I think one of the coolest things about Twitter is that the entire experience is so completely “user generated” that it defies its own marketing advantage. Many twitterers don’t even interface with the twitter.com site itself (I don’t), opting rather to use handy third party apps to better manage, track, search and tweet their thoughts in this space. So, Twitter making money running ads on its own site seems like only a partial win at best. The truly viral nature of Twitter leaves things unclear from a monetization standpoint. Oh, there’s plenty of clear return to be seen for a business leaping in and interacting with consumers on Twitter. But for Twitter itself?

In the world of Internet Marketing you come to look at every website and ask Why? And more to the point – Where do you make your money here? Google? Easy – ad platform. Facebook? Easy – ad platform. Blogs – Easy – ad platform (No, really, even here it’s about eyeballs and driving ad impressions and clicks for most bloggers) LinkedIn? – I see ads there too. But Twitter? What are these guys thinking? In the end that need not even be the point. The platform is a beautiful reflection of how the society of onliners thirsts for the ability to share and receive the commentary of their “twibe.” Twitter is exploding because it fills a hole perfectly. Yes, people are dropping off like flies. But, I’m starting to think there is enough ground swell to keep it alive. Of course, that means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t become a revenue producing engine. It will come, I’m sure. And with that will likely come the effort to preserve the true social integrity of the platform and deflect the scams and black hat schemes. All in good time.

It’s the wild wild west for now – better hop on a horse!

Feeding The Electronic Super Brain

Just what the world needs now is another blog about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media, right? Of course it is. The way I’m starting to see it, the world of SEM is developing at more than the fevered pitch it saw over the first five years of this century, and the new frontier (can we still call it new?) is as baffling as ever to the true market that must adopt it – businesses trying to reach customers.

Slowly but surely it is starting to look like the evolution of real insight and wisdom concerning how one approaches the Internet as a marketing tool is taking shape more as a "unified voice of many," and that voice, in large part, is speaking from within the very medium it aims to explain. It’s not about wise guys and gals who might possess something approaching knowledge of the space attempting to prove who knows the most – the first thing we will agree on is that being an expert in this field is far fetched. It’s more that the very tools we are trying to master look to be serving as an archive-like collective database of the very marketing expertise that businesses are looking for in the first place. The landscape of Internet Social Media has become a living, breathing, warehouse of this information, flowing and changing in near real time.

As humbly as possible, and without necessarily having any notion that I have something wholly new to contribute, I know that the place where my collection of Search Marketing experience and knowledge is meant to exist lies beyond the years of conversations, contracts, and direct relationships I’ve enjoyed helping businesses tackle online advertising for the last six years. The space for that knowledge is equally in the domain it serves, right here online seeping into the crevices and crannies of the web 2.0 electronic brain. This isn’t a new revelation, mind you. I just felt that the time was right to begin documenting some of my own experiences in the space. For me, the act of writing becomes a catalyst for connecting dots and articulating concepts that otherwise might remain too abstract to potentially act upon. This, then, is as much for me as it is for anyone who might take an insight or two away with them as they traverse the land of web 2.0.

So, in brief, I come from having helped successfully launch and bring to acquisition one of the country's leading online marketing firms over the last six years. It was absorbed by a host (the company that bought us) and wiped from the face of the web about a year ago; a story needing no telling now. I came in as the company’s Director of Sales, and had a great run helping to usher in “Local Internet Marketing” from the days before there was a Google Local, well into the days of mass online aggregation of business data (still continuing today). But really, my history is mute. The perspective and info I might share here are all that will keep your interest. I’m thrilled to see you here at post number one, really.

So, here’s to feeding more information into the collective electronic super brain that will spread its wisdom far and wide. May there be less and less static and noise for all of us.