Guest Article On Getting Up To Speed With Social Media

I’ve contributed another guest article to ReelSEO.com. “Rounding The Social Media Learning Curve With YouTube” speaks to the way YouTube can help newcomers to Social Media realize they may know more than they think from day one.

Please stop over and check it out along with all the other useful content found at ReelSEO.com.

Surviving The Social Media Roller Coaster

Wow. There’s nothing like a Monday morning in the world of Social Media. Firing up various dashboards, checking what’s trending, reading up on some news. It acts like an online manifestation of Attention Deficit Disorder – a million bits of information to absorb all at once as they fly by, all pulling your attention in every direction. Who needs coffee anymore? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Just as quickly as you think you’ve stumbled upon an eye-opening revelation or solved an impending crisis, you come to find that there is no hope of catching it all, and you’re hopelessly behind.

This negative impression can actually be your moment of enlightenment. Let it remind you that you aren’t supposed to scramble to take it all in. You are caught in a microcosmic example of one of Social Media’s biggest pitfalls: the thought that it’s about doing every little thing as fast as you can to achieve near-instant online marketing success. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

While no one will deny that you can’t reach any destination without taking all the little steps along the path to get there, remind yourself that social media is but one segment of the marketing approach which will help you succeed online. It isn’t where the gold is hiding – it’s just another tool for finding the gold. And as a tool, it only helps you construct your overall marketing machine.

Social media will not solve your marketing puzzle overnight, regardless of how much attention this wild new media darling receives. So don’t believe the hype, and don’t strap everything to this horse only to ride it into the ground. If you’re determined to reach a quick conclusion about whether social media can help your business, you’re likely to reach a negative one. You must give it time, and you must force yourself to take a measured approach as you integrate social media into everything else you do.

The importance of participating in the social media space can’t be understated. But like everything in life, balance is key. Resist the intoxicating draw of social media’s bells and whistles to trap you in a never ending cycle of lever pulling and dial adjustment. Plan a strategy and set your marketing machine down the path. Watch for ways that social media can inform the rest of your marketing initiatives. Use its statistics to inform and advise your overarching marketing agenda. This can be accomplished at many levels, even if simply by listening and taking note of where on the Internet your audience is gathering so you can plan how and where to engage with them.

Social media marketing requires time to work its way into your routine. Don’t be in a rush to see it solve the mysteries of the marketing universe. Expect it to open new windows into the way you approach your audience online, and don’t be surprised as it pays dividends that touch more than your bottom line.

Tired Of Social Media? Look Ahead To Web Presence Management

Already people are sick of the phrase “Social Media.” Already it is becoming so over-used and over-hyped that its connotations suggest all the flash-in-the-pan uselessness of increasing hits and clicks to a website with no thought given to the quality of visitors the site receives, nor whether those visitors take any valuable action once there. Marketers and business owners alike are already growing weary of the social media craze.

But we’d be well advised not to miss the forest for the trees here. It could be useful to look a bit into the future of the Internet so we can begin appreciating social media for what it might be after the dust settles. We would do well to consider it two galaxies in the midst of colliding. Social Media and Search Engine Optimization are in the process of fusing into one singular future state: Web Presence Management.

Search engines are changing. The way we use search tools to find the content we seek is changing. While today this content is spread across countless platforms, eventually the Googles, Bings, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world will find a way to appease our wish to consolidate all the content we desire into an easy-to-digest stream. And the ability of businesses to reach their target audiences in this stream will come down to how they best manage all of the diverse platforms in which their content can be found, indexed, and served up in result sets. On our part, it will require Web Presence Management.

Web Presence Management is the future state of Search Engine Optimization, and it is where SEO and Social Media become one. We aren’t going to be optimizing for search engines anymore. Regardless of what new dashboard arrives or which new application rules the day we are going to be optimizing for the Internet itself. In the end, the core rules of SEO will continue to prevail as we look to position ourselves everywhere online. You will always need to give the engines (in whatever form they take) the ability to recognize you legitimately as the resource you are. Speak to them in their language, and allow them to reflect the “real world” in their result sets.

Today, when we talk about you ranking at the top of Google, the “you” in this statement is your website, or more accurately, your web pages. Tomorrow (and even today to some degree), it will no longer be about your website ranking, it will be your web presence. How you best optimize your presence will dictate how easily you are found.

Rather than optimization, I term this the management of web presence because optimization speaks a bit too much to the manipulation of elements which influence the algorithms. Web presence management reflects the more honest intention to make sure you are representing yourself online in a way that reflects the authentic nature of you and your business.

Come to see social media as the set of tools and content delivery mechanisms through which you can best articulate your real world value and position in the market (your Presence), and you will be well on the way to avoiding the distaste and distrust of all things "social" today. Begin using these tools as you see them in their future state, and you will start paving the way to reaping their rewards today and tomorrow.

Related Posts: You Are Not Your Website, From Information To Communication Highway

Can We Shift To Communitising?

There seems to be a precious paradigm shift in the air. Businesses and marketers are poised to make such a genuine connections to their target audiences that it could change the rules of the game forever. It seems that through one of the highest values of social media – that of providing valuable, engaging content to an eagerly expectant audience – the world of advertising could transform into one of communitising: using authentic communication to grow sales, revenue, and profitability. Crazy, right? A lot of paradigm shifts look that way going in.

But it could all be blown long before the transformation occurs. How long until people give up on seeking out and welcoming in businesses and brands into their social media neighborhood? Who will mess it up more quickly and more completely? The big corporate giants as they stomp into the social media forest? Or the little businesses as they dart around trying to wrangle out customers in this new frontier?

Large corporations seem at risk of failing despite the best intentions of their well funded marketing efforts. Already we’ve seen examples of large companies stubbing their toes. And there’s no telling if the hoards of small and medium sized businesses won’t equally poison the water as they begin glomming on to the alluring siren call of social media and its ability to place them directly into a friendly dialogue with potential customers.

I can’t answer the question of who might ruin it for everyone else first, and I’d love to think we can solve for the potential disaster long before it occurs. But I fear most for the small business owner. Eventually, scalable and potentially automated solutions will come onto the market touted as the all-in-one solution for small businesses to step up to the social media challenge. These solutions will be marketed out through the massive sales channels which already own the client relationships (much like mass Pay Per Click services have gone to market). If these solutions get it wrong, the entire opportunity could fall to its knees.

In order for Social Media Marketing to succeed en masse, it is going to take a well balanced methodology which adheres to the integrity of social networking while also demonstrating an ability to offer return on investment. If both the large corporate brands and the small and medium business can get it right, we might see amazing things happen.

But it’s going to take a well thought out and measured approach to succeed. I fear that with social media being so exciting, new, and alluring, “well thought out” and “measured” are going to be in for quite a battle as this portion of the online marketing industry establishes its “best practices.”

I, for one, hope we get it right, and learn to take advertising on to communitising.

Stop, Look, & Listen - Good Social Media Baby Steps

Whether individual or business, everyone is coming to understand that all this social media and web 2.0 hullabaloo requires some attention. Often it comes down to a particular individual within a company who hears this calling and starts worrying that they might be left in the dust while the competitive world around them launches forward and succeeds in this new landscape of customer interaction and acquisition.

There comes a moment of consensus and decision to take the leap. But just as one’s toes reach the edge of the cliff, options paralysis sets in leaving the decision of which direction to jump a complete mystery. Many will use this as a cue to step back from the cliff and do nothing at all. What was moments ago an invigorating plan to take things boldly into the future becomes an overly cautious and guarded return to the past.

There is simple way to ease oneself over the cliff, and to avoid avoiding the adventure ahead. In fact, no one generally succeeds in social media by throwing everything at the wall all at once. A measured approach is often the most intelligent and cost effective means by which any company begins using social media productively. That easy first step? Just listen.

That's it. You barely even need to lay your hands on your keyboard. Your mouse will do quite nicely. Just go exploring a bit in the land of social media. You don’t even need to participate right away (as important as interaction will obviously become later on). Just do some passive research for a while. Thirty minutes here and there. There need be no rush. Rushing will just send you running from the cliff edge again anyway.

Call it research. Call it listening. One of the easiest things you can do without sticking your neck out at all is to take a look at conversations related to topics you find interesting and relevant. There are countless tools out there which will allow you to monitor the conversations occurring in your space. You can track brand names, products, hobbies, or anything at all, and simply observe what is being said.

Here are a few tools that are intuitive to use, and can help you discover what, if anything, is being talked about:

Collecta is a pretty cool search engine that monitors real time posts across blogs, Twitter, and more. It can expose you to everything from casual conversations to blatant advertising going on related to your search terms. It can also lead you to interesting content around the web. Check out the search options which allow you to narrow your results in interesting ways.

TwazzUp is Twitter search engine, but with an interesting variety of result sets. Not only showing you who is saying what about your search phrase, it also ranks web content relevant to your search and shows how much Twitter activity it’s getting.

TweetVolume allows you to track how many times any phrase has appeared in Twitter since its inception. Good for judging the overall popularity of topics and the slight variations of how people are talking about stuff (note the difference between the phrases “social media,” and “socialmedia”). While it doesn’t allow you to narrow search by a date range, it is still quite insightful in learning what topics have “buzz.”

Google Blog Search Okay, this one might seem like a no brainer, but if you haven’t explored it yet, it is worth some play. It’s essentially Google, but restricted to the content appearing specifically in blogs.

So go exploring. By first studying or listening to some of the conversations going on out there, you can gain an appreciation for where you might fit in when you get more comfortable actually participating in the dialogue of social media.