Spring Cleaning For Your Social Media Sites

Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 2:17 pm  
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Spring Cleaning For Your Social Media Sites

By Kevin Dugan – Mon, 03/08/2010 – 6:14pm.

Logging into Twitter over the last few days, users are being prompted to update their profiles. According to the AP,

Twitter is encouraging people to allow their e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers to be included in the service’s search index.

Let’s be honest, this is more of a Twitter acquisition strategy than a Twitter service improvement. The more information Twitter has about its users, the more it can charge advertisers. Twitter may push out 50 million tweets every day, but after four years in business the blue birdie needs to make some bank.

Social Media Spring Cleaning Tips
We should still take advantage of the profile prompting. In fact, as spring promises to arrive sooner than later, we should do a sweep of all our social media profiles. Several of these tips were created with Twitter in mind, but I think that most can apply roughly to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and even social media platforms like Foursquare to a degree.

A | B | C
As much as I love that Glengarry Glen Ross scene, this does not represent always be closing. A, B, C stands for Avatar, Bio and Content/Conversation/Commercial.

  • Avatar: Use one! And preferably the avatar is a picture of you. I break this rule. Often. But the point is it reminds everyone that there is a real live person at the end of every tweet you send.
  • Bio: Twitter is reminding everyone to fill out their profile because in part not enough people have filled out their information. And if you look at the picture below, my first instinct is to NOT follow this person. No picture + no bio info + no tweets = no context and no real reason to follow them.
  • Content/Conversation/Commercial: This is also called the law of thirds. If you focus too much on just pushing out links to stuff or just on having conversations or only shamelessly self-promoting yourself, you won’t appeal to many potential friends/followers/contacts. A mix of all three is a well-received variety.

Don’t fret about getting it literally into thirds. But this is a helpful guide to keep your content streams as useful as possible.

Register Your Name
OK, this is a very niche tip and may only apply to Twitter. But if you go by handles like crazylegs25 or, uh, prblog, it pays to include your full name in your profile and/or register your full name account so people can find you. I use @kevindugan to do nothing other than push people to my @prblog account.

Better yet? Don’t even start down this schizo-branding road. Be yourself from day one. Trust me on this. As the line between personal and professional continues to blur online, it doesn’t make much sense anymore. In my defense, I started down this road eight years ago.

Profile Consistency
You may want to use every pose you paid for at Glamour Shots, but using one or two pics across profiles consistently helps people to recognize you. If you have a few specific interests or skills, be sure to use the same keywords across every profile. This makes it easier for like-minded people to find you in relevant searches. And by pushing each profile’s email alerts to one account you can be more organized and potentially more responsive when new friends find you.

Register at Directories, Create Lists
It really can be tough to find people on Twitter, hopefully their profile update prompt helps this in the long run. But for open-API social media sites, there are usually a few directories where you can register to be more easily found by like-minded folk. Sites like TweepML and Listorious also make it easy to create your own lists. I owe a ton of my followers from being included on lists.

Your social media profiles are the first moment of truth many will have with you/your personal brand. Profiles have to do a lot of work and you’re not around to provide context. Are your profiles doing you justice?

Engagement Is The Key To Success

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 10:53 am  
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Engagement Is The Key To Success

By Sally Falkow – Wed, 02/03/2010 – 5:29pm.

The term ‘engagement‘ is popping up all over the place.

Using social media channels as a broadcast medium won’t get the result you’re after.   Engagement is the key to success.

According to the Alterian “Annual Survey 2009” report Are You Ready to Engage? the maturity of digital and social media requires integration of marketing strategies. Marketers must move from a focus on siloed campaigns to an emphasis on listening to, and communicating with, consumers.

“Engaging with customers is becoming paramount and the yardstick by which we measure those brands that survive and those that don’t,” says David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian. “Marketers need to appeal to the individual and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis.”

Read the rest of this entry

Why Your Social Media Strategy Sucks

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 9:31 am  
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By Michael Brito – Wed, 03/24/2010 – 5:14pm.

• You think Twitter is going to solve all your problems: Substitute Twitter with any other tool or    social network. Social media is about people and relationships. The tools come and go.

• You work in a silo: No one else in the organization knows what you are doing.  Marketing doesn’t talk to PR and PR doesn’t talk to marketing. There are multiple programs, campaigns and contests running. No integration at all.

• You’ve done no research: You have no idea if there are any discussions happening about your brand. Then you decide to create a Facebook fan page and management is all over you because the only fans of the page are employees of the company.

• All you do is listen.  So you’ve signed up for ScoutLabs; good first step.  Now you are monitoring the conversations.  Better. But brands that act upon the feedback from the community are the ones who are seeing success.

• You lack story telling.  You have no message. There is no story.  You aren’t aligned with the brand promise.  Everything is fragmented and the content distribution network doesn’t exist.

About the author:
Michael Brito is a Sr. Manager of Community Marketing at Yahoo! Inc. He has over 10 years of direct marketing experience in driving customer acquisition, retention and engagement through social media and other online media channels to include search engine optimization, paid search, display advertising, word of mouth and generating buzz.


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The Era Of Social Business

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 12:13 am  
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By Jay Baer – Thu, 03/11/2010 -

Today the day we start thinking about social media as part of an integrated program?

My friends at ExactTarget announced a moment ago that they have acquired CoTweet, the leader in enterprise Twitter management, and will be building a social products lab to add tie-ins for Facebook, YouTube, and other elements of the social communication ecosystem.

All members of the CoTweet team, including uber-sharp CEO Jesse Engle will stay on board, and the CoTweet name will continue.

This is the first salvo in what I anticipate will be a flurry of moves to bring together email and social media into a coherent whole. As I wrote just a couple weeks ago, email and social media are more alike than different, and the major corporations that comprise much of the customer bases of ExactTarget and CoTweet are embracing that concept.

Really, what is social media from the brand perspective but email 2.0? A way to remain top-of-mind with your customers, in a way that’s (hopefully) relevant and engaging. Not the ready, fire, aim email that’s the bane of your inbox, but smart, contextual email that sends the right message to the right person at the right time.

That’s been ExactTarget’s territory for a long time, and extending that concept of message-centric, platform-agnostic to social media is a natural fit. And the fact that Forrester Research projects social media spend in the U.S. to be larger than email by 2012 doesn’t hurt, either.

4 Milestones to Social Business

There are numerous granular issues to consider, and it will be fascinating to watch ExactTarget and CoTweet work out the operational details (I might even get to help a little, as ExactTarget is a client), but I see 4 primary hurdles that have prevented the full synergy of social and email to-date. This move will start to eliminate all of these obstacles:

1. Personnel Integration
In many (most?) mid-sized and large companies today, the email group and the social media group are not the same, and communicate infrequently. Having a single platform (the combined ExactTarget/CoTweet) will enable those groups to work together, creating operational efficiencies.

2. Database Integration
While CoTweet has made the most progress toward solving it, the big flaw with customer service and consumer interaction via Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser degree) is a lack of knowledge about the person on the other end of the keyboard. If someone asks a question or complains to @yourbusiness on Twitter, you can possibly provide some immediate triage and basic assistance, but because you don’t know who the person really is, what their account history is, etc. it’s difficult to get into much detail.

And then, if you do solve someone’s problem via Twitter, how do you capture that data? Print out your tweet stream and put it in a file folder?

I suspect ExactTarget’s database capabilities (quite robust due to heavy email customization needs of customers like Microsoft and Home Depot) will be tied to CoTweet and other platforms quickly, enabling companies to use ExactTarget (or its tightly integrated partners, Salesforce or Microsoft CRM) as the customer database of record, with a variety of API-driven messaging options riding on top.

This will provide companies with an holistic view of their customer relationships and each customer’s communication modality preferences. You can look at Jay Baer and determine that he’s a follower of your Twitter account, and has commented on your blog 3 times. But, he’s not a fan of your Facebook page, nor is he a subscriber to your email newsletter. And, you’ll be able to send relevant messages to him accordingly.

3. Messaging Integration
This type of unified understanding of who is connected to your company via what social outposts will usher in a new era of messaging strategy, where companies develop content ladders that dictate how a particular piece of content is modified and syndicated across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs, brand communities, email, and elsewhere.

This will be a major time saver for brands, as today there is too much reinventing the wheel on the content side, with different people creating disparate messages in each platform. It will also enable companies to move faster, and with more messaging consistency in the event of a social media-fueled crisis.

4. Metrics Integration
Due to its online nature, social media is inherently measurable. Today, however, creating truly meaningful success metrics often requires a custom statistical hodge-podge that tries to tie together data points from across the social spectrum. Try to figure out what your Facebook fan page’s impact is on your number of Twitter followers, for example.

The social media community is starving for a viable way to track customer behavior throughout all social outposts (as evidenced by the massive number of retweets for this post I mentioned recently about a new way to tie Google Analytics to your Facebook fan page).

With ExactTarget and CoTweet working together (not to mention ExactTarget’s built-in ties to Omniture and WebTrends), can the holy grail – an integrated, customer behavior-based, social media metrics dashboard be far behind?

Both Social, and Media

There will probably be social media purists out there wringing their hands raw about this, as a big email company that has <gasp> never exhibited at South by Southwest bought one of the (rightful) darlings of social media. Sure, ExactTarget is a company that’s about messaging – the media side of the social media equation.

But, speaking from firsthand experience, they’re a smart crew that’s not about to turn CoTweet into some sort of spam bot. They bought CoTweet as a first step, not a last step, and as I understand it, are throwing a huge development effort behind it to create major advances in the social/email integration area that go well beyond today’s announcement.

Fundamentally, we’re entering the era of social business, where we have to start treating social media with a level of oversight and accountability. We can’t continue just tweeting randomly and hoping to make “viral videos.” The big companies understand now that all of this needs to be about dollars at some point, and we’ll all be making the social media to social business leap soon enough.

This is a major step in that evolution.



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Advertising on Social Networks: Worth it?

Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:36 am  
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By Chris Crum – Wed, 03/10/2010

Can Social Ads Deliver as Well as Search?

Social media is about conversations. That’s the line we’ve been fed time and time again. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s the truth. For marketers and businesses looking to utilize the tools and social networks out there, it will probably serve them well to remember that, but it has often been suggested that directly marketing and trying to sell your product through social networks is in bad taste. That is a topic that probably isn’t so cut and dry.

It’s going to largely depend on not only your goals, but your audience. It’s a different thing altogether when you talk about simply purchasing ads with social networks.

Michael Kahn, SVP, Marketing at Performics says one of the biggest misconceptions people have about social media is that you can’t use it to market or sell.

Facebook has offered advertising for quite some time, and it has over 400 million users. Twitter is expected to launch an ad platform of its own at the upcoming SXSW (from which WebProNews will be providing live coverage), and Twitter has grown greatly over the last couple years.
Can Social Ads Deliver as Well as Search?

Kahn says social is better for selling than many people think. He says Facebook CPC buys can perform really well, at the same ROI as search. Its just that the way Facebook delivers its ads is different than the way Google does. With Google, ads are delivered based on search behavior. With Facebook, ads are delivered based on information that users have chosen to share with Facebook.

Facebook recently began testing a new “promote your post” feature with Facebook Pages. This presents page admins with the option to turn any status update into an ad to run across the social network, as the update is created. If this gets a full roll-out, it could go a long way in boosting advertiser enthusiasm for advertising with Facebook.

We don’t know yet how Twitter’s ads are going to be delivered, but hopefully we will soon. There are other networks that sell advertising on Twitter, however.

Do you advertise on social networks? How is the ROI?

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