The Web Uncovered

Many small business owners that come to us already understand the importance of social media. They get that there are hundreds of thousands of potential customers on Twitter, Facebook and other online communities, but they aren’t quite sure how to get started.

Instead of just jumping in and creating accounts on a number of social networking sites, we recommend to our clients to take a step back and create a plan, just like you would for any other part of the business.

Here are some basic steps to build out a social media plan:

1. Define your purpose/goals – What do you want to get out of the time and energy put into social media? Do you want to build brand awareness? Generate new leads? Become a leading source of news and information regarding a specific topic?  By defining your purpose and goals, you create a overarching guideline for every tweet, post or message you deliver via social networking sites. If a particular message does help reach those goals, you are wasting your time sending it.
2. Determine your target audience – There are millions of users are social networking sites and you certainly can’t reach them all. So define your primary, secondary and tertiary target audiences based on your main purposes and goals. Be specific. Beyond your basic customer, what other audiences are important to your business? Think about related associations, societies and organizations. Don’t forget about editors and reports from target publications that can potentially help spread your message.
3. Understand the social media environment – There is much more to the social media environment than just Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Hundreds of niche social networking sites exist, each with specific target markets. Take the time to research these networks to determine the most relevant online communities and outlets for your target audience. Where are you more likely to be able to engage in conversations most effectively? Be sure to track your clients, competition and industry leaders to find which platforms they use most.
4. Develop valuable content you expect to deliver – Now it’s time to develop a list of key messages and topics relevant to both your purpose and target audiences defined in first two steps. As mentioned in our previous blog post, “Connecting the Dots Between Traditional and Digital Marketing,” be sure that your online and offline messaging is consistent. Also, keep in mind that social networking sites provide opportunities for two way conversations so the content you develop should attempt to engage conversation with your audiences.
5. Identify a spokesperson – A business/brand needs one, single voice. Whether the spokesperson is the small business owner, a marketing person or even an intern, be sure the messaging and voice is professional, well-crafted and consistent.
6. Develop specific strategies and tactics for each social network – In order to reach as many of the ‘right’ customers as possible, you are more than likely going to need to use multiple social media outlets. Web sites, blogs, share tools, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other online communities each has its own benefits, and each requires its own strategy and set of specific tactics to maximize those benefits. Research best practices for each social media outlet and use the tools offered to your advantage. Also, be sure to use the “Multi-Touch” approach by cross-referencing your social media efforts. If you post pictures on Flickr or a video on YouTube, be sure to tweet a link to your Twitter followers. Blog posts on your corporate web site should be shared across all your other networks.
7. Measure your results – Finally, be sure to measure your results. Has your online traffic increased? Were you successful in creating customer interactions and conversations? Did you generate new sales leads? Did your brand awareness increase? Using online tracking tools, you can quantify your impact and answer all of these questions and more.

Written by Twitter Handle @jabraha7

The evolution of digital marketing has forever changed the way marketers have to think about how to build and manage a brand. No longer a “behind the scenes” function, marketers are now one of the most critical and visible functions of a successful organization. With responsibility for both traditional and digital marketing channels, an effective marketer must be a strategist, writer, online guru, relationship builder, executer and more.

But many communicators are struggling to find the most efficient and effective way to connect traditional marketing tactics and digital marketing tactics.

When connected effectively, traditional and digital marketing tactics offer immense opportunities to build market recognition, increase brand awareness and provide the foundation for strong and sustainable growth. To do so, successful marketers must turn to the “Multi-Touch” approach.

The “Multi-Touch” approach combines traditional marketing (advertising, public relations, events, etc.), which offers opportunities to reach the masses, with digital marketing (social networking, SEO, etc), which offers a more personalized, one-on-one communication opportunity. This integration allows marketers to offer consistent messaging that resonates to as many of the ‘right’ customers as possible, through all the proper channels.

The integrated marketing campaign that is created through the “Multi-Touch” approach provides marketers to use existing assets from traditional marketing for search and social media marketing efforts, and vice versa. Utilized by smart marketers, the “Multi-Touch” approach and integrated marketing campaigns can generate the measurable results needed to build your business quickly and effectively.

Written by Twitter Handle @jabraha7

If you are a technology nut like me, you are always interested in trying out the latest applications or tools available. Several months ago, I was lucky enough to get an early preview invite to join Google’s new communication and collaboration tool, Google Wave. The online tool is reinventing email one wave (conversation) and blip (message) at a time.

The platform combines email, instant messaging and online collaboration into a real-time system. It can be used by two people or a whole group of people. Instead of cc’ing a person on a message, you can add that person to the conversation. Users apart of a wave can follow messages in real-time, play back the entire conversation timeline and even add to or edit any part of the conversation.

While it seems confusing at first, these videos shine a light on Google Wave’s simplicity and functionality: http://simurl.com/simplewave

Although my time on Google Wave has been limited, I can already see the value in this new form of online collaboration. Instead of having an inbox full of emails back and forth between two people or a group of people, Google Wave provides a live timeline of events and updates with full editing functionality. You can even collaborate on documents in real-time as a group and embed photos, videos and maps in to the conversation.

More than one million users are actively using Google Wave in preview mode. New outlets and publications like RedEye Chicago are hosting daily waves to discuss timely and relevant topics with their readers.

There are still some kinks for Google to work out, but once Google Wave advances past preview mode and catches on with the masses, I can see this as a revolution in the business world. A

Blip me at www.googlewave.com/jabraha7

Written by Twitter Handle @jabraha7

Thanks to a recent blog post by Andy Beal, We can find the MarketingProfs survey of Twitter users.  What did they find?

Twitter users were asked to rate the reasons why they participate, on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1=strongly disagree and 5=strongly agree):

• “I find it exciting to learn new things from people”: Average score 4.65
• “I value getting information in a timely manner”: Average score 4.58
• “I like to be connected to lots of people”: Average score 3.91
• “I want to generate new business”: Average score 3.70
• “I find it gratifying to have people follow me”: Average score 3.64

The Takeaway:  Twitter users care more about being heard than listening.  if you are using Twitter as a marketing tool, then you must generate frequent, targetted content that will truly gain the interest of followers after you have enticed them to  follow you.

Thomas Freidman’s flattened world may be appear a bit fictious in certain regards, but one technology that has overshadowed the others mentioned in his book, The World is Flat, is that of mobile technologies.  Since the book has been written, the proliferation of Iphones and Blackberries are rudimentarily changing the fashion by which business is conducted.  As an example of how this effects marketing, I’d like to talk about John Mayer.

Sound a bit out there?  John Mayer has learnt about the capability of marketing to mass ammounts of people several times a day.  How does it do it?  He tweets.  John Mayer’s twitter page has over 685 THOUSAND followers, and I am one of them.  With his Blackberry, he uploads around ten updates a day to over half a million people.  It isn’t the mobile technology that makes this so effective, it is how the technology has allowed his fans to feel as if they are personally connecting with him several times a day.

The Takeaway:

While you may see mobile technology as a tool to execute your marketing plan more efficiently, think bigger.  How can your campaign be adapted in a mobile world?  Neil Postman, an American media theorist from my alma mater, taught that the same message changes on different media, often to the negative effect.  Taking the inverse, to be truly on the cutting edge, we all must explore how new technologies in media create new opportunities to adapt our message.

While there are many aspects to running an effective online marketing campaign, including video is seen as imperative, especially if there is an intent for going viral. The billion dollar deal that brought Youtube into the Google fold only reiterates this fact. Before we can appropriately address how to approach the use of video in online marketing, we need to understand why it works with people.

Coming back to Marshall Mcluhan, media is either hot or cold, either interactive or ready-made. The internet transcends these boundaries. I won’t divulge too much here as this is a post of it’s own. However, beyond the fact that humans are visually-based, and that culturally we put a visual emphasis on everything (“’see’ what I mean?”), video has been and will likely be the quintessential example of hot media. Whether it is a cooking recipe, a guitar lesson, or your product commercial, people will choose a video over a typographical description 99 percent of the time.

Another reason for this is that Video is a mixed medium. It can be visual, audio, and typographical at the same time. This solidifies it as a hot medium.

The Takeaway: Taking this all into consideration, your target audience wants to come as close to experience your service, product, etc, as possible within the confines of technological ability. If you don’t have a video showcasing your value-added, your competition will, and likely already has. To have an online presence to be multisensorial in a mixed medium.