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

Web 2.o developments have significantly changed the way political campaigns are executed.  The Obama campaign championed some of these technologies with a team of over 90 people working on just their internet presence.  While virility is much easier to attain with a presidential candidate, it did plow a path for for more local political campaigns to follow in how social media can make a difference on election day.

First of all, not only did Obama have a Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, and every other social network page, he also created his whole own social network Mybarackobama.com, which had millions of registered users.  While this is a good start, it was only the beginning.  Obama kept a blog, a text message list, email list with 13 million names, and more.  What this signifies is not just a move of campaigning to the internet, but utilizing the less formal aspects of online marketing.  Getting a text message from Obama is much more humanizing than seeing him on CNN addressing a crowd.  

This feeds into consumer psychology.  If politics is a business, representation is the product.  People want to believe they have access to their politicians, and that their voice is truly heard.  Utilizing these technologies, Obama was able to address many more nuanced concerns of his constituacy.   Following in suite, many other politicians began using Twitter to Having new ways to both reach out to your audience and have them feel as if they are reaching you, this has greatly changed the way campaigns will be done.

For those of you who didn’t catch it, check out this article about Facebook in New York Magazine:  Do You Own Facebook or Does Facebook Own You?

  Basically, it is exploring how the Facebook business model effects relationships with both users and implicitly marketers.  This is centered around the change in the terms of service, but ultimately its about determining how to deal with ownership of personal information.  This is very interesting in that there is the contradiction that it is in fact an advertising-ran system, yet they are dependent on user trust in order to remain relevant.  This is a game that many have lost, including Myspace, Friendster, and others.  Read the article here.

A few years back, Myspace was seen as the best marketing tool available on the internet.  Marking the early stages of the web 2.0 era, many successful campaigns were executed on Myspace, including that of bands, products, non-profits, and politicians.  Not so anymore.

Myspace has became increasingly worthless for generating meaningful traffic to target websites.  Formally ranked the website with the most traffic, Myspace is now #9 on Alexa Top 500 rankings.  This however isn’t the real reason for it’s increasing irrelevancy.  The lack of protective measures by Newscorp’s management of Myspace has made it increasingly impotent to hacking software that allows spammers to abuse Myspace.  This relative increase in noise has led many to flee Myspace for more secure and interactive social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, where not only were prof

The take-away: Not only has Myspace began driving away valuable customers, but it has driven away marketeers as the remaining traffic on Myspace appears to be bots, software ran profiles used to promoting useless things like Multi-Layered Marketing programs and Pyramid schemes.  The one HUGE exception of this rule is in music, where music industry leaders may in fact look at the Myspace profile of a band before even looking at their website, as play count and traffic give good insight for a artist’s fanbase.  In short, if you’re not rocking it out in a band, get yourself to a new social network.