More notes from “Social Media Marketing”

Cover of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

More notes from “Social Media Marketing” by Dave Evans. Pages 47-77

Just like the title to my blog, “Life is what you make it,” I believe that what you get out of social media marketing is related to what you put into it.

The key to getting good results is knowing how to use social media tools to benefit your marketing plan. Grouping an organization’s employees together and giving them the power of using social media unleashes a network value that can drive your marketing payoff through the roof. Used incorrectly, social media is ineffective.

Dave Evans describes three laws: Sarnoff’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Reed’s Law.

Reed’s Law has, by far, the most potential to help an organization give voice to its products/services. As I see it, an organization has its employees use social media tools such as blogging, forums, video and pod casts on its site. The strength of the group comes from its online community. As the group interconnects with site visitors, new groups are formed based on interests. These off-shoot groups interconnect with other groups on other sites, and that results in community growth.

More importantly, the results of Reed’s Law impacts groups in a multi-directional way. It’s not a one-way communication like print, TV, or radio.

Blogs and wikis. I’ve had my Google blog since December 2003. It was originally created to keep in touch with family. Then, everyone started using Myspace. I rarely use Myspace. I find it doesn’t have the filters found on Facebook and so it has a lot of useless noise. Although wikis turn up in Google results when doing searches, I have avoided wikis because we are not allowed to use a wiki as a source of information in our college research papers. We have to stick with peer-reviewed journals.

For one of the assignments, I created a wiki. I haven’t contributed anything to the wiki, but I see how it works. I can see that a hot topic creates activity, but still, not as much activity as I would expect. I don’t think wikis as they are presently being used will be a big part of my social media marketing plan.

Blogs will definitely be a part of my social media marketing plan. Traditional full-length blogs such as WordPress and Google Blogs will create community on theme-based portals because the conversations will draw in people based on interests. Micro-blogging on Facebook and Twitter will boost traffic and word-of-mouth.

Technorati is a social application that keeps track of blogs and is useful in blog searching. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, they have indexed over 133 million blogs since 2002. I am a member of Technorati and find that it can be useful to see who has linked to your blog. Blogging is conversational media, it isn’t going away, it may evolve, and Technorati is an analytical tool for keeping track of the blog world. I would suggest that employees utilize this useful tool.

What do I think our employees can blog about? A combination of business and personal posts. No direct sells. Announcing the launch of a new product is fine, but don’t use marketing jargon. Announcing that you have been working your butt off on a new product that is being launched, is great. The blogger wants to create a conversation in which he/she mostly listens and responds. The blogger needs to give value to the readers.

Multimedia. Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, Seesmic. The crucial thing to remember is the importance of user participation and content. Make the user experience enjoyable. Make it easy. Visitors will return again and again to check out your content only if they enjoy visiting your site.

Back to blogging. More specifically, micro-blogging. Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Plurk, Seesmic. Adding tags to your blog posts creates a cloud of words affiliated with the content of the post. Tags make your posts easier to find and share. Tags are ranked, becoming useful and valuable.

Tagging services: Delicious, Stumble Upon, Magnolia. I have been using the first two. There are others, such as BackFlip. Basically, these sites allow you to bookmark a site and then share your bookmarks in a social setting. Tagging services are useful and valuable and should be part of any marketing plan.

RSS feeds. Aggregators. Stream. I use Google Reader to let me know when there is new content on my favorite Web sites. I use Twitter to follow interesting people, both for business and for personal reasons. I’m a member of BoingBoing and Seesmic. Google Reader and Twitter should both be part of a social media marketing plan.

Social sites: Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn. I find Facebook is more personal than LinkedIn. Both are social media tools that can be used for business.

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