Joe Chernov, Eloqua

While small businesses continue to strive to find the most effective way to engage with the social media world, truly understanding the best use of these platforms still appears to be a stumbling block. Joe Chernov, director of content at Eloqua, outlines some of his top tips for using the major platforms available to maximise social media integration into marketing campaigns.

The Web in general is a great equalizer, but social media has made this phenomenon even more compelling. In many ways, a small business, being more nimble and being able to adapt more quickly to customer feedback or changing market demands, is better suited for social success than larger companies.  They just have to use the tools in a thoughtful, strategic manner.

The goal on any social platform is to attract new fans, engage existing advocates and guide both through the purchase funnel.  Authenticity is the key ingredient in this mix. Anything less than genuine interaction (i.e. real words by real people) may actually serve to hinder customer engagement rather than improve it.  So the first rule of social marketing is to be real. Social media is most effective when there are real people, with genuine intentions and quality content, behind every profile, tweet and tag. Trainings, review of best practices, adoption of guidelines, organised/planned editorial content, companywide awareness, and, most of all, peer support/promotion will all contribute to a SMEs ability to achieve these goals.

Outlined below are some of the best ways to engage with some of the major platforms at the marketer’s disposal.

1. Twitter

The micro-blog Twitter, which allows users to connect with the right people at the right time in 140 characters, hit the 20 billion tweet mark at the end of July. Twitter users have employed the platform to stage protests, coordinate disaster relief, break news, air grievances against brands and stay in touch with one another. Twitter is a strong, well followed resource but is a fleeting content tracking tool. The shelf life of tweets in terms of impact ranges from a few hours to a few minutes. While pure text tweets are appropriate when you have an original thought to share or when you want to start a conversation, your followers are likely to get the most value you mix in rich media (links, photos, videos) to keep tweets dynamic and inviting.

2. Facebook

Considered to be the most popular social network on the Internet, “super platform” (500 million members and counting) Facebook allows users to connect, publicly and privately sharing all kinds of information with the people in their network. Because of Facebook’s “closed’ platform (though recent indicators suggest it’s incrementally becoming less and less closed), users feel more comfortable sharing personal information such as their political affiliation, their favourite movie – and now their location – than they would on other sites. These granular details about a user’s preferences allow marketers to create campaigns aimed at much smaller, more appropriate audiences than ever before, while Facebook endeavours to balance marketers’ needs with member privacy.

3. Blogs

Blogs should ideally be the hub of a company’s content-creation wheel.  Effective blogs provide context for internal developments, expert commentary on industry news, and valuable content for customers and observers.  A strategic blog positions a SME as an “insider” within a particular industry.  The blog can be also employed to follow-up with a lead or connect with a new prospect – simply send them a link to a relevant article that someone from the company has written with a simple, “Thought you might be interested in this post.”  Note that blogs that tend to hype one’s own products tend to be lightly trafficked and ineffective.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great tool for making business connections, cultivating leads, developing personal brands and growing professional networks. Connecting with other professional and educational contacts may serve as leads themselves, or connect you to other leads. The platform allows marketers to identify the types of connections that your connections have (e.g., first or second degree) and see how far away your contacts are from people you are trying to contact.

5. YouTube

Twenty hours of video is uploaded each minute to YouTube, the video social platform. Google rewards multimedia content with higher search rank and since the platform is owned by Google, the analytics tool includes key word and traffic sources, Hot Spots (showing when viewers stop watching the clip), and insights about what other content users also watched. Uploading videos to corporate channels can support search ranking and therefore makes it a doubly valuable tool.

6. Wikipedia

According to the website tracking service Alexa, online user generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia is the 6th most visited in the world, with more than 50 million visits per month. To engage effectively, digital professionals need to not only adhere to company policy regarding editing of its page but also the many policies Wikipedia has in place itself. The most important thing to remember in keeping to the correct policies is to be polite and objective.

7. Delicious

The social bookmarking web service for storing sharing, and discovering web bookmarks, Delicious, expands the utility of saving links to a desktop by making information to be accessible from the Cloud or the Internet. Users should look to use the platform as a highly refined, pre-vetted Google search with the ability to learn more about the person who saved the link in the first place.

8. Flickr

In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the Flickr service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.  The platform can be used to increase the reach and relevance of your photos. This can be done by tagging and titling photos to help them rank in Google Image searches and increase SEO findability.

9. Google Buzz

Designed to integrate into Gmail, Google Buzz allows users to share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments via organised “conversations” that are visible in the user’s inbox. Just like an instant message (IM), new posts and comments pop in as they happen, with no refresh required. This can help to keep marketers up to speed with relevant industry topics so that response comment can be supplied as swiftly as possible.

10. Geosocial

Geosocial networking platforms such as Foursquare – and now Facebook Places – are social networking tools on which geographic services such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social functions. The tool is a good way to reward those consumers that have showed loyalty to the brand. For example, a Foursquare “mayor” – someone who has earned their position after checking in at the same location a certain number of times – is often offered special deals on top products and services.

These tips will help you get your business started in the social media world, but you can find out more about how to enhance your business with these platforms by reading or downloading a copy of Eloqua’s social media playbook here: http://media.eloqua.com/documents/Eloqua_Social_Media_Playbook_Public.pdf

Although currently only available in the US, a UK launch of Places is not far away, and while many people may not even be aware of location-based social networks just now, Facebook could potentially unleash 500 million new users onto the scene, and even a small percentage of those would make an impression in a market where Foursquare boasts just three million users globally.

The concept may seem a little alien at first. The principle is that – via GPS – users can inform their friends where they are via their smartphone and also check out locations listed on Places. Why would people want to divulge this information, you may ask? But “why?” in social media is not the question; people just “do”, just like they tell the world what they had for breakfast on Twitter. As a business, you want to be a part of the conversation, and that means making sure you enter your firm on location-based social networks…before anyone else does, because they can and will take it out of your control.

Watch Facebook’s video to learn more (below), but as with all things social media, we don’t yet know which platform will win out. Ultimately, what’s important is that if you run a business you want to make sure you’re listed on each one, and play around to see what offers you can to entice users in and get them to tell their friends, many of whom are likely to also be in your vicinity. Keep an eye on Facebook Places for when it launches, but get practicing with Foursquare.

Social media: it’s all about location, location, location…(and conversation)

It’s easy to get carried away with the latest ‘new marketing’ – AKA social media – and, as is inevitable whenever something becomes popular, there’s a counter response. I was tickled by this tirade against Facebook marketing I read this week, although I caught myself nodding profusely throughout. Social media has a LOT of hype to live up to from a marketing perspective – that’s the industry’s collective fault – and now we have to deliver.

If we look at the two opposing standpoints in Walley’s article, we can probably find the true value of social media marketing somewhere in the middle. It’s the not the silver bullet, but equally it’s also not a load of old tosh.

Disturbing

The correct advice should be “proceed with caution”…and imagination. People surf the Web for compelling, relevant content and on social networks such as Facebook it is especially vital that you’re providing something important of interest that will spread virally amongst your target audience. Unlike search engine marketing, where you’re trying to gain the attention of someone who is actively LOOKING for a product or service which you offer, when it comes to marketing on Facebook you suddenly assume the role of TV ad or door-to-door salesman – you’re disturbing people from their leisure time, so this ‘disturbation’ had better be worth it!

Small businesses with imagination and a little budget really can add value on social networks, though. The one I always cite is car hire firm Zipcar, which has a massive following on its Facebook page. Great content, fun competitions and more, this is what people are after. It gets shared and other people join as a result. Given that the vast majority of Facebook groups have less than 1,000 members, you can see why the opportunities to market can be limited and senior marketers like Walley remain unconvinced.

For more, listen to our podcast on Facebook marketing tips or download our social networking white paper. Hey, and guess what? You can also join the RunMarketing Facebook group…what do you reckon? Up for it?

I find this an intriguing point as the people who I have learned MOST from in social media have come from Clift’s ‘lost generation’ age bracket. Obviously, with Clift’s standing in the industry what he says comes with authority and is said with a great deal of thought, but speaking personally I just don’t see it.

I look at some of the great social media marketers that I’ve interviewed for RunMarketing and – hopefully I won’t upset anyone here – they’re all pretty much 30-45 years old, the likes of Jenni Lloyd, Roger Warner, Stephen Davies, Kelvin Newman, Josh Feldberg and others.

I think 30-45 is actually the best age to be in social media. Why? Because you’ll already have the background from your 20s in the industry so know how to apply proven marketing principles to emerging social media platforms, as well as have the experience to counsel clients on how to make the most of those platforms. This client counsel is something a fresh graduate could probably not do alone, even if s/he does spend two hours a day on Facebook.

I do agree with Clift that PR is best placed to benefit from social media as, after all, it’s a reputation game. All in all, a healthy social media and PR mix is required to really engage in the Web 2.0 era – whatever age you are!

Zzzzz. We get it; social media is growing, some of it works and some of it doesn’t. Some site are popular at the moment but will probably be passé in 2011 and we’ll all laugh at how we thought it was the future.  As well as keeping their finger on the pulse what upcoming platforms could well be of use to their business, such as the emerging Foursquare, the only thing that should really concern marketers is how companies are using social media to promote their brand and interact with customers.

It’s all very well for the likes of Starbucks to be active on just about every channel, because it has the budget (and it does do social media very well indeed, it has to be said). But what about small business?

In a recent podcast I did on marketing over Facebook, my guest drew my attention to car hire firm Zipcar’s Facebook page as a great example of social media by an SME. Zipcar runs competitions, blogs, interacts with fans and now has a following of more than 30,000. That’s 30,000 potential customers ready to spread the word virally – a marketer’s dream!

At RunMarketing we’re always up for hearing about successful case studies of SMEs using social media successfully for whatever ends – direct marketing, conversation, market research, customer service – whatever! Let us know what you’re up to – email us at info@runmarketing.co.uk

With social media, mobile and traditional marketing techniques all providing myriad opportunities for marketers, knowing what’s right for your company is critical. RunMarketing will be posting some nugget of marketing wisdom once a day maximum, so you’ll not be bombarded with ‘work-related’ information on your Facebook stream, but I hope you’ll be able to learn something from each post which will ultimately benefit your business.

Join up! See you on Facebook…

In this podcast, we talk to Claire Stokoe of digital agency Fresh Egg about how small business people can make the most of Facebook as a marketing tool.

• Just six per cent referenced social media
• Only nine per cent mentioned Twitter
• Thirteen included Facebook, but mostly in the ‘interests’ section rather than within a commercial context
• Just 4.7 per cent of CVs referenced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

I’m not sure that this tells us whether younger candidates really don’t have a grasp of social media and its importance to the overall marketing mix going forward or a clumsy collective oversight on the presumption that a recruiter will expect you to know social media as a given. Of course younger candidates know social media; they’ve grown up with it! It’s not a case of if they understand social media, but whether they understand how to use it for marketing purposes.

However, what I will say is that when it comes to PR and social media there needs to be a marriage of the two for really effective, integrated communications. This means experience at both disciplines and this is where I think younger candidates fall down. One needs to understand how businesses and corporate communications work to make sure that any social campaigns you run can have a real impact. Messaging over multiple platforms needs to be consistent. They also need to be able to explain to older – often stuffy, old school in-house marketing heads – how social media investment will benefit the bottom line.

That’s why ‘social media gurus’ with less than a couple of years’ PR experience ring alarm bells in my head. Young and funky, maybe, but what about the bigger picture?

What do you think?

Download the free white paper guide to social networking.

Jenni Lloyd, NixonMcInnes

It seems that Social Media is everywhere. Blogging, tweeting, social networking, the list goes on… But just what is Social Media and how can small businesses and start-ups make the most of it to raise awareness and engage with potential and existing customers? RunMarketing spoke to Jenni Lloyd, Strategy Director at Brighton-based social agency NixonMcInnes to learn more.