Social media: Where are my people?

What are people saying about you? Where would you fit in? In other words, where do you begin with social media?

Let’s begin just with these two goals: Locate where your company, product or service is already a topic of conversation and discover where your customers look for resources, guidance and support.

First review what you already know about your customers. What are the needs that lead them to you? What are they talking with your sales and customer service people about? Are there professional organizations they belong to? If you hosted a dinner party for your best customers, what would the conversation—even the idle chit-chat—be about? At this stage you can make some guesses; just get a list of subjects and possible locations to begin your research.

Now go to the following sites and search for your company name, the names of leaders at your company, your major competitors, the names of their leaders, your product or service and your suppliers: Google (search the Web, blogs, forums, and video; keep tabs with Google Alerts), LinkedIn, Twitter (keep tabs with Listiti), Facebook, YouTube, Socialmention. If you already know influencers such as analysts, publications, or review sites, be sure to search through their recent published work as well.

Just listen at this stage. Be sure to record the locations of any conversations you were immediately tempted to join in on. Make note of the sites or people or publications that you keep seeing referenced. Note where you find people who already seem to be speaking on your behalf and note their names. (You’ll want to discover what made them evangelists and be sure you’re keeping them happy.) Note where your competitors have already joined the conversation or begun one. Watch how they succeed or stumble. Listen for signals on how you could differentiate yourself from your competitors. Where are the opportunities for expansion of your brand?

You’ll discover where your customers and their extended communities are spending time online and who initiates and hosts the best conversations. You’ll learn about what the current concerns and interests of your customers/audiences are. You’ll discover if they are using different language than you to describe your products or services. You’ll find topics that you could be covering in a company blog or chatting about on a sales call. (Insights you learn through social media should be shared and not kept hidden inside the marketing team.)

It’s probable that you will assemble a great list of blogs/forums to keep monitoring and Twitter users to follow. Pare down this list down to a size that’s manageable for you to continue to follow. The discovering and listening process never really ends.

You’ll find out what your competitors are doing in social media or if they are absent. This will help you take the next step of coming up with your social media strategy.

November 4, 2009 | No Comments »

Defining our terms, the letter S

Acronyms can be tricky. I remember taking my first business class and hearing the professor talk about OB. I knew he wasn’t talking about his obstetrician, but it took me several minutes to realize he was referring to operational behavior. So don’t be embarrassed if you see SMO and think System Management Office or Santa Monica Municipal Airport, before you think of social media optimization.

Here are some common acronyms in the online marketing field for the letter S.

SEO

Search engine optimization

This is not about stuffing a lot of keywords into your meta tags. This is a process of researching what keywords are appropriate for your site and improving the volume of traffic to your site for those keywords. It’s also about capturing the audience you want with those targeted keywords. It’s a way of making it easier for search engines to learn about, index, categorize and rank your online content, thereby making it easier for your costumers to also learn about you. It’s a very effective digital marketing tool.

It’s best to begin the SEO work during the site design process since effective SEO is influenced by coding, navigation, accessibility, redirects, site architecture and other elements of Web design.

Search engine optimizers

These are the humans who work on search engine optimization. Some might be referred to as “white hats” or “black hats.” This has nothing to do with cowboys, Tibetan Buddhism, or Free Masonry. The good people are, of course, “white hats” and the people who are likely to get your site banned from search engines employ “black hat” SEO tactics. I like to keep my hat shiny white.

SEM

Search engine marketing

Most frequently this means  SEO you pay for.  It’s a way of promoting your site’s visibility on search engine results pages by paying for placement, by contextual advertising, through pay per click (PPC) campaigns. Sometimes this term is used to mean almost all of online marketing.

SERM

Search engine reputation management

Basically this is a way to check your online reputation. If someone searches for you by name, is it legitimate information about you that comes up? Has someone purchased or registered your name as a site or account holder on a site? Is this confusing your audience when they search? This only a very small part of online reputation management (ORM).

SERP

Search engine results page

This is the list of sites returned by a search engine for the keyword(s) entered into the search box. When you launch a new site you initially just want engines to crawl your site so you’ll appear in search results. Then you work on improving where you appear on various SERPs for your identified keywords.

SMO

Social media optimization

SMO is similar to SEO, but broader. It’s about getting traffic from more than just the search engines. It’s making sure your images and videos show up on community sites devoted to those media, for example. SMO makes it easier for your costumers to share your content with their own online communities through RSS feeds, social bookmarking buttons, “follow me” buttons, etc. It’s like viral marketing except that the focus is on electronic word-of-mouth. It’s also been called the media “you earn” since you can rarely benefit by paying for it. Your content simply has to be engaging, relevant, information, encouraging, disturbing, weird, or funny enough to be worthy of being shared via a Tweet or blog post or other online media.

It can be about much more than just building your brand or marketing your product. It can also be used to build a community our of your various audiences,  to gain market knowledge (what are people saying about you and your product?), ensuring customer satisfaction, customer relations, recruiting, engaging your employees, etc. This can be as time consuming as you want to take it, but its’ also a way to interact with your audiences much more cheaply than by going to trade shows, or holding individual meetings, and probably more enlightening.

SMM

Social media marketing
Engaging your audience and building their trust within social media spaces is what defines SMM. These could be Twitter, Facebook, Ning, various forums, LinkedIn groups, blogs, social/shared bookmarking sites, Gather, or many other possible locations online. (When you use the term, just be careful to carefully enunciate that first “m”.)

SMPR

Social media press release
The SMPR is not something to replace the traditional press release, it’s just some techniques to improve upon it. Think of a traditional press release that formatted in a way that makes it easier for new media professionals to use.  Blogs, Twitter and other social media sites are now important news channels.

I haven’t seen the acronym used for social media public relations, but I’m sure someone out there is using it this way.

October 22, 2009 | No Comments »
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