Web 2.0 Social Media Musings

After working on a handful of social media marketing and SEO/SEM projects over the past year, some consistent themes are emerging in my client work.

First, some SEO/SEM and social media marketing firms are claiming that their SMM/SEO/SEM techniques will put you at the top of a Google, Yahoo, or Bing search list. Well if that is the case, it’s like choosing 'firsts' with a baseball bat of infinite length. Not everyone can be first. And after some investigation, it turns out their secret sauce is nothing more than adding esoteric "words" to the "key words", which identify the content.

Secondly, companies are forgetting that traditional and classic marketing and PR methodologies must not be pushed aside, but can integrate with Web 2.0 methodologies, and that their corporate business goals and strategies should also be integrated into SMM/SEO/SEM.

And lastly, most companies underestimate the effort to maintain a social media site, not realizing that you must be constantly improving the Web 2.0 capabilities, adding new high quality content on a daily/weekly basis, seeding and joining in on the conversations, and educating your user base on the array of tools and services available to them.

Web 2.0 is not the be all and end all marketing methodology, and you can succeed with some common sense integrated marketing techniques to promote your brand and message to your targeted demographic.

Here are some guidelines to follow when analyzing and deploying Web 2.0 social media communities.

Business Goals and Strategy:
- Make sure you have business goals and strategies, which are supported by your Social Media Marketing
- Leverages these goals and strategies with multiple integrated social media channels to improve the traffic and distribution
- Protect your Brand, Message and Content. Have a brand guide for your staff to control your company image across all social media channels
- Have a Social Media Policies and Procedures guide for your staff. Not all staff know how to act in your companies best interests
- Focus your efforts on your targeted demographic, and keep it simple
Remember the user interface and user experience

Traditional Media Marketing (TMM: PR, Marketing and Communications):
- Have a plan, follow the plan, adjust the plan
- Never under estimate the power of TMM, yes that means print, snail mail, radio and TV
- Integrate SMM and TMM
- Establish partnerships and syndications

SEO/SEM:
- Have great content, including interactive and rich media
- Have great new content every day or several times a week
- Consider user generated content (iReports)
- Be topical, provocative and challenge your reader
- And yes, use relevant key words to define all your content assets
- Establish syndication and partnership relationships with relevant sources
- Use CSS, meta data, key words, and clean code

Social Media Marketing (SMM):
- Use social media channels to extend your product reach
- Use social media channels to drive traffic back to your community
- Use social media channels to communicate with your audience. Talk to them, don’t just shovel your news titles down their throat
- Don’t abuse Twitter. Some very well known Guy’s on Twitter inundate their audience with 100’s tph (Tweets per hour). Very bad form.
- Post great information on your Facebook and Twitter channels, with humorous musings, links to your content, and rich media
- Gain your audience trust with great meaningful information
- ReTweet and post relevant information from other sources. Become a good source of information, which is relevant and topical
- Encourage your audience to share your content and become ambassadors of your site, and give them the tools and knowledge to do so
- Educate your audience on your SM tools and services and how they can virally spread the word

Traffic and Distribution:
- Syndication
- Partnership
- Viral sharing
- RSS, XML, Query
- Mobile SMS
- Blogs and Forums
- Integrated social media channels

How to Stand Out:
- Be unique, develop a niche and have an angle
- Be smart, target a specific audience demographic
- Be accessible, talk and listen to your audience with social media channels
- Listen to your audience, sometimes they have good ideas
- Treat your audience with respect, gain their trust

Measurements of Success:
- What denotes success
- How do you measure success
- Release your SEO/SEM/SMM models in a staged manner to accurately measure their success or failure
- Adjust your business models and strategies to increase success
- Delete models, which show a low return
- Review your traditional and social media analytics for traffic trends and key influencers

Maintenance:
- Maintain your social community on a daily basis
- Train and educate your staff to constantly improve their SEO/SEM/SMM skills
- Establish new partnerships and syndication agreements
- Have a social media policy and procedure guide
- Constant review of Web 2.0 and improvements to your social media community
- Open new social media channels
- Always strive to have great content for your audience

Some Final Thoughts:
- Conduct a social media analysis
- Only deploy the social media models which match your budget
- Match your resources to the effort to maintain the social media models
- Deploy the social media models over time, not all at once
- Follow management best practices
- Follow development processes

To learn more about Electric Effect's Web 2.0 social media community portal software YellowSpace and YellowVision, and Web 2.0 social media services, please contact Steve Cohen at (905) 330-3570, stevecohen@electriceffect.com, or visit the Electric Effect web site at http://www.electriceffect.com