Social media marketing – the ever evolving medium

Thinking about jumping into the social media world? It can be daunting to say the least because things change so fast. New applications launch daily and the existing ones evolve and add new features.  In the past 12 months we’ve witnessed the debut of Google+ and the introduction of Facebook Timeline. Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary moved into the 21st century of technology last year when they added the words “tweet” and “social media.” The dictionary company is a little late to the game as the The Oxford English Dictionary had already added “tweet” and “retweet” along with “sext” while the Collins English Dictionary had already added “Twitter” as a verb and noun way back in 2009.

It’s clear that Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are the most popular forms of social media.  But is it enough for a winemaker just to have a profile on these platforms to make a presence for their label?  The answer is No.  The goal here is to produce quality content, find and engage your fans, build relationships, inspire word of mouth… and actually have a little fun while doing it!

I don’t have a tasting room – how will Social Media sell more wine?

There are a number of ways Social Media can help your marketing and distribution efforts.  Content and activities such as an active blog, videos, and “Twitter Taste Live” events (such as the successful St. Supery East Coast Wine Tweetup Tourin 2009)  bring wine lovers together to taste and celebrate your brand. Drive people to your website by linking blog posts to Facebook and Twitter or with a QR code on your label.

Your label becomes your virtual storefront

Can I hire someone to do this for me?

Yes…and no. It’s always a good idea to get some coaching before jumping in. However, keep in mind that social media is transparent and full disclosure is critical. You wouldn’t send someone to a networking event and tell them to pretend to be you, would you? If you decide to hire someone or an agency to be in charge of social media, make sure they sign their posts and disclose to the audience who they are and why they are engaging with your audience. They also must understand the strategy behind your marketing campaigns, vision and goals.  Creating a Facebook or Twitter page and occasionally putting out generic, one-way messages is a waste of time and nobody will pay attention to it.

To properly engage with your consumers online and create quality content you need someone dedicated; someone who understands how all the social media platforms work together.  I’ve seen a small wineries give this task to a staffer who already has enough on their plate. Unfortunately, as with any project, you only get back what your able to put in. Instead, consider tasking your  social media marketing to someone who has a firm grasp of all the platforms and applications, who is able to keep up with the ever evolving technology and trends, who has a passion for the wine industry,  who cares about your wine, and can approach the brand from a consumer’s point of view.

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Spending a little time today reflecting on the year, setting new goals and revisiting old ones. I’ve archived some really fun, helpful and just plain cool stuff this year – Here’s a sampling. Enjoy!

100 People I hate on Facebook – I particularly appreciate #21, 79 & 91

Top 75 Apps for enhancing your Facebook page - One of my goals for 2011 is to become absurdly proficient at landing pages and other handy FB apps.

20+ awesome and unique uses of google reader that you probably didn’t know about – I sure as heck didn’t.

12 gifts most freelance designers only dream about – I admit to dreaming and yearning for #1

Mapping America; Every City Every Block – this is so cool! Put in your zip code and find out how diverse (or not) your neighborhood is…

The top 40 iphone apps of 2010

One of the BEST twitter cheat sheets I’ve seen so far!

It never fails. At least once a year, someone sitting around the after-dinner table throws out the old “what would you do if you won the lottery?” question.  Sigh. I hate that question! I hate it because I can’t help but ponder my life, where it’s going and what I’ve got to show for it so far… and it’s not that dreaming kind of ponder, it’s that ridiculous “oh ya right!” kind of pondering.

This time was different.

This time the question came around to “If money was not an issue what kind of work would you choose?”  I didn’t even have to think about it. You will think I’m being cheesy but this is the absolute truth: I would do exactly what I am doing right now. 90% of my time is spent on one client, The South Willamette Wineries Association. I love wine marketing and PR! It’s a romantic, sexy brand that is easy to sell, it’s a complicated and interesting business (I have so much to learn) and the people in our valley who own these beautiful properties are down-to-earth, passionate, friendly folks who are truly a pleasure to be around.The other 10% of my time is spent coaching and helping small businesses here in Eugene – mostly with social media but also with good old fashioned guerrilla marketing. Love it.

So for once, “that” lottery question did not leave me feeling forlorn and defeated.

What would you do for work if money was not an issue??

I meet with small business owners everyday who want to know if they should tweet, or Facebook or YouTube or….and the answer is usually a resounding yes! However, NEVER without a plan. Examine your goals and objectives – even your vision (you DO have a vision statement, don’t you??) before you even get your toes wet…Have some idea of your purpose in the SMM world. Have a measurable goal too – just like you do for your marketing plan (you DO have a marketing plan, don’t you??).

by Rich Brooks  President, flyte new media :

Whether you’re an early adopter or finally fell victim to the hype, there’s a moment after you’ve gotten on Twitter or set up your company’s Facebook page where you ask yourself, “now what?” If you find yourself at that point, you may have already skipped a couple of essential steps to building a social media campaign that will grow your business or non-profit. If you’re looking to create a sustainable, effective social media presence, then follow these five steps to social media marketing success.

1. Clarify Your Business Goals. Getting on Twitter is not a goal, it’s a tactic. What are your goals for the coming year? Is it to grow by 20%? Bring a new product to market? Increase donations to your non-profit? Without specific goals you’re shooting arrows in a fog.

2. Outline Your Strategies. Remember: strategies are the forest, tactics are the trees; when evaluating strategies think big picture.

If you’re trying to promote something, one strategy might be to get influencers talking about it. If you’re bringing a new product to market your strategy may be to educate people about why they need it, and what more expensive product or service it’s replacing. For a non-profit looking to increase donations, your strategy may be to tell stories that personalize the troubles your organization solves.

3. Determine Your Tactics. Here’s where you determine whether a Twitter account, Facebook Fan Page, or YouTube channel will be most effective.

One thing to keep in mind when prioritizing your social media campaigns is that you want to go where your audience is. B2B companies might get the most traction by getting involved in LinkedIn, either by joining appropriate groups, creating their own to attract new clients, or answering questions in the Answers section to establish their expertise. They may also choose to encourage their employees to get on LinkedIn and build out their profiles to give the company a wider reach.

Companies that have products that don’t necessarily scream for social media engagement might instead try creating valuable content. Performing a keyword analysis to determine what effective search terms might be, and creating blog posts, podcasts and videos around those phrases can be help increase online visibility, search engine ranking and drive more qualified leads to the Web site.

4. Plan Your Execution. Joining social media sites may be free, but social media does have a cost. Whether you hire an outside social media consultant or task one or more employees for the work, there is a cost.

Some questions to ask are:

• Do you (and your staff) have the skills inhouse to launch an effective, sustained campaign?
• How will you handle negative comments and feedback?
• Which (or perhaps whether) employees can play in social media spaces on behalf of the company?
• If you do hire a consultant, what will their role be? Will they tweet for you? Engage your fans on Facebook or forward leads to your sales team? Will they get you going, or will you enter into an ongoing engagement with them?

5. Measure Your Results. Social media is fairly new, and some hard numbers on its effectiveness–or even what to measure–are difficult to come by. Here are some suggestions on how you can measure the ROI on any social media campaign:

• Don’t discount soft numbers. The number of followers you have on Twitter (especially in relation to how many people you follow on Twitter), the number of fans on Facebook, and your subscribers on YouTube are all “soft numbers.” None of these directly increases your revenues. However, they do represent “social proof.” Just like when someone steps out of a limo wearing a stylish tuxedo, there’s a certain amount of social proof that this person has “made it.” (And like that example, these numbers can be artificially influenced.)
• Measure hard numbers. If you’re tasked with showing your boss that tweeting matters, you’re probably going to have to show her more than just the number of followers you have.If you get business or sales through your Web site, you can look at your traffic reports to see where your traffic is coming from. At flyte, most of our recent “referrers” are from blogs or social media sites. That means that our blogging and social media activity is directly increasing the qualified leads from our Web site.You can dig even deeper by setting up Google Analytic goals and measure whether or not this traffic is taking desired actions on your site, like completing a contact form or purchasing a product.By using URL-shorteners like bit.ly you can easily track specific traffic to different campaigns to see whether it was your blog post, your online video or the link you posted to Twitter that brought in that big new client.

In Conclusion
When businesses hear stories about Blendtec’s viral video success, or Dell selling millions of dollars in product through Twitter, they assume social media is a get rich quick scheme, for better and worse.

However, for most of us, social media is an investment in our future success. It takes planning, hard work and a results-oriented focus to work. It doesn’t happen overnight, but rather like a snowball rolling downhill, it builds momentum over time.

Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web design and Internet marketing company http://www.flyte.biz . They help small businesses with search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging and social media marketing. You can contact them for a free consult at http://www.flyte.biz/contact

Powerful wise words for those of us delving into the world of social media – blogging, tweeting, Facebook. What is the best way to make these “social” networking sites work for you and your business?

ENGAGE. Knowing that you had too much to drink last night or that your husband lost his job is not engaging. It’s boring and, quite frankly, none of my business. It amazes me when Upper Management in a small community publishes posts about misconduct in their lives. Don’t they get how viral this is? The conversations are personal but decidedly not private. So is it possible to be personal AND professional on Facebook? I think absolutely yes! Part of “Enlighten” is to allow colleagues a glimpse into your life, within reason. I still live by the adage “Don’t publish (on the internet) anything you wouldn’t want your grandma (or biggest client) to see or hear about!” Keep it relevant and interesting. Offer up some value; an inspiring quote, an interesting anecdote or a link to some fascinating tidbit. Engage with your friends and colleagues without sharing so much that your other 430 followers are made uncomfortable. On Twitter there is no space to waste. 140 characters means get to the point and get me interested!

ENLIGHTEN. According to the dictionary the definition of “enlighten” is: to give intellectual or spiritual light to; instruct; impart knowledge to. What does this mean to you? Find out what your community (friends/contacts/followers) are talking about. What is trending in their world (follow http://twitter.com/trendingtopics and look for Twitter to release a local trending topics search tool soon: http://bit.ly/583Ejx). When you stumble upon relevant interesting tidbits – share that! When someone enlightens your world – pass it on!

EMPOWER. My favorite tweets are the ones that lead me to the coolest newest app or to a fantastic article about my industry that provides immediately applicable strategies. I feel empowered and that creates immense good will for the person or organization that provided the information. Chris Brogan calls these folks “Trust Agents” and uncovers how to become one in his best seller of the same name.

Become a trusted agent in your online community. You do this by Engaging then enlightening and empowering.

Came across a great post by Lance Scoular and had to share. If you want more information about social media marketing or just need an hour long SMM clinic – call Denise at 541-221-8592

To survive the current economic downturn you will need to grow your revenue where possible. Apart from keeping your current customers, the next goals are to increase you customer base and/or perhaps find more cost effective suppliers.

To do this effectively you need to:
1. evaluate your target market and
2. find cost effective ways to reach prospective customers and suppliers.

Whether you have a reasonable marketing/advertising budget or virtually nothing to speak of, Social Media provides some creative ways to make contact with either new suppliers or customers.

The most popular and fastest growing Social Media that can be leveraged by business are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Businesses that adopt these technologies will have the jump on their competition. Developing a strategy combining these three forms of Social Media can develop three powerful networks without any financial outlay.

Social Media Triangulation
Combing the three media formats provides what can be described as Social Media Triangulating or “smTriangulation the Power-of-3.”

Firstly, this combination provides the development of three separate but complementary networks with the ability to provide exponential growth.

Secondly, it provides a back up situation for your networks, should one of these online companies fail, you still have the contacts on the other networks.

Thirdly, each network has its own strengths which when combined with the others provides quite powerful synergies.

A Brief Overview of these three Social Media Sites

Facebook – facebook.com
Facebook has taken over from MySpace as the fastest growing social media network. Many businesses are creating Facebook Pages for their business and joining Facebook Groups that are relevant to their business. Also, Facebook has multimedia capability for photos and video which can be used for promotional purposes.

LinkedIn – linkedin.com
LinkedIn is a Professional Network using the format of an online Resume. LinkedIn can be used as a reference point for people to check your credentials and for you to check theirs. I see it as a point of credibility in the business negotiation process. LinkedIn also has many groups for various industries or interests you can join.

Twitter – twitter.com
Stephen Collins, (trib) on Twitter, extolled the virtues of Twitter for businesses in general and export organisations in particular, at an Austrade conference in September last year.

Twitter is a microblogging site with a limited text of 140 characters. Messages can be distributed and redistributed rapidly. The other advantage from a business point of view is the capability of building networks fast and also converting those contacts or “followers” to Friends on Facebook or “Connections” at LinkedIn.

There are various applications built for Twitter and a significant one for business is twellow.com. This application classifies Twitter members by their interest or business classification as well as by locality.

Targeted Advertising
Whilst Twitter at the time of writing has no advertising options, both Facebook and LinkedIn have targeted advertising models similar to Google Adwords. The advertiser can target their advertising message utilising the demographic data of the site’s subscribers.

Consider Your Strategy
Whilst these online networking services are free of charge, apart from the advertising options mentioned above, there is definitely a time involvement to be considered. Therefore, when considering this form of Social Network Marketing, consideration should be given to the person/s that would be best allocated to this task.

Meatball Sundae
I’m reading a brilliant book by a brilliant guy, Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae. It is for sure changing (and validating) the way I view traditional marketing. Traditional marketing is like a car alarm- In the 80′s if a car alarm went off we all looked out the window to see if it was our vehicle…today an alarm sounds and nobody notices. Not only is the alarm ignored, it’s not even heard. Invisible. Well, isn’t that what is happening today with traditional marketing? TV, radio, Newspaper even billboards? We are so inundated with messages and they are coming at us so fast and furious in so many ways that we just stop seeing them. I know I do. Godin defines New Marketing as sort of caveman marketing, the sort of marketing that existed before money and corporations took over. New Marketing doesn’t understand top-down command-and-control thinking. It’s consumer telling consumer what to buy. It’s about creating stories that spread because people want to spread them.
Permission Marketing
The term “Permission Marketing” was coined by the afore-mentioned Marketing Guru, Seth Godin. Permission Marketing allows marketers to gain consent from customers or prospects before sending them a marketing message. This type of marketing is a win-win. The advantage to the consumer is that they are in control of what messages they receive and when so the messages are anticipated, personalized and relevant. They can also opt out at any time. The advantage to the Marketer is that cost is low, feedback is instantaneous and they are speaking to a loyal, captive audience who will likely pass the message on. What is more credible that consumers promoting your product?
Does it work?
According to a study done by University of Texas at Dallas Professor B.P.S. Murthi, this marketing method has proven to be two to three times more effective than conventional direct email and ten times more effective than banner ads. According to a survey by Flownetworks, inc
an incredible “94% of consumers opt-in for permission based email”.
Is it Easy?
I don’t think so. I think you have to be diligent and work just as hard. More to come on this as I explore the world of contemporary marketing and how I can help my small business clients navigate this new world.

Smart organizations face uncertain times with optimism. It is during chaotic times that fortunes will be made. Out of chaos comes order… and market leadership.

Research indicates that companies who continue to spend on marketing and sales survive a recession better, plus come out of the recession stronger than their competitors.

Research also indicates that companies who reduce other staff before reducing marketing staff have a better chance of surviving than companies who cut marketing first.

If you represent one of those companies with a limited or non-existent marketing staff, how can your company or products come out of this mess as a market leader? The answer is simple… outsourcing.

Outsourcing tasks to an independent consultant is like hiring a Virtual Marketing Manager. You can activate the Virtual Marketing Manager only when you need it, and not have to pay for the gaps in between like a full-time employee. Plus, you get all the experience of a seasoned marketing veteran, unlike hiring a low cost entry-level person.

How Do You Know If You Need a Virtual Marketing Department?
~ Do you have a great marketing goals and no one to implement them?
~ Are you tired of having to select and manage costly web developers, graphic designers and writers to get
your marketing initiatives done?
~ Have you considered hiring a full-time marketing staff person, but can find the right candidate with the
skills you need at a price you can afford?
~ Are you focused on your business operations and have little time to set the strategy and implement
effective marketing programs?
~ Are you read to accelerate your company’s growth?

I really believe that in this stressful (economically speaking) time our small businesses should strongly consider virtual employees or contractors. What is the downside? I don’t see one. Save on payroll taxes – Use this person when and if you need them….Objectivity…it makes sense to me…How about you?