Social Media Marketing Success Starts with Content

I'm often asked the question about how to implement a corporate social media marketing plan and how to make it a success.  My answer, based on experience, is always that it must start with your blog.  The blog is today's corporate voice where a company can establish itself as an expert and freely express its opinions.  It's this information that can be socialized and targeted to your social network.  Think of your blog as your social media launching pad and all the other parts (Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, etc.) are your communications vehicles for spreading the word.

Additionally, I tell my clients that they must create compelling content, such as white papers, videos, and webinars, that will be of interest to each specific targeted audiences.  If you create content that can help people figure out how to do things better, faster, cheaper, you will rapidly increase your social media following.  The trick is to not be too self-serving while still developing content that gets your message across and sparks actions.

So how do you know what's working and what's not?  You must not only measure traffic to your corporate website and blog site, but you also need to analyze what content your visitors are viewing the most.  From there, you can optimize that content and build more targeted campaigns.  Also, by monitoring your web and blog traffic and what referral sites visitors are coming in from, you can quickly see what social efforts are yielding the best results.  If you're getting a lot of web hits from Facebook postings but not a lot from twitter, you may need to change your content or the way you are messaging to that audience.

Social media marketing is a lot of try this or that and see what works.  This is what makes it so fun and interesting.  You must put the time in to make social media marketing successful.  However, with very little marketing dollars other than time, you try many different things on the fly and continually test your messaging.  Talk to me if you'd like to learn more.

Why are you not using video on your web site?

Concisely deliver information and improve SEO

When you think of corporate videos, it’s hard not to think about executives in suits, high production costs, and little actual impact on your target audience.  This is what we’ve all been used to with corporate video.  However, Google with Youtube and newer consumer video technology are dramatically changing the perception of video and enabling it to be one of the most valuable sales and marketing tools.

It was not long ago when a boring 5-10 minute professional corporate video would cost $20K+.  What was even harder to swallow than spending all that money was that your messaging changes and the shelf life of that video was much shorter than you expected.  It was tough justify the cost by using the video as a demand gen marketing piece.

The world of video production has changed dramitcally.  Today, you can buy a Flip HD video camera ($200), a webcam ($25) if your laptop does not already have one, and a license of TechSmith Camtasia Studio ($350) for video editing.  And, for about $600, you can now produce your own sales and marketing videos on demand.  You can even use Youtube to host your videos for free.  This is exactly what we did at my last company and it was very successful.

What’s more, video helps with your Google search engine ranking.  How?  While somebody may download a white paper, print it, and read it offline, video keeps visitors engaged on your web site.  Google looks at the average time being spent on your site and the higher that time is the more relevant your web site is to Google.  This can greatly improve your SEO resulting in more visitors to your web site.  This is the number one reason why you should be using video.

Here are some ideas for your videos and what worked for us:

• Customer testimonials-  You can talk about how great you are all day long and know one will care, but if your customers say you are great, it carries much more weight.  Send your customer a webcam and give them 2 or 3 questions to talk about.  Then let them keep the webcam as a thank you.
• Product “how to” videos -- get your technical people involved and create quick 2-5 minute videos that walk people through the install and set up process and more targeted how to do ‘this’ with your products.  You’ll be surprised how these videos help shorten the sales cycle and reduce support calls.
• Partner training -- build a video library of training materials to help train your partners.  Everybody is resource constrained and video is a great way to reduce the onsite training burden while still maintaining a personal touch.
• Corporate positioning -- find your corporate spokesperson and use video as a positioning tool for video podcast that can be sent to press, analysts, investors, etc...
• Funny videos-  This is the hardest one to produce but can also pay big dividends, so don’t be afraid to try.  Who knows one of your videos could go viral.

Give video a try and you will be amazed at what you can do and instant results you will see. Bottom line is video will greatly expand your reach on the web. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact me and I talk to you about how we did it and more tips and tricks.

The Times Are a Changing for PR

I've been working in public relations since before you could email a press release or a pitch.  I've wasted many trees when the only means for putting a press release out was by "actually" mailing or faxing it, and the only way to contact an editor or reporter was to pick up the phone.  The Internet and email made great changes in the way we as PR people put out and pitched the news, but it's nothing compared to the impact social media is having on PR.

It used to be write the press release, proactively pitch the news, put it on the news wire, send it to all your targeted media contacts, and follow up with your pitch.  It was almost a science and you followed it with every bit of news your company put out.  Email and the Internet made it much easier and efficient to put out the news, but in many ways it made it harder to reach your contacts.  As it became easier to put news out, more companies pumped out more news, and suddenly publications were overwhelmed.

At least then, you still knew who your targeted media contacts were.  Now, everyone and anybody is a publisher, editor, and/or reporter.  The Blogosphere is immense and is quickly taking over as the go-to places to read about what's new, especially in the technology market.  As PR people, we can no longer think about our targeted audience as the reporters and editors of publications.  We must think more about who are our end-users and how do we get maximum visibility with them.  In most cases, end-users want to hear from their peers and trust their opinions.  The Blogosphere is creating a network of peers and it is quickly gaining more credibility than the technology trade publications.  To get in front of your end-users, you must get your news in the Blogs that they are reading.

The challenge is...how do you find all the Bloggers that are writing about your technology?  To do this, you have to talk to your customers and prospects more to find out who they are reading.  You must search for what Bloggers are covering your competition.  Then, you need to figure out how to reach them.  Can you contact them directly?  Do you reach them through twitter?  Or, do they just start following you through your company page on sites like Facebook or Linkedin?

To get exposure for your company, you really need to rethink PR and how you can use different ways to reach your key influentials.  This is the biggest change in the history of the PR business and to be successful, we all need to adapt to the how people are now finding your news.