Social media is a medium still in it’s infancy, but undoubtedly will continue to grow and evolve as a platform that is heavily used for expression, information, and communication. This poses a challenge for businesses to determine how to effectively use social media and how to achieve the results they desire. The task can quickly become very overwhelming as there are many different networks to manage which all function a little differently. Here is a list of things to consider when developing your social media strategy so that you can be efficient from the outset and not spread your resources too thin by attempting to conquer too much.

Things to consider when developing a Social media Strategy

1. Resources – One of the benefits of social media is the ease of use. Very little technical skill is required to get started in social media which contributes to it’s popularity. Many third party applications are available that make using social media even easier. The main resource that is required to participate in social media is people and time, which can be fairly expensive. The effective use of social media requires regular monitoring and engagement in the community and offering valuable information to others. Many businesses make the mistake of being too sales oriented in their social media efforts which is usually ineffective because it lacks an authenticity that is required for social media success. Social media is about developing trust within the community and indirectly increasing your business through those efforts which leads back to the need for people and time to make that happen. Social media is a significant time investment that should not be underestimated. If only 15-30 minutes per day are allocated to social media, that is simply not enough. Your company must commit the time necessary to adequately participate in social media. Only allowing for a small amount of time will be time wasted.
2. Expectations – Setting realistic expectations is probably one of the most difficult aspects of social media. Two questions that must be answered are 1) what your company hopes to achieve and 2) how long will it take to meet your expectations. A myth in social media has been created that causes people to believe that the results are immediate and the response is overwhelming. This is simply not the case. With consistent effort and a clear focus, social media can produce positive results, but if your efforts are concentrated into one hard week of work and waiting for the phone to ring, then you are probably wasting your time. That is similar to extreme dieting and simply is not an effective strategy. It must be clear to your leadership that social media efforts are a long term strategy and not a quick fix and also many times the results are not as tangible as other media.
3. Goals – Setting goals for social media can be difficult especially if your goals include lead generation. If goals are loosely defined by such things as “more exposure” or “increased fan base” then those are easier to obtain because they do not have hard numbers. When setting goals for your social media strategy some things that should be included are a defined increase in website traffic, a defined number of leads that should be produced, and a goal of revenue to generate. These metrics are important since resources will be allocated to social media, the ROI of these efforts must be compared to all other marketing efforts to determine future direction. Without clearly defining goals for you social media efforts, it will be difficult to assess how successful your efforts have been and if it is worth moving forward.
4. What networks to participate in – The short answer is all of them, but that is a little naïve and unrealistic depending on the resources you have available or are willing to invest. With finite resources as all businesses have, the decision must be made as to which network will give you the most return on your investment which as I discussed earlier, is not an easy metric to measure. The best guide should be determined by your targeted audience and which platform they participate in most heavily. For most B2B companies, this is going to be primarily Facebook, Linkedin and Youtube, with some usage of Twitter and Myspace. In B2C, all five are equally valuable. There are many other smaller networks that can be targeted that are more topic specific. A simple search on Google or Ning.com can identify many of them. So the challenge for business owners becomes how to effectively manage these networks and produce results that make their efforts beneficial. Starting with one or two networks and gaining momentum is your best bet.
5. Two way conversation – The ability to broadcast your message to a large number of people is an intriguing aspect of social media and when used properly can be very effective in reaching your target audience. This may include press releases, promotional offers, and just general information. The other aspect of social media is that it allows your audience to speak back to you and sometimes in unflattering ways. Just like every other medium where customers can voice their opinions, it is usually those that are the most unhappy that speak up. This requires the engagement of these people within the social media community and constant monitoring of those communities to identify when opinions need a response. The larger your company and your client base, most likely the more potential for these types of responses. When developing your business social media strategy, consider that there needs to be an understood company response to certain accusations as well as a focused message when using social media to obtain maximum benefit. If social media is not treated as a two-way conversation, you will have a hard time being effective.

The ROI for social media is still very sketchy for both B2C and B2B. There are very few reports from successful social media campaigns measured using tangible data. Success thus far has been measured in statements like “exposure” and “engagement” which are tough to measure and this identifies a lack of strategy and lack of numerical goal setting. Using the list outlined above when developing you social media strategy should lessen the learning curve and ensure that your efforts are aimed at the tasks that will produce the best results.

It has been a common belief that social networks were not a good place to advertise cost effectively for B2B marketers as most of the users were children or young adults and not decision makers for businesses. This has rapidly changed with the exlposive growth of Facebook and their self-service advertising platform that allows well-defined demographic targeting. In recent months, the laragest percentage growth for Facebook has been for adults 35 and older. This creates an amazing opportunity for B2B marketers to reach their target audience in a place where there are increasingly spending more of their time.

In order to take advantage of this growing user base, marketers most use the targeting features of the Facebook platform to narrow their audience and target those individuals that they deem a good prospect. As you can see in the picture below, there are 50.35 million Facebook users 18 and over in the United States. Since all of these users are not prospects for your products or services, you must narrow your target.

In the next image, the audience has been narrowed to people who are 30 & over who have identified themselves as CEO, vice president, or general manager. There are 129,280 people who fit this criteria. Is this a large enough audience to target your message? I think so.

Online video had a record month in December 2008, according to Comscore. In December alone, more than 14 billion videos were viewed online. By properly using video sharing websites, business-to-business marketers have an opportunity to strategically place well-crafted videos of their products and services directly in front of the potential client. It is a form of advertising that could potentially increase brand awareness for years to come as well as driving high quality visitors to your site.

The report states that the average video viewing time was 309 minutes per month. That’s the average. Without viewing the raw data, it’s likely many viewers have only watched a short amount of video. So in order to have averages as high as 309 minutes, there are some people viewing well over 500 minutes per month. That is a very serious engagement, definitely not to be overlooked.

If your company has not considered using online video as a part of your integrated marketing campaigns, you may be missing a huge opportunity.

Yesterday, Google introduced a search-based keyword tool that should help Pay Per Click marketers with keyword research as well as fill in gaps in campaigns that should lead to improved conversion rates. It will also help to generate revenue for Google as the more keywords that advertisers purchase, the more potential for Google. Here is how Google describes their new tool:

Based on your URLs, the Search-based Keyword Tool displays a list of relevant user queries that have occurred on Google.com (and on other Google search properties, such as google.co.uk) with some frequency over the past year…The Search-based Keyword Tool compares your website and current AdWords campaigns against actual, past Google search queries to identify additional keywords that might be relevant for your campaigns. The tool compiles a list of search queries relevant to your website that don’t already appear in your AdWords campaigns.

Without a chance to test this against actual campaigns yet, if Google is able to do a good job of matching keywords with particular pages on your site, this tool will be very helpful. The new search-based keyword tool used along with Google Insights, Google Ad Planner, Google Trends, and Google Keyword tool allows marketers to more accurately target keywords while improving conversion rates on their campaigns. Hopefully this tool is a little more accurate in the estimates of search volume than Google’s tools have been in the past. If the volumes are 50% accurate, targeting long tail keywords and generating enough traffic to make the effort worhwhile just became much easier. ]]> http://www.briankeithmay.com/google-introduces-new-search-based-keyword-tool/feed/ 0 http://www.briankeithmay.com/why-google-cancelling-their-ad-partnership-with-yahoo-is-good-for-advertisers/ http://www.briankeithmay.com/why-google-cancelling-their-ad-partnership-with-yahoo-is-good-for-advertisers/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:55:24 +0000 Brian http://www.briankeithmay.com/?p=41

Earlier this week Google made the decision to no longer pursue their ad partnership deal with Yahoo as the deal faced heavy scrutiny from the Department of Justice(DOJ). If you are not familiar with the deal, to sum it up briefly, was an agreement that Google would serve the ads on Yahoo and split revenues. The purpose of the deal was to increase revenue for Yahoo as Google is able to garner much more per visitor from their searches than Yahoo. This deal would have allowed Yahoo to still serve ads for their less profitable keywords and Google would have displayed the ads for the more profitable keywords. This was sold as a win-win.

The latest sticking point that caused Google to walk away from the deal was the requirement by the Department of Justice that Yahoo not generate more than 25% of the revenue from Google. Google decided that a deal with those requirements were not in their best interest and they walked away from the deal. The real winner of Google walking away from the deal are the advertisers. The Department of Justice made this requirement to prevent Google from gaining monopoly status.

From an advertiser perspective, this deal not going through is great. If the deal would have gone through, Google would have controlled the advertising on over 90% of the searches in the United States and nearly all of the revenue. Although Yahoo is still searching for an identity and is no longer really a formidable competitor for Google, their market share of 20% still makes them very significant. Had Google controlled all of the ads for search, it would not have been immediate, but over time there would be a significant increase in advertising costs.

The reason prices would have increased would be due to lack of competition. In an unregulated industry, a company that is a monopoly has the ability to price gouge and I have no doubt that would have happened with this deal. Although the Google Adwords platform is far superior to Yahoo and Microsoft, forcing all advertisers to solely use that platform would drive up prices and stagnate innovation.

I have a feeling that the deal is not totally done, but for now we can breathe a bit easier. My expectation is that Microsoft will renew their interest in Yahoo and purchase them. Those two combined companies would represent approximate 30% of share of search and would then be a solid competitor to Google which would keep innovation high and prices low.

The movie was recommended by several people on a listserv that I belong to. The basic premise of the movie is a fireman in a struggling marriage and the trials he goes through to save the marriage. That is the very high level view, but what made the movie significant was the ability to touch on so many aspects of relationships that happen in real life. Their plight included the feeling of disrespect, lack of support, lack of communication, outside influences where the grass seems greener, and so many other aspects.

His challenge was also the one-sidedness of his efforts as he attempted to rclaim the fire in a relationship after his wife had given up. In all fairness, there were many instances that led to that point, but for a good portion of the movie, that was his challenge: to change his actions and feelings while trying to get his wife to do the same.

What I found most ineresting about the movie, is the advice and guidance that were given to each of them as they went through their trials. Most of her friends were quick to bad mouth him in almost total diregard that they were married. They were aware of her flirtings and interest with the doctor in the movie, but not once did anyone of them say, “that is not right, you need to work it out with your husband.” The one person, who was not a close firend, that said it was quickly dismissed.

If these are supposed to be her friends, then this is not the advice that they should be giving, but it is all too common. What is worse is they were waiting in the background to see it blow up into a bigger mess because it always does. So the challenges in their relationship, were compounded by the bad advice that was being passed on by friends.

Without going into too much detail that it gives away the movie, I will just say it is an excellent movie, that should be seen by all. It covers so many apsects of relationships that we all go through, that it brings a different perspective when it is laid out the way it is.

It also has a follow up site that has a lot of resources(I did not look through them all) that can be used for your relationship. www.fireproofmymarriage.com

Definitely worth checking out!