Like every other social media geeks around the world we logged in to Google+ in awe for the first time and fell in love like George Clooney pursuing a super model du jour! It’s cool and we like the tight integration with other Google Applications, Products and Services.

Must admit, it’s about time somebody gives the runaway train known as Facebook a run for their money. It’s really two monopolistic behemoths battling each other for supremacy in the digital age. It will be fun to watch Facebook reverse engine Google Circles and Hangout in the not to distant future, judging from their past activities.

In the end, we think Twitter may have more to worry about than Facebook, although with a $7.7 Billion Valuation and having just raised beau coup bucks, Twitter should be in good shape. Although any company (Groupon, Facebook, Microsoft, Walmart, AT&T et al) looking at the Google freight train bearing down on them like the opening in Speilberg’s superb Super8 flick has reason to be nervous.

What we like about G+:

• The User Interface is cool and not too geeky – clearly, Google has learned from their mistakes (Buzz) and come to market with an elegant, well designed and thought out robust social platform.
• It’s easy to dive into Google+ (assuming you have some social media experience) and start building relationships and a stream.
• We like Google’s categorization capabilities, enabling one to distinguish between Casual and Family (our terms).
• The Google Profile, GMail, Picasa and related Google Apps/Product integration is seamless.
• We love the “Twitter-like” ability to have non-reciprocal connections; you can follow anyone.

What we don’t like:

• All together – “it’s another bloody social media platform that brands have to deal with.” Increasing time in the digital saddle and another set of apps, constructions, digital social mores, etc. to grasp and leverage. Your inbox just got busier!
• This is not an application for a just getting started with social media person – it’s a Ferrari best taken out for spins by experienced drivers
• One of the things we love about Twitter for our agency account and for multiple clients, is its inherent social glue capabilities; you can move that Twitter stream easily across a web site, LinkedIn, and many/many other platforms – Twitter personifies Web 3.0 connectivity. We don’t see this happening with G+ – this baby is going to be siloed forever within Google’s walled garden, unless Sergey Brin has a personality transplant.
• The Privacy controls are anemic to say the least – this needs to be improved moving forward.
• It’s a personal brand social network for now. Google avoided the still idiotic distinction that Facebook makes between Fan and Business pages. Maybe Google is going to sit back and think about this. Which is a good thing.

Stay tuned – the digital wars are just heating up! No words were harmed in this post………

Social Media is evolving quickly – what you should be aware of:

1. Creating and deploying high quality content is becoming increasingly important for your brand.  As more and more firms and individuals embrace social media, barriers to entry are rising and your messaging must be high quality to be heard in the marketplace.
2. Ensure your social connections are more than that. Reach out and connect offline.  Move the social intro into a real world scenario that is conversation driven.
3. Social babble (check ins, Twitpics of lunch, inane posts, etc.) creates an illusion for many. People are not necessarily what they seem to be online.  It’s becoming increasingly important to assess and weigh an individuals offline credentials to ascertain whether they are someone that you want to interact and/or work with.
4. Use third party applications to aggressively build and measure your social media market presence. These can encompass relationship measurement tools like Klout or PeerIndex or for Twitter, third party apps like Social Oomph or TweetAdder that help you bulk up your account faster.
5. There are a crop of startups that now help you to identify everyone you know across the social web by leveraging your email account including Nimble and CloudSponge.
6. If your content messaging is not well defined and targeting you risk not getting heard in the marketplace. Relevancy is critical to ensuring your message is heard above the din in the marketplace.
7. A YouTube channel is becoming an increasingly important tool for your social media marketing. Your account must be properly optimized to generate traffic. Like other social platforms, it’s becoming increasingly important to augment your presence with third party apps/services that drive high volumes of views and engagement such as Traffic Geyser.
8. As content development costs continue to escalate, savvy brands figure out how to bring user generated content into the picture coupled with engagement. The former can be Blog comments (light UGC), guest blog posts, soliciting product reviews for usage via social accounts or web site, soliciting videos submissions to YouTube via contest. Engagement is just that – connecting with and interacting with individuals via the social web to move the relationship into the real world.

We’d love to get your thoughts, disagreements or challenges you are facing via comments below. Jump in and let us know………….

Clearly Social Media Marketing has moved out of the shadows into a front and center position in every marketing agency’s pitch session.  I don’t think this evangelical embrace of social media is all positive for many corporations and small to medium sized businesses. We see so much dreck that’s being passed off as “social media marketing” being foisted on unsuspecting businesses.

Good Social Media Marketing is not throwing up quick profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and having an intern start to push out a bunch of lousy content. Case in point, we talked with a client last week that wanted us to do exactly this and we told them no. End of story.

Great Social Media Marketing Campaigns Require these Elements:

1) Baseline understanding of and integrating Search Engine Optimization best practices with all Content, Platform Profiles and Web Site.

2) Setting up Google Analytics for ROI Analysis – if you don’t know where you started in terms of traffic, usability metrics you can’t measure a social media campaign.

3) Cross promoting social profiles to leverage content costs and to enable better content curation across the social web.

4) Building a social presence that is more than pushing out basic content. This may have been acceptable 12-18 months but it’s beyond the pale now.  This is about engagement.

5) It’s about call and response marketing. The wonderful underpinning of Gospel Music has always been “call and response” – a great Facebook marketing campaign necessitates comments on what’s being said on your fan page. You can’t let the conversation threads get pushed out without any dynamic interaction.

6) Measuring more than the number of Followers on Twitter, Likes via Facebook or the Number of Fans, number of Views of a YouTube account.  These metrics may have passed muster in the good old days but not now! You need to understand who is engaging with your brand by sharing, forwarding and/or moving your content to people they are connected with.  New Social Media Metrics:

• Who is engaging with you via social influence aggregators like Klout and Peer Index. The real value of your social network will be determined by who is following and engaging with your brand, especially those that can influence others.
• What actions are people taking in your social community that creates a lead, drives revenue opportunities or enables your brand to integrate CRM into your social stream. We called these “conversions” in the now ancient pre-Facebook days.
• Who isn’t connecting with your brand via the social web. Take a holistic look at your customer focus so you can understand who isn’t connecting with you. This makes a comment on your overall social media marketing strategy.

7) Identifying reasonable demonstrable goals for your campaign that dovetail with your organization. Key word in this sentence is reasonable. Social media marketing shouldn’t be siloed, it needs to be integrated with PR, Print, Broadcast and Online Advertising.  You must set up a way to break out social media marketing analysis to properly measure ROI.

8) Grasping the fundamental dynamics of social media. Social media marketing is a superb tool for local businesses. A restaurant as an example can dominate highly targeted keywords using a simple Google Business Profile and then dovetail a vibrant campaign with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that enables communication with and empowering new and existing customers.

If your a big national brand, then localized marketing is not a fit. Your entire baseline SEO and content development and curation strategy has to be targeted much differently. A blog should be the epicenter of your social media marketing, with a social platform strategy that dovetails with your Blog and that drives brand engagement.

9) Understanding how to position your brand above the noise level in the marketplace. I would wager 20% of the accounts on Twitter are just bot accounts with no human interaction. Whether we like it or not this is a reality for the time being. You have to work hard to build a brand on Twitter to make yourself heard above the incessant babble on Twitter that passes for content. How? Simple, create and curate good content and engage with the community. Everything else will fall in place.

Our social media platform of choice is Twitter – click here to connect! No words were harmed in this Blog!

Image Credit: Startonomics

Corporate brands are embracing social media marketing in a big way.  Many are called but few have a good handle on what to do, evidenced by the millions of me too Tweets.

Great social media is like a rock and roll song – if you knew what a great song was you wouldn’t have to work for the rest of your life.  Those “benjamins” would be flowing into your back account faster than a Dave McClure investment in your startup. Listen up corporate brandoligists:

1) Lose the lawyers and organizational layers – be creative and set your brand free. Great social media marketing is not echoing PR missives, it’s about creating compelling content and engaging with the social community.

2) Create brand loyalists for your company and listen to what they say. High impact social media marketing is much more than broadcasting. It’s listening to your customers and then amplifying their messages and building layered engagements with them as you move your brand forward.

3) Give your brand loyalists a moment in the digital sun – let them jump into your social stream via a Guest Post on your Blog. Give em a contest on YouTube and feature the top videos across your social stream: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Corp site.

4) Think of social media monitoring as an early brand warning system. Get ahead of the curve and respond back to those comments, questions, brickbats, kudos with rapid response marketing. Great Tools for Social Media Monitoring include:

• Google Alerts
• Trackur
• Viral Heat
• Sysomos
• Engagor
  

5) If your CEO is a brand like Richard Branson get her into the social stream via Twitter. If she isn’t then make her a star. Creativity trumps everything in social media – your CEO can talk about anything/everything that relates to your brand, or anything that resonates with your market that suits her fancy.

6) Motivate and enable your social media marketing team or community managers to become customer advocates internally within the company. Don’t harness them with rules and regulations, give them power and flexibility to cut through corporate rules and regulations so they can fix a problem or right a wrong. “I see you paid $30. over our discount price and I’ve just sent you a coupon for $50. off any purchase…….”

7) Repetition is at times essential to success with social media marketing. To stay with our music theme, there’s a reason why a great song has a repetitious chorus. Now is not the time to comment on the short term memories of consumers across the social web. Suffice to say, your message is interspersed with thousand/tens of thousands of others and you have to follow the repeat, rinse, repeat cycle to be successful.

8) Foster a positive culture within your own company. Look at the wonderful brands Whole Foods or Patagonia have built by empowering their internal staff. Neither company is perfect; but, each has pi0neered empowering their employees to believe in the corporate brand being built and to make contributions to it in creative ways.

9) Go long and go deep with social media marketing. It’s not going to happen overnight unless your Steve Jobs introducing one killer product after another or a member of Twitter’s exec staff. Build it right and they will eventually embrace your brand.

10) Think mobile. We are seeing a huge shift in consumer usage of social media via smartphones. Building your own unique IPhone or Android App is not a bad idea either, if you are lucky enough to find a developer!

11) Integrate a social cause into your branding/marketing mix. Pick a cause and support it as part of your branding initiatives and social media marketing. Check out the Pepsi Refresh Social Media Marketing Campaign. This campaign has helped to revive Pepsi’s “rusty” brand and humanize it at the same time.   We Support “What’s In The Heart” a wonderful film about the plight of our Native American People here in the US.

Discography Courtesy of Pandora: Dina Krall, Ray Charles, Dusty Springfield, The Who, U2, Ella Fitzgerald, Coldplay, Stan Getz.

Let’s start with the bottom line for  your brand or business. You absolutely need to know what’s the lifetime value of a customer to your business before you can start giving away those coupons to anyone and everyone. If these numbers don’t work (lifetime value versus marketing cost) then your much better off investing your marketing dollars elsewhere.

In our research and based on utilizing Groupon Marketing for multiple clients, we’ve unearthed some insight that may impact your decision about using Groupon. Although we cringe at the thought of writing something that is au contrair to the sparkling multi-billion dollar valuations Groupon and Living Social have achieved.

Bottom Line Analysis – No Silver Bullet

• That wonderful Groupon customer coming in to your store or restaurant is also displacing that customer you’ve spent years and maybe lots of marketing dollars building a relationship with.
• Our research indicates these customers are fickle and they are not brand loyalists.
• Groupon customers are really/really (!) value driven – “how big a deal am I getting?”
• Groupon’s customer service is far from exemplary in many cases. This isn’t all their fault (lest we sound like we are bashing them) – am sure they are experiencing some growth pains.
• Your putting your brand at risk working with Groupon. At the end of the day their massive email list is pushing out deals and your customers may associate brand value with Groupon and not with you. This is not a good thing. They “own” your customer to a certain extent.
• Many savvy merchants and brands are not using Groupon as they feel their brand is being cheapened by association with Groupon. Look at the travel industry and what happened to major chains versus sites like Priceline or Hotels.com – these online businesses have more marketing muscle now than the brands they represent.
• The one big positive our research showed us was on the cash flow that Groupon generates for many businesses. The sheer volume (which can be another problem) of these deals can help to infuse some cash into your business quickly.

Our recommendations if your diving into the pool with Groupon

1. Remember Groupon is a marketing channel not a sales channel!
2. Know what your incremental cost of sales is? You must know this number going in. Don’t include your fixed costs as part of your analysis.
3. Are you cannibalizing existing customers? If you are this may not be a good thing. And, if you don’t offer these deals to your existing customers, this can be a challenge as well.
4. What are the redemption percentages?  We’ve seen 60-85% on average. Factor back end operations accordingly and expect a bow wave the first few days.
5. If your getting just bargain shoppers what is the likelihood these consumers will turn into real/downstream customers?  Know going in that cash flow and brand awareness may be your sole drivers.
6. What’s the bottom line advertising value to getting your brand exposed to some finite number of customers in your local market?  Although this exposure can cut both ways.
7. Advertising is relative as Don Draper says. What are your normal customer acquisition costs? And how do these costs overlay with a Groupon Marketing Campaign?
8. Get ready for the masses – Groupon can defintiely deliver the numbers. And, you may want to cap the number of coupons that can be redeemed and the time period as well.

We tell our clients that Groupon is definitely not a silver bullet. But, it may have a place in their marketing mix if they understand all of the numbers and factors going in. But, as you can tell from this post, we have some healthy skepticism and concerns.

In the long run, your brand might be much better off investing a like amount in marketing dollars in blogging and integrating a CRM app into your business and building your own email database. Enabling you to have much better control over your marketing costs, direct contacts with your customer and doing some wonderful things for your SEO and content development and curation.

Image Credit: Inverse Blindness Machine: The Cool Hunter

Your brand now lives just about anywhere people congregate and interact on and offline!  Social media enables consumers to interact with your brand’s product and services in meaningful ways that were unheard of up until the last 12-24 months.

The conversation stream is coming at your brand in just about any and every way imaginable – Tweets, Likes, Yelp Reviews, Forums, Blog Comments, Videos. Your poor brand is under a digital assault like never before!  Brand command and control needs to be your marketing mantra moving forward. Some insight from here on the digital frontlines.

Identify the Right Community and Build Brand Advocates

Today’s social consumers are sharing their thoughts and feelings about your brand across many communities and sites. The conversation may start with a visit to your web site, then a clickthrough to your Facebook fan page, Twitter account or YouTube channel or a specialized community site like Yelp via a standard web connection or a smartphone.

Your challenge is identifying where your customers are living digitally and to then engaging your brand with them. You don’t build brand advocates by pushing content (text, images, videos) at them. You must engage with these digerati in a meaningful way by getting them to interact with your content and share it with others. And, identifying  and engaging uber connected “thought leaders” with your brand is even better.

• You want to identify the right platform and community and motivate the members of these communities to connect with your social media profile and engage with your brand.

• The two best applications and platforms that we use on behalf of existing client campaigns to identify thought leaders, connectors, heavyweights, etc. (whatever your term du jour) are Peer Index and Klout.

• PeerIndex has a broader set of components in their ranking algorithm but Klout’s user interface is a bit easier to grasp. But, we highly recommend both vendors and they are licensing their technology to a large number of other companies like HootSuite and Nimble.

• PeerIndex: http://www.peerindex.net/

• Klout: http://www.klout.com

Leveraging Facebook’s Market Dominance

Facebook is reshaping how brands market their products and services. It’s unparalleled growth, sophisticated platform and market dominance are reshaping marketing in the digital age.

Image Credit: Swaroski Japan

Facebook has morphed from a pure destination site to a platform that lets your brand interact with this vibrant community in a number of meaningful ways.

All the cool brands around the world the last 3-6 months have touted how many “likes” they have on Facebook. But, this one touch marketing technique has been passed over for meaningful activity on Facebook.

Your interaction with Facebook consumers now needs to start with a “like” that moves the consumer into a broader immersive engagement with your brand. The “like” is not the end game but the start of a chain of marketing activities that you want to cultivate with Facebook consumers.

Your “like” marketing can now can lead to wall recommendations, an embedded ecommerce mini store on y0ur Facebook page that drive immediate revenue, connecting the consumer to your Twitter account, taking a survey, downloading a video, watching a “live” broadcast of an event and much/much more. One to one engagement can drive your brand into uncharted marketing territory – to underscore, the “like” is just the beginning of brand engagement.

Brand Protection

You’ve done a superb job of building brand awareness across the social web.  Now, how do you monitor what’s being said about your brand?  This is a simple question with a complex answer, with variances tied to your social media platforms of choice, the dynamics of your content development and curation, size of company and related brand (small business to corporate entity) and marketing resources. Recommended Platforms and Services:

• Radian6: http://www.radian6.com/ (now part of SalesForce)
• Sprout Social: http://sproutsocial.com/
• Awareness Networks: http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/
• People Browser: http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/
• Blog Search: http://blogsearch.google.com
• Google Alerts: (Sidebar Keyword Target): http://www.google.com/alerts
• Search Twitter: http://www.search.twitter.com (Integrate RSS for Brand or Topic Follow Automation)
• Google Realtime: http://www.google.com/realtime

Creating Brand Relevancy

It’s critical to make your social media campaigns and strategy relevant to your target demographics. A cutting edge clothing lifestyle brand like Diesel can get away with integrating sexy male and female models across all of their marketing initiatives, including print, TV, web and social media. Diesel is “storytelling” with buffed actors, coupled with superbly written content and strong graphical elements that really engages with their target audience demographics via their web site and all top tier social platforms.

Image Credit: Mad Men

But, if your selling insurance to families your campaign’s content and imagery needs to resonate with your demographics – pictures and videos of families, homes and children are going to create brand relevancy with this demographic. Calls to action need to incorporate content that adds value to the relationship such as White Papers, comparison costs, Case Studies, etc.

Be creative with your brand and add value to existing content that your pushing out on the social web about your brand. A blog post can talk about how your products or services save your customers money or make their lives more interesting. But, a simple post with no outbound links to other resources is not going to engage your community as well as one with embedded resource links.

Driving people to a Facebook page is a good idea. But, it’s not real engaging. Giving them the ability to download a discount coupon as Starbucks has done and share this with others is much more engaging and drives brand value.

To summarize. Set your brand free on the social web and don’t fret over too many measurements and ROI details. Social media marketing is moving at warp speed and you are never going to be able to capture the digital touchpoints that reflect a well received brand. Get to market with a strategic plan and refine/improve downstream!

That’s not to say you shouldn’t measure social media ROI analytics. You absolutely should. But social enabling your brand is again all about setting it free, driving engagement and conversation. If done right, you’ll reap tremendous rewards with a broader targeted customer base of brand advocates! Go forth brand evangelists and multiply!

We get asked all the time what is the formula for promoting a brand on Facebook or Twitter. The simple answer is it’s a complex blend of art and science. If you follow these fifteen steps you will ultimately be successful on both of these social media communities.

I provided a short answer to what drives Social Media ROI on Quora earlier today which generated an immediate response. I’m going to flesh out my answer, as I think many brands and businesses are struggling with identifying social media ROI. Before you even think about social media marketing ROI you have to create and launch a campaign and should be aware of these barriers to entry.

• Remember the old saw: “time takes time” – well this is true of social media marketing. It requires an investment of time, which is increasing every day, as more and more jump into the market. It’s a marathon with the characteristics of a 100 yard dash!
• Effective high impact social media marketing campaigns require a knowledge of specialized marketing processes and platforms (YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp, Flickr).
• You should have a good understanding of content development and curation, coupled with a good web site structure that inculcates good SEO fundamentals.
• Social media marketing is starting to draw a crowd – the low barriers to entry are disappearing. Meaning, your brand messaging has to stand out above the digital hubbub.

Now that I’ve hopefully give you a sanity check about the big picture challenges lets dive deeper into social media marketing ROI metrics. Big picture capabilities:

1. Creates Buzz and Brand Awareness if outbound marketing is done creatively.
2. Gets Targeted Customers talking about your Product and Services via Social Communities.
3. Enables you to Build a Social Presence within these Communities, driving competitive barriers to entry.
4. Track brand engagement (note my recommendations for platforms and services below).
5. Monitor Competitors – remember they are doing the same on their end.
6. Use Social Communities as a product feedback loop that’s second to none.
7. Will push your organization to embrace new and challenging Marketing Methodologies, which in turn improves the DNA of your brand/organization.
8. Give you the ability to measure positive Social Sentiment (or negative).

Tangible ROI Measurements for Social Media Marketing:

• Revenue
• Customer Acquisition
• Generate Keyword Rankings and Related Search Traffic
• Drive “real time search” traffic via Keywords in Social Streams
• Cross Promote and Curate Content to Drive Search Rankings & Visibility
• Utilize Social CRM to Engage with and Solve Customer Problems (Support)
• Identify Customer Influencers & Market Directly to them
• Move Ecommerce Initiatives into Social Stream to Minimize COG
• Utilize Social Stream/Communities to Measure KPI
• Drives Blog & Newsletter Subscribers
• Leverages Content Development Costs

Market Leaders  involved in Social Media Marketing ROI

• Radian6: http://www.radian6.com/
• SproutSocial: http://sproutsocial.com/
• Awarness Networks: http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/
• People Browser (Research.Ly): http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/
• PeerIndex: http://www.peerindex.net/
• Klout: http://www.klout.com
• Lithium: http://www.lithium.com
• Lexalytics: http://www.lexalytics.com/

It’s critical to the success of your branding and online presence to integrate your social media platforms with your web site. Enabling you to leverage your overall outbound marketing costs and processes.

Before we dive in to enabling your web site for social media platforms and profiles make sure these website attributes are all systems go:

• Google Analytics is installed for tracking and optimizing.
• Content is current, accurate and search engine optimized.
• Site Navigation is clear; visitors can easily move around within your web site, contact and engage with your brand.
• You have calls to action are in place: Blog sign up, Newsletter, Product/Services Promotions, etc.
• Load times have been tested and all web site digital touchpoints work well. WooRank has a superb website analysis and reporting tool which is one of the best in the industry with a free and paid version.
• Web site content should be updated frequently to drive downstream search rankings and visitor engagement – your Blog will do this job nicely.
• Many visitors (admittedly geekier types) still use Google’s RSS Reader to stay abreast of what’s happening with your Blog; make sure this is working properly by setting up and testing your account via Feedburner.

Social Enabling your WebSite

1) Install Social Media Images in a prominent position that is resident in your universal menu structure (shows up on all pages). Make sure these are “above the fold” – don’t do you much good if icons are not showing up at the top of each page in a prominent position.

2) If you have a YouTube account them you should also embed your videos with the web site – leveraging your content development costs and driving deeper engagement with your visitor. There are a ton of YouTube widgets that make this pretty easy to do. Click here for a deeper dive (previous blog) on video marketing.

3) Integrate your Blog closely with your web site via menus, links, mentions and references. My web site is built around my blog – in fact we tossed out our old design and went with a Genesis Framework template by Studio Press as the primary platform for the site.

• Blogging is at times getting thrown under the bus for the sexier/shinier new tools like Twitter and Facebook. A Blog should be the cornerstone of your social media marketing activities – it does so many powerful things for your online presence: content refreshment, brand engagement, drives  incremental SEO results and can be repurposed across the social web.
• I don’t recommend using standalone third party web sites like Tumblr, Posterous, Google’s Blogger or niche vendors for vertical industries. If you want to use them as add on sites for republishing your blog, this may be okay, although you have to think about duplicate content issues.
• It’s critical to own, control and manage your own content and the benefits of having a WordPress blog integrated with your web site far outstrip using third party sites.
• Don’t forget to embed your Blog with your social media platforms; LinkedIn enables you to do this in a couple of minutes. Every Blog post should be syndicated across your social media accounts.

4) Enable visitors to share your website content with the social web; i.e. Likes (Facebook), ReTweets (Twitter) using plugins for the respective social media platforms. This makes your site more interactive with the visitor (driving engagement) and helps to extend your content across the social web.

5) Extend your brand and web site content across the social web by setting up accounts via SlideShare and Scribd (industry leaders), After you’ve created an account with both sites you can easily embed a widget with our site and also embed your SlideShare account via LinkedIn account.

6) There are a large number of content publishing and bookmarking web site available to you. Market leaders are StumblUpon, Digg (although facing some challenges of late), Reddit - Ping.FM (now owned by Seesmic), and OnlyWire are aggregate sites that enable you to update all of your social bookmarking sites at once.

If you have thoughts, questions or digital bon mots we’d love to connect with you via our Comments below.

The latest buzz emanating from my fellow marketers is that traditional marketing is dead, replaced by social media marketing strategies. Hogwash! As usual, marketers are looking in the mirror and falling in love with their own images and prognostications.

Great social media marketing strategies are all about branding, positioning, communicating, engaging – all of which are integral to classic marketing processes. My take on building effective social media marketing strategies:

Branding is critical to any company and the core building block to any social media marketing strategy. Differentiating your products and services via brand positioning is a crucial marketing imperative, especially in today’s warp speed comment-driven echo chamber known as social media. Its critical to define your brand or risk having others define it for you, which is dangerous.

• Zappos did a wonderful job of taking a staid market (reselling shoes) and branding themselves as the market leader in providing excellence in customer service, coupled with competitive pricing and selection.
• Although, Zappos didn’t invent this brand positioning – Nordstrom’s “The Nordstrom Way” used similar branding/positioning in the 80′s and 90′s to build a multi-billion retail powerhouse. Zappos “borrowed” the core concept and made it their own by incorporated a web-centric direct ecommerce business model.

Social Media marketing moves at Warp Speed – those who want to excel at social media marketing  must stay on top of and shape the conversations occurring in the multiple communities where there brand lives. In the end, social media is about building a conversation and engaging with those that amplify your brand’s positive or negative connotations. Recognizing your dealing with a forest fire in some cases that’s moving at a speed unmatched by any other marketing maxim know to woman or man!

Consumers define and share conversations- your on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, broadcasting high quality content and doing your best to shape consumer’s perception of your brand’s core strengths. Out of the blue a critical feature of your product begins to get promoted via Twitter and Facebook as not working as defined in your marketing. Bam – your brand’s critical challenge is to jump into the conversation and address these complaints and observations, or risk losing credibility, revenue and perceived value of your brand.

Grasping how to use content to drive your branding is critical. Effective social media marketing strategies live or die based on how your content is created, optimized, promoted, syndicated  and/or shared by members of the social community.  Great content must resonates with the community, whether its textual or video – if it doesn’t inform, stimulate or create brand enthusiasts then it’s not working.

Social networks provide you with powerful new tools for brand measurement. Using social media to quantify what’s being said about your brand enables you to skip the traditional product centric measurement and dive right into customer analysis and feedback. Successful brands are using social media to converse with this social consumer to understand what product or service features resonate with them and which don’t.

• Bigger brands like American Express or P&G are moving beyond consumer-direct communications via traditional social platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) and building their own branded social communities. P&G’s “Being Girl” forum enables P&G to engage with, measure and quantify the forum’s evolving social conversations.

• American Express’s OPEN Forum is a superb example of a branded community (targeting small to medium sized businesses) that leverages branded content presented by “thought leaders”  and bloggers that work directly for American Express that engages with and solicits information from the broader community.

Great social media marketing strategies are not a replacement for traditional marketing. Far from it!  Marketing is always evolutionary and iterative – today’s social media marketing strategies are just the latest iteration of same! Stay tuned……….