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………….

Barriers to entry are rising quickly for social media marketing. Facebook’s meteoric growth in Q1 2011 is staggering, with over 1 Trillion display ads served in this time period. This growth is mirrored, although not at Facebook’s  breakneck pace, via other top social media portals including LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

As we’ve discussed before in previous posts, it’s no longer possible to simply create a good social media profile and expect to generate stellar results. There is simply too much noise in the marketplace.  Your brand’s challenge is really about building what we call relationship capital.

First, what is “relationship capital?”  It’s the collective and individual value of the network of all people, partners, suppliers, customers and others that are connected with your brand.  

Three Steps to Building Relationship Capital:

1) Creating quality content that engages people in your target market and motivates them to change their behavior and/or share your brand messaging with others. The social web has rapidly become a decision index for many, replacing more traditional research.

• Individuals and companies look to the Internet and social web to see what is being said positively and negatively about brands they want to engage with.
• Think of your content as the front door to your engagement with people and other brands.
• Don’t forget about adjusting your content strategy when necessary. If your Blog isn’t driving sign ups and your Twitter and Facebook accounts are growing then your content strategy may need a significant adjustment.

2) Measure your growth via the social web and the quality of your online brand. What we mean by “measure your growth” is doing more than analyzing the number of Followers via Twitter, Fans via Facebook, visits via Google Analytics and related baseline measurements.

• Your looking to take a snapshot of front end social engagement that drives relationship capital; i.e. how many times a piece of content has been shared, ReTweets via Twitter, Likes via Facebook, Shares via LinkedIn or incorporated/referenced via a “Best Answer.”
• The quality of your online brand can be measured in a number of ways above and beyond baseline metrics. It overlaps with social measurement and should also include a deeper dive into customer interaction with your brand.

3) Be ethical and qualitative to build high quality relationship capital. People online like to engage with brands (companies, individuals and groups) that they like and trust. They are looking for insight, motivation and something inspirational.

• You can be as creative as you want to be online, in some cases, the more the better. But, don’t overstep the boundaries of good taste. Spamming LinkedIn contacts (we get them every day) and throwing out nasty slang via Twitter are not going to build an ethical or qualitative brand.
• Relationship building via the social web is no different to a certain extent than offline. People track your content much more than you realize  and every blog post, video, Tweet and Facebook “Like” activity is building a profile for your brand – engagement or lack thereof indicates the quality of your brand’s online persona.

To summarize; create great content that is engaging, take a deep measurement of your social media activities and be ethical and down to earth in all communications. The end result will be a strong pillar of relationship capital. Which in turn will drive opportunities and revenue.

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!

Twitter is again generating a tremendous amount of interest from brands and businesses all over the world for good reason.  Growth rates are accelerating, with an average 460,000 accounts created during the month of February 2011 and mobile usage is growing at a staggering rate of 182% during the last calendar year. So how do you market your business on Twitter?  Ten ways for twitter marketing for business!

1) Build a profile on Twitter that resonates with your target audience and don’t be bland and boring. You have 6-10 seconds to garner your target market’s interest – be bold, provocative, creative – faint of heart never won fair lady right?

2) Think of Twitter as a finely tuned competitive analysis engine. Connect your account with your competitors to get an immediate sense for what they are doing right and wrong on this dynamic social media platform. Be aware, it’s a digital quid pro quo world – savvy competitors will be doing the same.

3) Use Twitter as social glue for your brand. Meaning, integrate your Twitter account across all of yours social media platforms and profiles: Friend Feed, LinkedIn, Google Profile, Squidoo Page(s), Facebook, Web Site, etc. The more the better – you driving brand awareness and updating your content across all of these platforms, which will generate marketing ROI moving forward.

4) Twitter is a superb tool for aggregating news or information about any topic that relates to your brand or business. You can mine content via your Twitter account or sign up for and participate in Twitter Chats to learn more about specific topics.

5) Leverage Twitter to drive sales. Think of Twitter as a digital billboard if you will. Integrate a Bit.Ly shortening code for a discounted promotion for your web site and only use this customized link with your Twitter account so you can track your marketing impact.

6) Many businesses don’t understand Twitter’s inherent capabilities as a platform for spreading brand awareness and building relationships. They jump on Twitter and start off broadcasting content to the community and ignore any interaction with their connections. Do this at your peril. People want to engage with your brand via Twitter – meaning, don’t  just shove content down their digital throats. Build and cultivate relationships.

7) Use Twitter as a real time customer relationship management tool by encouraging your customers to connect with you via Twitter and responding to their Tweets.

8) Think of Twitter as a live broadcasting platform. If your hosting an event on or offline use your Twitter account to update your Followers in real time with what is going on.

9) Use Twitter for a brand monitoring tool via Twitter’s Search Engine and use the RSS Feed to automate the process to deliver regular reports on what’s being said about your brand or business on Twitter.

10) Build brand influence and awareness to drive revenue.  Convert your Followers into brand advocates by engaging with, thanking and rewarding them with accolades, discounts or something of value that cements their relationship with your business on Twitter. Influcencers (those with large followings) can amplify your Twitter marketing message and visibility significantly.  Connect and build relationships with them to amplify your message, content and brand awareness.

How is your brand or business leveraging  Twitter to generate Marketing ROI? Love to get your comments below!

Don’t even think about a social media marketing campaign unless your Web Site is working flawlessly, Search Engine Optimization components are addressed and Content Development and Curation strategy is in place.

1) Your web site must have these features and functions working to ensure your engagement with the social community will drive meaningful ROI:

• Site Navigation must be flawless – visitors must be able to navigate through your web site easily.
• Multiple call to action and response elements must be in place: Newsletter Sign Up, Contact Us Page,  Phone Numbers are prominently displayed and Blog subscription direct and via RSS Feed are functioning.
• Images should be optimized to ensure load times (time it takes a page to load) are at their best.
• Domain Name should be registered out 3-5 five years at a minimum to drive SEO results and brand valuation.
• Sociables (links to social platforms) are prominently placed at top and bottom of all pages and “likes” and ReTweet buttons are set up and working.

2) These Baseline Search Engine Attributes must be in place:

• All Pages and Images have unique Title Tags, Descriptions and Keywords – the latter have minimal impact for Google but good to include.
• Quality backlinks have been developed for the site over a 90-120 day period or campaign.
• An XML Google Site Map has been setup properly and you have connected your web site with your Google Analytics Account.
• Location has been created via a Google Business Listing.
• A Keyword strategy has been developed for your web site content

3) Your content development and curation strategy is set. We tell our clients building a successful social media marketing campaign is really about creating and sharing quality content; i.e. Images, Text, Videos, Comments, FAQ, Blog posts, Newsletter, Tweets, Newsfeeds, Answers across the social web. Then, driving engagement and interaction with your followers across the social web.

• Blog (as below) is set preferably via WordPress, optimized for search engines with plugins, individual page titles, images optimized, with Categories in place, is linked to from the Home/Index page and is updated 3-5 times per week.
• You have content development and curation strategy in place to broadcast and share across the social web; i.e.schedule in place, content is rotated for maximum exposure, in-bound flow of news sources created (Google Alerts, RSS Feeds, Newsletter Subscriptions).
• Your team understands the importance of cross promoting content across the social web – for example a Blog post should be referenced via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and second tier sites like Posterous.
• Flickr Pro account has been created, images are uploaded and optimized properly and shared across the social web.
• YouTube Account has been created, optimized and cross referenced via all social identities and platforms.

These three marketing prerequisites, Web Site, SEO Setup and Content are all critical components to your overall marketing strategy and must be in-place prior to starting a social media marketing campaign. Or, you’ll waste time and resources building and engaging with social consumers/followers!!  The devil is absolutely in the details – we’d love to get your comments or thoughts below!!

Image Credit: Mediasation

Ecommerce has become a way of life for many brands. But, launching an ecommerce startup requires a blend of art, science and technology. Our take on some absolute steps for launching a successful Ecommerce Startup.

1. Build your web site on WordPress! Advantages are built in CMS, wealth of developer support, 10K & growing plugins that extend functionality, great for SEO and its a robust stable platform that is being improved everyday via developers all over the world.
2. Analyze and understand your target market and demographics. Where do your customers “live” on the social web and how do they interact with each other? Once you answer this question develop a social media marketing campaign that will reach, engage with and motivate customers to buy from you and recommend your products to friends via social web.
3. Create a Blog on your site and blog at least 3-5 times a week – make sure you invite comments from readers/visitors and interact with them. Your blog should have content topics that integrate with your Keyword strategy mapped out in SEO best practices below. Leverage your blog by connecting it to your LinkedIn profile and share blog posts via Twitter and Facebook.
4. Ensure you have sociables (links to social media profiles) on your site for
   

   Image Credit: Netlogical

   Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and give people the ability to Tweet out and “like” your site via plugins. These promote and foster interaction with your community and should be two-way connections.

5. Do some competitive analysis (there are always competitors) and identify 3-5 top tier competitors and follow their digital footprint. Also, set up Google Alerts that are keyword targeted (“my brand”) for your company, products, brand and competitors.
6. Test  PPC advertising via Facebook and Google’s Display Ad Network (not Adwords initially) – both of these offer pretty good targeting. For Google’s Display Network, either hire an agency or consultant to set this up for you, unless your very knowledgeable about your target market and online advertising. Test, test and retest – split variable testing is a great idea – test your message, offers, landing page, days of week, etc.
7. Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your site and closely watch entry/exit pages, time on site, bounce rates, where visitors are coming from, etc.
8. Build a coupon offer right on your Facebook fan page that is integrated with a “Like” component – driving deals and perceived value of your brand.
9. Built landing pages that are second to none – this is an art and a science and can determine the success or failure of your ecommerce site.
10. Deploy a Viral Marketing Campaign
    

    Image Credit: Parallel Interactive Media

    - offer member’s of your community rewards for referring friends to your site for deals. You can leverage these via Twitter and Facebook.

11. Video usage driven by bandwidth and smartphones is ramping up very fast. Create a YouTube channel with lots of 1-2 min optimized videos. Leverage the channel by throwing up a YouTube contest for your visitors. Use TubeMogul to accelerate syndication and digital reach of your videos.
12. Make sure SEO best practices is in place for your site. Meaning, good content strategy that incorporates a list of top twenty targeted keywords, UI/Menus are easy to navigate (this touches on user experience and SEO), using the right WordPress plugin like All In One SEO (plus, the developer is a retired Marine), good Privacy doc, connected with Google account, Google Places is done, have developed (legitimately) good quality backlinks and Google XML Sitemap is installed/working.

There’s more to a successful ecommerce startup than what’s been conveyed in this blog post. But, we’ve covered most of the basics for you. If you have questions or thoughts please ping us back via comments below.