March 11, 2011

6 Ways to Prep for Advertising Online

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by Jason Falls

Before you can establish an online advertising plan for your local business, you need a few key marketing basics in place.  After you have that, you’ll know that you know what you need to know (follow that?), and your plan will be grounded firmly in reality and primed for success.  Although most of these basics hold true for traditional media advertising, the beauty of online advertising is that you can test it quickly and affordably —and make adjustments to your mix or your message in almost real time.  Here are the six building-block tasks that any serious marketer has to tackle:

1. Define your target market.

Look at who you’re currently doing most of your business with and then figure out why they do business with you and what it is about them and their needs that are unique.   Defining your market is critical, because it allows you to start thinking about what kind of marketing communications would be effective for your business.  After all, if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, there’s no way to figure out how to reach them.

2. Write a paragraph that defines your target market.

This helps you keep your customers’ unique characteristics in the front of your mind. Write what you think they want out of life and how your offering fits into their plans.

3. Identify your value proposition.

Determine what your business does best — and why customers should choose your business over any of your competitors. If you honestly don’t know what it is about your business in particular that appeals to your customers, call a few and ask. You’re likely to get good, actionable answers. Your customers might even come away from your call feeling flattered that you sought their valuable opinions.

A good value proposition might include characteristics like having the best customer service or the fastest turnaround time or even having the most competitive prices.

4. Create your key messages.

This should flow directly from your value proposition.  However, whereas your “value proposition” can be thought of as characteristics that make your business unique and attractive, your “key messages” are the way in which you express and communicate those characteristics.  Once you create your key messages, look for opportunities to incorporate those messages into all of your advertising – online and otherwise.

5. Analyze your competition.

Now that you have the basics down, it’s time to think more specifically about online.  And one of the first things to think about online is to make sure you know who (and what) you’re competing against.  How and where do your competitors advertise? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can your business be competitive with theirs?  A great way to do this is by searching for one of the services you offer.  Do your competitors appear in the paid listings? If so, do their ads contain an offer? Are they listed with the local IYP or do they maintain a Facebook page? In the same vein, search one of the major engines for your competitor’s name. The results show you where they have an advertising presence.  Pay particular attention to any places you hadn’t yet thought of but that also make good sense for you.

6. Research your market online.

Research can consume valuable time, but it’s time well spent because the better you understand your customers’ online behaviors, the more effective an online advertiser you are.  Start by searching the major and the local search engines with keywords that best represent your business. That simple act produces a lot of search results, but that’s the goal. Now, follow up those results and see where they take you.  Chances are the keywords will bring up a big, messy mix of IYP listings, local sites, blogs, social networks, local search results, and more. As you chase down each, make your own assessment of their potential to drive business. Does the content reflect what your business is about? Do the keywords take you to places where businesses like yours are discussed and where you might participate in the discussion? Would your customers search the way you just did, or would they not dig as deep? Are some of your best customers on Facebook or LinkedIn?

After you do these six steps, you’re definitely closing in on what your online marketing mix should be. You’re also about to figure out (if you haven’t already) precisely how to position your local business to attract qualified local customers.  And when you’ve done that, you can start establishing some informed, realistic, attainable, and maintainable marketing goals for your company, which is half the battle.

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March 10, 2011

Have You Embraced Being A Media Company? Really?

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by Adam Singer

It’s not a new notion that every company is a media company, but it’s still a succinct way to describe the shift in communications the web has enabled. This isn’t a strategy, it’s simply the way the world is. Either embrace it or don’t.

Yet I think a lot of companies and marketers pay lip service to the shift but don’t do a damn thing about it. Which is fine, but they don’t really have much to ground on when their organic digital marketing efforts fail.

Being a modern, relevant media company involves a pivot of your communications strategy to put an owned channel at the center. You don’t see popular media brands yielding their presence 100% to the stream. They would have to be crazy to do this as they’d be basically giving any of their personal leverage away. They are building opt-in at the source and growing their main communities safe from externalities in an environment with a signal to noise ratio they control.

Pontificators look hypocritical when they say blogs are dead, meanwhile they sit back and continue to build up their own publishing ventures, funneling traffic and communities from the streams and the engines. It’s in their interest to propagate controversy: it creates links, traffic and attention. All which contribute to their brand and help sell more ads to build revenue. And if their influence is that far-reaching, hey it could even mean less competition for them. Meanwhile at the end of the day a blog is simply a publishing platform – so anyone who says blogs are dead is basically saying self-hosted digital publishing is dead. Right. What would everyone link to? If the social web is a problem in search of a solution, perhaps you should be the solution.

So just what are modern media companies doing right?

They are not just embracing search and social – they are reorganizing to dominate them

Did you see AOL’s master plan leaked to the web? Yeah it’s a bit convoluted but the main takeaway is they are aggressively going after search and social. To the point they aren’t even afraid to throw paid promotions at stories. Likely, they’ve ran the numbers and understand a certain thresholds of visitors are necessary to create the highest chances for content to propagate and build up enough organic momentum for search and social channels. Meanwhile, media entities and companies who are reticent not only continue to fall further behind, they are dying.

Being efficient with their time

As I noted above, many smart media companies are focused on building opt-in at the source and creating a hub on the web. This is smart – ultimately they will monetize by serving ads, affiliate links, selling premium services/subscriptions/apps or even consulting and software (no, it’s not far fetched and yes, modern media companies could easily compete with you). They’re still leveraging outposts, but in many cases doing so efficiently. Consider the NY Times doesn’t really have a Facebook page, they basically just have another RSS feed. Subscribers don’t notice the difference because likely many of them never used RSS in their life. Facebook just makes it possible to syndicate there much like you would a feed.

The Times also gutted their social media position:

The move is part of the Times’ efforts to more fully integrate its print and digital operations. It’s also an acknowledgment that social media needs to be — and is already — a shared responsibility.

….Social media can’t belong to one person; it needs to be part of everyone’s job…It has to be integrated into the existing editorial process and production process”

Indeed, once an organization gets to a certain level of sophistication social media-specific positions start to make less sense. Get everyone to be socially smart. Shows you some media companies may actually be ahead of the curve in terms of having a digitally-savvy team. Not to say social media team members aren’t still valuable. Of course they are, but once a company has a larger social strategy everyone is executing on they can transition into larger and more strategic roles. Jeremiah Owyang notes this trend in a recent report.

Tapping communities for content

A-list blogs and media frequently tap expert guest contributors for content. It’s smart because they get something: compelling content and the reach into that person’s network (undoubtedly anyone who guest contributes will share it back with their network) and the person gets something: the notoriety of being features in that publication and the reach into that publication’s network. Sites like the Huffington Post basically organized around their community for content and offered this as the norm, not the rule to the tune of 315 million. Again any community member who was upset doesn’t really have a right to be: they get something too for contributing.

Investing in content and viewing it as an asset

I noted this in my primer on content marketing but I’m going to share this one again. Have you seen the posts at Smashing Magazine? If not, you should take a look at what they do right whenever they publish. They vest the effort make every post an authority on the given subject. What has this built for them? Hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Millions of visitors per month. Leverage to create an e-commerce platform and even a job board. They have attention and a community – now they get to decide what to do with it. If they ever need anything: research, more contributions or to help spread news they have built permission with a community they can ask. And I bet their readers are happy to help due to all their value Smashing provides.

Of course all of these examples have different views on content. AOLs view is to be fast and prolific, Smashing wants to be authoritative and definitive. But if you boil it down they are actually built on the same underlying foundation despite different approaches to get there.

These are just some samples of what modern media companies have done, but let’s go back to the beginning. Are you really embracing being a modern media company? Are you building a community and view your web content and audience as assets to accrue over time? If no, you likely still see marketing as a cost-center, not a revenue generator and have bigger problems. You also probably keep paying new money to reach the same people. I’m sorry for you, but no one says that has to continue: it’s up to you to evolve your approach. If yes, are you taking cues from the successful media brands of today? Perhaps you should be.

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March 9, 2011

10 Persistent Social Media Marketing Myths

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by Brett Borders

Social media has broken out of the underground and into the mainstream. And while personal social media literacy rates are rapidly rising, awareness of how to use social media tools for business and marketing campaigns is still very murky.

Here are 10 of the most common myths I’ve had to untangle during my social media consulting gigs:

image credit: Chris Bishop

1. Social Media Marketing is Easy

Actually, social media marketing is a lot of hard work. You have to find, filter, create and share content constantly… schmooze smoother a social butterfly with 36 heads… and do lots of time-consuming favors for people. The pace of the social media world is like a busy bar or restaurant: fun to visit, but stressful and demanding to work in. If you’re not willing to constantly read, learn, solve technical puzzles and socialize with people – you’ll just be treading water and going nowhere.

2. Social Media Marketing Works Overnight

Actually, social media marketing usually takes months or years of persistent effort before you reach any kind of successful plateau. Your first dozen blog posts are probably gonly gonna get read by your mom, and you may get few comments or kudos. It might take you 6 months to crack 1000 Twitter followers, but once you get some moment… things start to spread exponentially. This blog only had 400 subscribers the first 6 months, but by 18 months it crossed 6,000 RSS subscribers. Social Media Rockstar now gets comments and new subscribers even when I don’t post on it. Don’t give up before the miracle happens!

3. Social Media Marketing is Free

Actually, social media marketing costs a lot of your time and/or money. You can do it yourself if you’re willing to spend hundreds of hours interacting with people and making chit chat, or you can save some time by hiring a consultant who has already put in the hours and can share shortcuts and personal connections. People who really know their social media are going to be busy and in-demand, and they’ll charge for their fleeting time accordingly.

4. Social Marketing Works Well for Any Type of Business

Actually, social media works best for certain types of products and services – and not-so-well for others. In Seth Godin’s excellent book Meatball Sundae, he explains the metaphor of the meatball being a boring / ordinary product – and the whipped cream and cherrry on top being “new media marketing.” So the combination of taking a meatball (i.e., lawn chairs or life insurance) and adding some social media toppings – (http://Twitter.com/AwesomeLifeInsurance) – isn’t got to be that appetizing or successful.

Social media marketing works best for remark-able products that are of great interest to heavy social media users (think: Facebook apps, Web hosting plans, 4g mobile phones, technology conferences). For more traditional products, and you can expect low-to-moderate interest unless you find a breakthrough and ultra-creative angle.

5. Social Marketing is Typically High ROI

Actually, most people and companies are remunerated quite poorly for all the hours they spend on Twitter or Facebook. Only a small elite make huge money from social media marketing. For many companies, it is usually wise invest a significant part of your web marketing budget in higher return-on-investment (ROI) tactics: SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay-per-click) marketing or CRO (conversion rate optimization) - and slowly supplement this main course with social media juice.

6. Social Marketing is Best Handled by the Intern

Actually, Social media is really easy to screw up. Who do you want to be the public voice of your brand: a hungover sorority girl intern, an outsourced guy in Uganda with satisfactory English skills, an mid-level marketing manager having a midlife crisis – or you, yourself? It’s quite easy to offend people and stir up an online reputation problem, damage your company brand, or make a costly mistake (i.e., picking the wrong wording for your company Facebook fan page, which can never be changed — or forgetting a password and locking yourself out of a key account .) A better option might be to get initial guidance from an experienced social media professional, and to let your intern or assistant follow their guidelines.

7. Great Content Sells Itself

Actually, great web content often laungishes about… unseen and unshared. Great films never win an award. Great bands are passed over by music industry exces. Total garbage makes the bestseller list, and it hits the Digg home page too. Social media is a popularity contest – probably even more than Hollywood is. It making relationships and paying attention to other people, so when the time is right, they’ll pay attention to you and your content. You should expect to make a lot of friends and do a lot of favors for them, first…. before they’ll be willing to check out your stuff.

8. Social Marketing is the Hottest New Trend

Actually, the “golden era” of social media marketing was from 2006 to 2008. Audiences were far less jaded and self-proclaimed experts were few. Starting around 2009, exponentially more people (like myself) started to blog and tweet about social media – making it expoenentially more difficult to stand out. Now social media users’ brains and eyeballs are quickly becoming jaded and fatigued. Only the best of the best content, and most charismatic (or narcissistic) personalities can crack through all the “me too” the noise and rise to the top.

9. Setting Up a Blog / Facebook Page / Twitter widget = Effective Social Media Strategy

Actually, it won’t do much of anything without something to say to the world. Having a Twitter profile or Facebook fan page is like having a cell phone. Everyone has one, and you having one too isn’t going to make special or popular. You are required to be an interesting conversationalist. Social media is about making connections with real people, which usually takes intensive real human interaction and TLC. Don’t believe that slapping a Twitter widget at the bottom of your company web page is a “social media strategy.” A blog or social media button is just a basic tool, and if you believe it’s going to get you popularity and trafic without ongoing effort – you’re a social media “tool,” also.

10. Social Media Buzz = Sales and Income

Actually, social media is a very indirect form of marketing. Most people who visit your websites or social media profiles will never buy your products, check out your services or click on your ads. People are naturally self-centered, especially when they’re surfing the web. Most of the people you make a connect with will eventually drop you as a friend or forget about you – but a small number of the people will loyally return, pay attention, comment… and even fewer will buy your stuff. The best you can do is search out niches where you can get better targeted traffic and raise the quantity (of new content and promotional efforts) so your-1%-of-visitors-who-become-buyers adds up to a bigger bottom line.

Did I leave any out common social media myths? Please add to this list in the comments below!

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March 8, 2011

14 Powerful Tips for Marketing on Facebook

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Finding a good place to showcase your products, services and websites for free in the online world is a dream for everyone – Facebook has made this a reality. With half a billion Facebook users and thousands of online communities to choose from, Facebook has brought potential customers much closer to you.

It’s no big secret that Facebook can help you in online marketing. However, I know there are many of you who believe that just registering on Facebook is enough… it’s not. Your Facebook

facebook-art-marketing-webinar

success story ends before it even begins!

There is much more to marketing on Facebook than just creating a profile.  Keeping your fans engaged is the key. Don’t be a brand, but be a community they love being a part of. In this article, I’m going to tell you how you can use the medium of Facebook to increase your customer base as well as retain the ones you have!

CREATE YOUR PRESENCE ON FACEBOOK

1.   Facebook Profile: By creating a profile for yourself or your business, you are establishing your identity. This will take you a long way in developing relationships with fellow users and in positioning your business. You profile lets you interact with people on a personal note, more so if it’s a local business. Here are some aspects of a profile page:

o    Profile Picture: Always put your best foot forward, which means use the most flattering picture as your profile picture.

MAC profile pic

No matter what they say, a book is judged by its cover. I came across M.A.C makeup’s profile and thought it was really catchy with the colors used on the face. Hundreds of indifferent people with little time to spare are going to decide whether to add you based on your picture. So, make sure you get this one right!

o    Add Friends: After creating a profile, don’t wait for things to

Facebook-Network-Marketing

happen. Add new friends every day and the word will spread that you’re on Facebook. Before you know it, you’ll be starting your day by accepting friend requests! However, make sure you don’t add more than 25 – 30 people a day as excessive adding can get your profile removed from Facebook.

o    Wall: This is your main platform to interact with Facebook users. Post messages on your wall and also comment on members’ activities, though, only when relevant. A cafe once commented on my status when it was something about food. And there! A personal connection was built in a second! I knew that I was going to visit this place more often. However, make sure you don’t spam people every other day or they may remove you from their friend list.

o    Photo Albums and Videos: Photos and videos are a great way to showcase the latest collection of your product.

CW-STM-vintage-album

I know many people who love to see what goes on behind the scene during a photo shoot or while a baker does his magic in the kitchen. Moreover, the first thing most Facebook users check are photo updates. So take that camera and start shooting!

2.   Fan Pages: Facebook Pages, known as Fan Pages, are designed for businesses, brands, companies, products and celebrities. It enables public figures, organizations and other entities to create an authentic and public presence on Facebook. You can encourage users to become fans of your page and share information with them by uploading pictures, videos, status updates, hosting discussions and displaying wall posts. Unlike Facebook Profiles, Pages are visible to everyone on the internet and are generally better for long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers.

3.   Groups: Facebook Groups allow people to come together around a common cause or activity to express their views. One of the best features of groups is the ability to send messages directly to members’ Facebook inboxes.  It’s a great way to form a community and help your brand image.
Nowadays, it’s almost a necessity for movies

group

to establish their presence on Facebook during its post-release period as Facebook users look for movies here. The good thing here is that you can send bulk invites to your friends, while it is manually done on Pages.  Groups are generally better for hosting quick active discussions and attracting attention.

4.   Events: Simply put, Facebook Events can help you connect with your target audience and invite them for your events, even if they aren’t on your friend list or one of your fans. Events can be created individually or even from Profiles, Pages. What I like is that Facebook gives you a choice between making the event Public and Private.
Let me explain the difference. I got an invite from Alanis Morissette Unplugged Acoustic Performance for a show next month, though I’m not a ‘friend’ or a

event

‘fan’. This is an open invitation for a public event where anyone can access the page and RSVP to it. However, if you want to maintain an exclusive guest list, choose the ‘Private’ option and the event page won’t be visible to anyone except those you choose. If you’re planning a launch or celebrating a landmark event, the ‘Private’ option lets you selectively invite people and give details on a page that can’t be accessed by anyone else.

The Next Step: HOW TO USE FACEBOOK FOR ONLINE MARKETING

Social Media Marketing is still in its infancy. I consider this as an advantage because there are not many set rules, you can try & experiment with different methods & techniques. However, if you don’t want to experiment, here are some tried and tested methods that will ensure success:

5.   Be Unique and Keep Updating: There’s nothing more boring than bland Facebook pages. Add lots of personality and

Unique-large

fun to your profile. If possible, try to create applications just for your page. Offer something different so that they keep coming back, instead of letting them wait for updates from you. If you check Dell’s Facebook page, you’ll see that it keeps updating its status and gives new information on their products and about technology.

6.  Use a Big Profile Picture: Who says size doesn’t matter? Using a big profile picture is one of the best ways to brand your Facebook page. Facebook allows images of up to 200pix wide x 600pix high to be used as profile images Pages. This way, you stand out in a crowd.  Check out Bob Marley or Johnny Depp’s page on Facebook and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

7.   Tag Fans in Photos: You can tag your fans in pictures of new collections, or even ask them to tag themselves as a part of a game or contest. Musician Lenny Kravitz uploaded pictures of his concert in Italy in 2009 and asked everyone to tag themselves. This gave him good publicity as the update on being tagged appeared on the fans’ walls.

group2

8.   Exclusive Landing Page for Users: Use different pages to target different sets of people. Take new users to a page that encourages them to ‘Like’ you or to a page they would find interesting enough to keep coming back. Members/fans can be directed to the wall or a game page that might interest them. Red Bull’s profile page is designed in a way that users are given a hint to ‘Like’ the page, while fans are taken directly to the Wall. You can get innovative in designing landing pages and targeting different people. 

'Facebook I Red Bull'

9.   Reward Loyal Supporters: Encourage loyal supporters to join your

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Page and reward them. Tabs or badges like ‘member of the month’ that can be placed on their profiles for visibility can be awarded to them. A happy customer on Facebook can get you lots of attention.  Remind users to Like and Share information about you. When their friends see the updates on the News Feed, it’s highly likely for them to do the same.

10.   Use Contests and Polls: Holding contests encourage fans to interact directly with you. Domino’s ‘Show Us Your Pizza’ is a contest where people can send pictures of Domino’s pizzas they’ve orders. The best picture will be chosen by Domino’s and the photographer gets a prize of $500 and a chance to get his picture featured in an ad. This has received a lot of attention from Facebook users.

'Facebook I Domino's Pizza'

11.   Actively Participate Outside Your Page: Find other Facebook pages related to your industry or topic using Facebook Search & start actively commenting on their posts & updates. This is a great way to build relationships in your industry and even adds credibility to your business. If you’re willing to offer free advice on communities and discussions, it will encourage people to check your website out.

12.   Integrate Facebook Social Plugins to Your Site: When I go to CNN’s website, I can see what stories my friends have ‘Liked’, or what movies my friends ‘Recommend’ on IMDB. The Like button on your site enables users to share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile and the Recommendation button gives users of your site personalized suggestions for pages that they like. There are many more buttons like LikeBox, Comments, Live Stream etc that you can add to your website. With this, you can see for yourself what your target likes and design your product/service accordingly.

You can also integrate Facebook Connect Plugin in your blog which will enable Facebook users to leave comments on your blog without registering. The comment they make will be put up on their wall instantly which will be visible to all their friends. So, you effectively get a lot of exposure without doing much!

social ntwk

13.   Marketplace: With Facebook Marketplace, you can buy and sell anything using the listing service. The Marketplace application page displays all the most recent listings in your networks. The difference between normal listings and the Marketplace is that you don’t see another boring list of business, but they show up as the site’s own updates. For example, a sales listing would show up in news feeds as “John is selling Abstract Art.” In this case, John can be a ‘friend’ of your or even a friend’s friend. You can find out what people want, what they are offering and also how you are connected to these people on Facebook. This is what the page looks like:

marketplace

14.   Don’t Just Write for an Audience of Teenagers: It’s time we free ourselves of this misconception. Facebook isn’t filled with youngsters. Though Facebook has many youngsters who belong to the age group 16 to 25, we see an increase in the number of people from other age groups who use Facebook regularly. According to Pingdom, 61% of Facebook users are over 35 years old. In fact, the 26 – 34 age group rivals the 18 – 25 age group in both the US and the UK. So, make sure communicate to your target the right way.

INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGNS

You can check out some of these pages for ideas:

•   H & M: Very interactive Facebook profile. Shows all of its new collections and is easily maneuverable.

H&M

• Victoria’s Secret PINK: The pink challenge: Design your own look.

PINK

• Lacoste: Simple, yet elegant, approach to displaying products on a catalog on Facebook.

lacoste

• Red Bull: Keeps track of sports people on Twitter, action sports, motor sports on Red Bull Web TV.

redbull

•   Digicel: A game where you pop balloons. Top ten players win credit and one player wins a phone.

digicel

•   Starbucks: Manage your card online.

Starbucks

•   Disney: Watch trailers, old clippings, status updates on news about Disney’s movies.

disney

As a marketing tool, Facebook is here to stay. Many people give up as they don’t get the desired result immediately, i.e. a huge increase in sales. However, consider marketing on Facebook as a step by step process: you first build trust, traffic and eventually – sales. I hope my tips help you to see that day soon! Do you have any ideas that you can add to this article? If so, let me know by leaving your opinion in the Comment Box.

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March 7, 2011

The Discipline of Social Media Measurement

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by Amber Naslund

We hate math.

Our abhorrence for calculation enables us to mutually agree on statistically dubious metrics with nary a shrug or arched eyebrow. Consider Nielsen ratings, which are used to determine the popularity of all TV shows and, consequently, how the dozens of billions of dollars in TV advertising is apportioned.

Nielsen ratings have a direct impact on hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. In 2009, there were 1,147,910 households with a TV in metropolitan Charlotte, North Carolina. Of those more than 1 million households, the behavior of just 619 was tracked by Nielsen to determine ratings. A total of 619 families became the unelected representative tastemakers for 1,147,291 other families. That’s not math; that’s folly.

But yet, we welcome numerical vagary and imprecision into our businesses like a box of free Krispy Kremes. We accept as truth Arbitron (and Nielsen) radio rankings, the number of cars that drive by a billboard, and the notion that somehow people read every page of a newspaper or magazine (and pass it along to 2.5 friends). Do you really know the financial impact of your TV, radio, outdoor print, public relations, and customer services initiatives? Probably not.

Social Media is Inherently Measurable

Social media almost always offers the advantage of complete—rather than extrapolated—data. The same is true of all online marketing. Whereas we have mutually agreed that 619 families are an appropriate stand-in for 1 million others, online marketing offers the compelling alternative of measuring each and every individual.

That’s the good news. One equals one.

What Should You Measure? It Depends

The bad news is that there isn’t an easy-to-convey, standardized, one-size-fits-all metric, like Nielsen ratings, for social media. And there isn’t going to be. What is measurable differs from company to company. If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company that has a long sales cycle with many conversations with prospects before they become customers, you can determine with relative ease whether that customer was influenced in some way by your social media efforts. Alternatively, if you’re Pringles, it’s a lot tougher to make that connection.

Your type of company and how your business is structured has tremendous influence on what you can credibly and reliably measure within the social media realm. Measurement of all things—not just social media—is a discipline, not a task, and it needs to be a cultural imperative. If you’re going to ask about the value or impact of social media and how to measure it, you need to know how you determine those things for other areas of your business and translate or adapt some of those practices.

The Common Excuses

“Social media isn’t measurable” is an excuse. Here’s what companies really mean when they say that:

  1. We don’t have the right tools in place to collect the data we need.
  2. When we have all the data, we don’t know where to start.
  3. We don’t know which data might relate to other data to analyze it well.
  4. We don’t have or won’t deploy enough data collection and analysis resources to figure this out.
  5. We’re afraid of what measuring will actually tell us about our effectiveness.

You need to understand whether you’re equipped with the right tools and data, whether you’re willing to spend the time evaluating that data, and whether you’re functionally and culturally prepared for what it might show you.

Once you’re past that hurdle, you can get to the numbers – and if you’re going to do social media right, you need to get past your loathing for math. Nobody promised social media would be easy, only that it would be awesome.

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February 28, 2011

How To Create A [Good] Blogger Pitch

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by Stephanie Schwab

Because I work with a number of PR firms, and have worked for a PR agency in the past, I’m well aware of the difference in pitching bloggers vs. journalists.  The problem is, most PR people aren’t.  My blogger friends bitch and moan to me constantly about the bad pitches they get from PR people, and how many mass emails they receive.  But c’mon folks, it’s been years since this problem was identified and there have been lots of attempts to help PR people understand the difference.  Yet blogger outreach still seems to be a problem for most PR practitioners.

I’m going to give it a shot and tell you my process for blogger outreach. This is not the only way, it’s just how I do it, and it’s been pretty helpful to me for a number of years. Hopefully it will help you too.

Good blogger outreachimg credit: music2work2 (flickr)

Identify the Bloggers

Create a list of blogs you think might make sense for your brand. Yes, your intern can do this. But it’s got to be more than a “list of mommyblogs.” (More than once I’ve been handed a list with a bunch of URLs.  Not so helpful.)  Create an Excel spreadsheet and put in all of the information you can’t find in Vocus or Cision.  For example, if you’re going after mom or dad bloggers, here are some of the things you might research and put into your list:

  • ages of the blogger’s children
  • parenting topics (kids with special needs, blended families, working parents, etc.)
  • physical location (you might need them for something local down the road)
  • whether they write about products or services at all (indeed, some blogs are still personal blogs with no PR/brand involvement – imagine that!)
  • whether they’ve worked with competitor brands
  • whether or not they host giveaways or contests

And so on.  Tailor this list to your industry or pitch needs.

Note that in order to create this kind of a list you (or that intern) will have to read the blogs. More than one post. Plus the About Me/About Us page.  This is not a task which can be finished in ten minutes. Take pity on your poor intern and realize that this is a lot of work.  If the pitch is important enough, it’s worth at least a day or two (or more) of their time (or yours).

Develop Relationships

This is the part which is most often ignored.  You will have much more success if you have a relationship with the blogger before you pitch them.  This means you’ve subscribed to their blog (in your RSS reader or via email), you’ve left a comment or two (relevant, not throwaway) on their blog, and you feel like you “know” them as you know any you do other blog you read regularly (like your favorite sports blog or celebrity gossip blog).  You can also develop relationships by meeting bloggers at events, conferences and meetups.  Add a column to your spreadsheet which indicates whether you really “follow” the blogger or “know” the blogger in real life, so that you can use those bloggers for your most important pitches.

If you absolutely don’t have the time to do this for your pitch, just be sure that you’ve done the best identification possible and have the greatest amount of information on every blogger before you select who you’re going to pitch.

Choose the Blogger and Craft the Pitch

Once you’ve got a reasonable list of bloggers to choose from, select a few blogs which seem to be the most relevant to your pitch and/or those with whom you feel you’ve got the best relationship.  For each blog that you’re pitching, determine a connection between the blog and your brand, product or pitch.  For example, if the blogger has recently gone to CES and written about gadgets, and you’ve got a gadget to pitch, mention that you read their gadget posts (which you have, right?) and that you agree or disagree with one of their reviews.  (Or whatever.)  Just be authentic, honest, and as specific as you can.  Every blogger gets pitches which say “I read your posts and just love them! You’re so funny!”  It’s not enough.

Next, determine whether what you want the blogger to do relates to brand-related work they may have done in the past.  Such as, “you’ve recently hosted a giveaway for Brand X, so I’m wondering if you’re willing to work with me to create a giveaway for My Brand which would make sense for your readers.” But never fear, even if you don’t see that they’re already doing something similar, you can pitch them on what you want them to do.  Just be polite and make your ask as clear as possible.

An even better way to gain traction with a blogger is to take a slightly longer route, and to tell them that you want to work with them to create a realtionship to the brand which makes sense for them.  Instead of assuming that they will give something away or write a review or write a guest post for you, first ask them if they are interested in the brand, then have a phone call (gasp! an actual conversation) with them to brainstorm about ways in which you can work together authentically for both parties.

Make It a Win-Win

Above all, make it clear that you want this to be a win-win for the blogger and for your brand.  And I hope I’m not the first person to break it to you, folks, when I say that for most bloggers this means they expect to be compensated in some way (and no, “traffic to your site” is not compensation).  After all, you are asking them to be your marketing arm and to help you promote your product or service to their readers. And they are not getting paid by their publication to do this work – they are the publication.

If you take the time to craft a a handful of well-researched, informed, and well-matched pitches, you will likely get a much, much higher return than if you sent out a boilerplate “Dear Blogger” pitch to a list of 100 blogs.  In the end, the time you spend upfront could very well justify itself vs. the time you have to take to follow-up incessantly with the hundreds of bloggers who are ignoring your bad pitch.

Do you agree? Disagree? Have other ways to improve blogger pitches?  Please give us your thoughts in the comments below.

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February 27, 2011

The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media

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By: Scott Stratten

In this excerpt from his new book UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. author Scott Stratten shows the profane acts users of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn commit. How many are you guilty of?

UnmarketingSocial Media is so new that most people are making it up as they go,1 but most people seem to make the same mistakes. Or dare I say sins. . . . We look at the biggest players online for business–Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn–but the same concepts can be applied to any social media site.

Greed

Greed is quite a popular sin. Twitter by default is a self-centered tool. It’s about us. But it’s 100 times better if used as a conversational tool versus a dictation. I see people using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed for their blog or an ad-puker. So absent of personality, I wonder why they even try. Yes, they are in business, but if they believe that business is built on relationships, they need to make building them their business.

This sin holds a special place for the people who only retweet compliments about themselves. I was talking to a colleague of mine and she was asking how I have built such a large amount of followers. I mentioned that I get retweeted a lot and I retweet others. Her reply was “I retweet others all the time!” When I checked out her page, the only time she ever retweeted anyone was if it was a compliment about her or a #FollowFriday2 mention with her in it. You may as well tweet while looking in a mirror telling yourself you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you.

Facebook is in a world of its own. Posting on someone’s wall with a seven-line signature, mass-inviting people to every event (even if the event is local and the person is not even in the same country), to tagging people in articles that they are not even mentioned in just to get them to read it. There is a special vein in my forehead that you can clearly see when these things occur.

Someone didn’t become your friend on Facebook to give you business or to allow you to use his or her wall as a billboard. Even the term “friend” means a relationship, and you are not building one when you invite me to your Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) event in San Diego and I live in Toronto. Instead, use Facebook to engage, and to comment on people’s posts and status updates and to share links with them that they may like, not ones you have written to promote yourself but ones you have found that may help them.

LinkedIn falls under the same issues that Facebook does. The group’s function has so much great potential because the site is fully business-oriented, yet the majority of the groups and posts that I have seen during my research were either outright spam or drive-by articles. Drive-by articles are those that are posted in multiple groups and sites, which are mostly a thinly veiled pitch for the author’s services. Some gurus also teach this method, but you will notice that the original authors are never around when someone has a follow-up question. I hope that the LinkedIn discussion groups become just that, groups that have great discussion.

Gluttony

Get followers fast!!!! Most people on Twitter have seen tweets like this or thought of using a site that helps kick-start things for you. Seems innocent, right? Let’s just have a look-see at this logic. Imagine a guy just followed you. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy that a new person is along for the Twitter journey with you, makes up for your lack of popularity in high school, and the day is getting better. Then you go to his profile and you see a bunch of tweets that say:

“I have found a way to get thousands of followers fast and automated!! Go to this site!”

How does that make you feel now? Still warm and fuzzy? Still getting tingles? Didn’t think so. When you tweet out “follower system” tweets it says one thing: You’re in it for the numbers. I’ll bet the 3 cents I still have after my latest trip to Vegas that one of the next tweets will be about an “amazing business.” Everything you tweet is an extension of your biz and your brand. If you want to scream about “getting thousands of followers,” be my guest, but the funniest part about the above tweet? The actual guy has 149 followers. Seriously.

On Facebook, gluttony takes a different turn for me. While actually writing this book a service provider that I am “friends” with sent me an invite to a Facebook event called “Freedom from the Fat Trap!!!” Really? One of two things happened here. She either sent the invitation, which wasn’t even for her own event, to her entire friend list or specifically chose to invite me to the event. I am going to go ahead and guess that it is the former and that I also do not have to tell you how badly somebody could take this. It is about as bad as inviting somebody to an event called “You’re Ugly and Here Is How You Can Look a Little Less Ugly.” Remember that everything you do impacts your business image, including inviting people to fat camp.

Sloth

Twitter is a conversation. It’s truly what I love about it. But imagine having a conversation in person with someone where that person takes an hour to reply to you, face-to-face. How awkward would that be: “Hey, how’s business?” and they blankly stare off for an hour, then reply “Good thanks!” That’s how it feels if someone takes a week to reply to a tweet. I once had someone who took 79 days to reply to a question that I asked her on Twitter. Seventy-nine days! If it takes you longer to reply than it would to walk over a handwritten reply to my home, you’re doing it wrong. I know, not everyone is a tweetaholic like me, and not everyone can devote a good chunk of their day to Twitter. So if you have a limited amount of resources or time, let’s say five hours a week, it’s better to spend 45 minutes a day for the entire week, than five hours once a week. Consistency breeds familiarity, which creates relationships.

Here we can combine Facebook and LinkedIn; if you are not going to be responsive on either site then you probably shouldn’t have a presence. There is a difference between being present and having a presence. You need to be active and responsive to people’s requests, whether that is accepting people as contacts on LinkedIn or as friends on Facebook. I was guilty of this last year on LinkedIn when I recently went back to ramp things up and realized I had connection requests from eight months ago. How do you think it made those people feel?

Envy

Ya, I’m kind of a big deal on Twitter in my own mind, which at the end of the day means nothing to the majority of the world, but every day I get DMs3 asking me to change my picture to add a “cause” or tweet about this or that. I’m all for causes, I’m a big charity guy, but mostly I’m a fan of choice. Meaning it’s your choice to support anything you want but every once in a while people try to get others, through guilt, to change their avatar. When everyone changed their Twitter profile pictures to a shade of green to support some cause I got asked daily why I hadn’t changed mine yet. My answer to them? It’s none of your damn business why. My lack of participation in your cause does not infer lack of support, just like changing my avatar does not make me a better person by default. Same goes for people who think you should be obligated to follow them back if they follow you. Things on Twitter, just like most things in life, are choices. We should follow people based on interest, not out of courtesy.

Same goes for causes and groups on Facebook. You will see a popular cause of the month go around with plenty of invitations that you will usually ignore. Recently I had the pleasure of choosing to not join a cause just to be reinvited back multiple times by the same person. I admire their dedication, but despise their persistence that has turned to annoyance.

One of LinkedIn’s greatest functions is the endorsement, where people can give testimonials about your skills at a particular job. The system allows you to request endorsements from anyone in your contact list. This is okay if they actually worked with you or were customers; however, I frequently am requested to give endorsements for people who I barely know anything about; or they write in the request “if you endorse me then I will endorse you.” Which negates the very point of the system.

Wrath

One of the worst things about social media is the reactionary nature of it. Especially on Twitter, most of us don’t think before tweeting and for the most part it’s okay because most tweets are harmless, boring, and innocent by nature. But once in a while we react or lash out above our better judgment. It takes a thousand tweets to build a reputation and one to change it all. Twitter feels intimate sometimes, like you’re on an episode of Friends, having a conversation with a few, except there are thousands “lurking” around. It’s like having a harem of stalkers, without the creepiness.4

Being the object of someone’s wrath is also common. For a full explanation on how to deal with trolls check out the section about them later in the book. But in a nutshell: Don’t feed them. They aren’t owed a reply, your time, or your emotions. You’re better than that.

Wrath can be even worse when it is cloaked in the disguise of being helpful. This is usually done by the spelling freaks or grammar police. I admit that I do not always proofread what I tweet–I barely proofread a blog post and then usually only after I have posted it. Posting on my public comments and implying that I am a moron because I spelled something wrong isn’t in anybody’s best interest. It makes me feel stupid and it makes you look bad. I was taught back in my human resource days that there was one rule: Praise in public and reprimand in private. So I would say praise in public and assist in private. If I asked for help or feedback in a public forum, then fire away, but if the spell check is unsolicited, drop me a note privately. It is actually appreciated and makes you look even better. But beware of those who ask for feedback in public as well–they are usually looking for praise.

Lust

Social media sites are filled with humans. And when you throw a bunch of humans into an environment, a few things are sure to be present: 20 percent of people will have bad breath, 30 percent will wonder how their hair looks, 60 percent like peanut butter and cheese sandwiches but are scared to say something (or maybe I’m the only one), and 100 percent will have hormones. 5 It happens. We can pretend they don’t exist, but they’re always there. It’s one of the reasons to have a flattering picture as part of your social media profile; it catches the eye. The problem is when people turn creepy or obnoxious (and by people I mean guys). I’m truly blessed to know many incredible women on Twitter who are not only brilliant in business but attractive as well. The stories they tell me about direct messages or replies they get from some men make me shake my head. Seriously, folks, I’m not sure what book told you the line “Your lips look tasty” works, but it makes me picture Silence of the Lambs, and not for the cool stuff. Every tweet, every DM, represents your company, and more specifically you as a person.

It is even worse on Facebook, where the laid-back attitude can make you look even worse. People post pictures of their vacations on the beach only to have them ruined by some guy making a comment that totally ruins the entire thing. And I repeat that you are always marketing your business–every comment, every post, is an extension of your brand.

Pride

You know what? Screw it. I have no problem with your being proud of something. I mean true pride. Something you accomplished, your kids, whatever. Scream it from the top of the mountains, good for you. Just do it in moderation. Don’t just talk about yourself, spread pride of others, too. Retweet, comment, and share their accomplishments. One sin out of seven ain’t so bad.

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February 26, 2011

40 useful things you can share on Twitter besides blog posts

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by Adam Vincenzini

I was never good at ‘pass the parcel’ when I was a kid. I blame it mainly on being over zealous. That and my unhealthy competitiveness – always had to win (which didn’t always make me the best birthday party guest!)

Twitter reminds me of pass the parcel a bit – RSS readers are ripped open first thing in the morning and then the shiniest blog posts get circulated and shared…like a good prize should I suppose.

But shiny doesn’t always equal useful. In fact, I’d argue that the more unusual and varied your stream is, the better – both for you and your followers.

Making variety a pillar of your approach, coupled with the recognition that time is a finite resource, definitely means there is a place for short and sweet too (and how many blog posts can you really read in one day anyway?!?!?)

So, I had a bit of a think and compiled a list of things to consider sharing more often…here goes…

40 useful things you can share on Twitter besides blog posts

  1. Flag up a hashtag you are following for the day and why (or list a few that you think are worth a look)
  2. Discovered a new app / tool that’s useful? Provide a brief description and share the direct link i.e. MyTweeple.com is a great follower manager tool
  3. A link to a Wikipedia entry from your niche can be very useful – especially if its been updated
  4. Link to someone’s Twitter favourites – they are usually full of hidden treasures both for you and your followers
  5. Spotted a glitch or alteration to a platform you’re using? Let people know what it is and how to address it
  6. A specific conversation / thread might be going on – highlight it and link to it (actually share conversations)
  7. Some great discussion might be being made around a Facebook post – highlight it and link
  8. A link to a transcript from a Twitter chat – these usually packed full of useful insights and maybe highlight one key point
  9. Been given some invites to a new edition of a platform? Share those around i.e. the new Digg.com
  10. A link to a poll taking place that might stimulate some thought / encourage interaction
  11. Simply introduce two people that you think might hit it off – “@TomA meet @TomB, you guys have loads in common…”
  12. A link featuring a special offer or product that might be of interest / add value to your community
  13. A link to a YouTube video of interest to your niche
  14. A link to an example of a good ‘terms of use’ page on a blog you’ve visited (or similar)
  15. A link to a directory of blogs from your niche (or a great blogroll) is a nice share
  16. A link to a Twitter list you think is worth following and why or one from tweepml
  17. A link to a news aggregator and a brief explanation as to why it is useful
  18. Spotted a Flickr gallery / group being used in an interesting way? That’s worth a share
  19. A link to a place / directory where your followers blogs can be featured – adding great vale to them
  20. Interesting Twitter accounts are always worth sharing i.e. @CleverAccounts
  21. Flag up an event that’s coming up and possibly of interest to your community – link to the details
  22. A link to something light – @jeffespo does it beautifully with his ‘cartoon to start the day’ tweets
  23. Spotted a contentious issue developing? Create your own poll and encourage people to vote
  24. If you’ve discovered an interesting special on Foursquare – share it via Twitter
  25. Pull an interesting quote / stat out of a news item and feature that (as opposed to the prescribed headline and piece)
  26. Link directly to an interesting presentation on Slideshare.net
  27. Specific pages on blogs / sites can sometimes reveal more than the the daily live content – share interesting examples of those i.e. an about page or privacy page
  28. Google Chrome extensions always make life easier – started using a good one? Share it
  29. Explain why someone should follow a particular blog / author, as opposed to just just linking to individual posts with no context
  30. If you’re heading to an event, share the #hashtag and link to that event before / during / after
  31. Sometimes a link to a robust and engaged Facebook community page is worth sharing
  32. A link to a good example online customer service i.e. Twitter complaint response
  33. Go back in time -great timeless content is always worth a share – even if it has a 2007 date on it, share it
  34. Use TwitPic differently – take and share shots of use / value, not (just) pics of the beach while you are on holidays
  35. Have you just joined a new community? Let people know where they can find you with a link / user name tweet
  36. Use TweeShot to share a screen grab of interest (especially controversial tweets that might be deleted)
  37. Link directly to a relevant podcast
  38. Sometimes really basic but useful websites are launched – like this one – link to ‘em
  39. Figured out a short cut / easy way of doing something.  Flag. it. up.
  40. Over to you…
I wrote this post for a selfish reason too – I’d love to know what other people share besides blog posts.
Can you recommend any other things that people find useful on Twitter?
Being useful opens the door to engagement for both individuals and organisations…let’s brainstorm!
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February 25, 2011

The Social Media Style Guide: 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona

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What follows is an edited excerpt from Engage!

Anyone who has ever worked in corporate marketing, advertising, and branding is more than familiar with a brand style guide. It’s how we ensured that the brand was represented as intended through marketing aesthetics and messaging – including detailed usage instructions on font, style, color, language, placement, positioning, etc.

It is our bible and adherence to its tenets and instructions is strictly enforced.

However, with the unstructured proliferation of social media within many organizations, the brand style guide is seemingly disregarded or not considered in favor of expediting the creation of profiles in social networks and the participatory engagement that immediately ensues.

Everything the brand was intended to represent is no less important simply because new tools and services make it easier for anyone within the company to reach and connect with markets. The contents and purpose of a brand style guide still apply. In fact, the unification of a brand and what it both evokes and symbolizes is now paramount in this conversational medium to effectively attract, earn, and inspire customers and advocates.

While it’s highly likely that the design of each social profile works against the brand elements and usage guidelines in the existing style guide, at least in principle, the true quandary and risk in all of this, is the potential for brand confusion and dilution.

In social networks, the brand and how it’s perceived, is open to public interpretation and potential misconception now more than ever. Without a deliberate separation between the brand voice and personality and that of the person representing it, we are instantly at odds with our goals, purpose, and potential stature.

Simply said, the style guide is more important than ever before and it is in dire need of innovation in order to humanize and personify a brand voice and persona, something that people can truly connect to online and offline. Therefore, we need to revisit our core and modernize our story, how we present it, and how we intend to be perceived, setting the tone for engagement and resulting activity.

The goal of a social media style guide is to establish:

- What the brand represents in the social Web
- Its characteristics
- Brand personality traits
- The voice of the brand
- Attributes and voice necessary at the representative level
- Procedures and guidelines for representation, accountability, and workflow
- Metrics for quantifying activity and the intended results

Finding the brand “voice” is not enough however. The result we seek is intentional and aspirational in its design, calculation, presence and overall mission. In my new book Engage, I share a template to help brand managers define the brand personality, characteristics, and overall identity for the brand as well as establishing the voice and behavior of its representatives.

By completing The Brand Reflection Cycle, we uncover a series of important attributes that symbolize the brand, its personalities, and its characteristics, as well as defining and aligning the voice and personal brand of those on the front lines in social engagement.

The goal is to include brand managers and social ambassadors in this exercise to document the words that will personify the brand and what it symbolizes. This is how we bring new ideas to the surface and discuss them in a collaborative environment to renew the value and intention of the brand, making it something truly engaging in the social Web.

The Brand Reflection Cycle is divided into 8 stages designed to not only help us define the brand persona, but also to lay the foundation for a new, more socially inspired and relevant corporate culture and value system.

1. Core Values: The audience, surrounding environment, and the circumstances in which we are summoned contribute to our disposition and character. At the beginning, we need to form a common center of gravity to support the orbiting characteristics that support our mission and purpose. Essentially, we need to specify what we stand for and emanate it through all we do.

2. Brand Pillars: Pillars are the support objects that serve as the foundation to sustain and fortify the brand. It is these pillars that establish the principal, central themes that convey our uniqueness and value, fortified through the social objects we develop and distribute.

3. Promise: The pledge that paves the way to brand meaning and direction is the brand promise. It should answer a simple, yet powerful question: What is our mission and how does it introduce value to those who align with our purpose?

4. Aspirations: No brand is an island, nor is it inanimate. As such, the attributes we define today must continually evolve. Our aspirations are representative of the stature and mission we seek over time, and it’s constant. This is how we compete for the future.

5. Brand Characteristics: Defining the brand characteristics will help us establish the traits we wish to associate with the brand represented through our actions, words, and overall behavior.

6. Opportunities: As we complete this exercise, the identification of the attributes that are not embodied allow us to embrace a path to greater relevance. It’s a combination of who we are and what we offer today and also the opportunities that emerge that allow us to connect to those seeking solutions we had yet to identify.

7. Culture: The brand team must examine the culture of the company, not only what it is today, but ultimately how it should embody our aspirations so that it is readily identifiable in social media. People need something they can align with, and it is our culture that serves as the magnet to our purpose and aspirations. We are all in this together.

8. Personality: It is crucial that we contemplate, review, and designate the elements that we wish the brand to illustrate and represent. This final step in the completion of the Brand Reflection Cycle, is to identify and bring to life the personality and character of the brand through conversations, social objects, and stories. If the brand was a person, how would it appear? How would it sound? How would it interact with others? How would others describe it?

Everything begins with evaluating the brand’s journey through the past to where it is today, and ultimately where it must travel to maintain and continually establish relevance.

As we usher in the era of the next web, the brand style guide requires a social refresh in order to embody purpose, engender affinity, and earn relationships based on trust and value. In a social context, people aren’t looking to earn friendships with avatars or logos, they are seeking the attention of the people who personify the brand and the corresponding values they represent. It’s not just the brand personality that requires examination and establishment. The personality, tenor, and voice of the individuals representing the brand combined with a meaningful culture and mission, contribute to the overall brand experience – whether it’s in social networks or the real world.

The opportunity to update the brand style guide is so much more than a mere exercise. It renews our sense of purpose. It is a chance to breathe new life into everything we create, where and with whom we share it, and how we engage in online societies that contributes to the brand’s universal legacy of and the brand graph that weaves everything together.

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February 24, 2011

5 Easy Steps to a Winning Social Media Plan

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By Emily Soares Proctor

So you’ve set up your social media empire using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and you’re blogging too.

But how do you make it all work together? You want to reach potential clients and establish your authority online, but what’s your plan?

This article delivers five foolproof steps to get you on your way to finding, formulating and distributing content that will get you noticed. Content could include your own blog posts or links to others people’s work posted on your social networks.

#1: Find Your Target Audience.

The first step in social media planning is largely the first step in identifying your brand—determine who you are and who your customers are.

What unique aspect of your product or service attracts your target population?

Are you a veteran business coach who works with small entrepreneurs? A grandmother and knitter who likes to teach others how to create gifts?

You’ll need to determine what your readers want to know from you, what their likes and dislikes are and where they congregate.

You’ll also need to find the right tone. The “social” in social media requires a conversational approach, but you still need to speak your clients’ language.

Be sure you know the lingo and style that your clients are comfortable with and where they talk to each other—on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs or on social bookmarking sites.

Write out a basic profile for your most common type of client or customer. How would you classify them in terms of education, hobbies, tech-savviness and time spent engaging in social networking?

#2: Solve Readers’ Most Important Problems.

Become a reporter/editor.

Sharing information on social media is essentially about becoming a reporter/editor for those who take part in your industry or your passion for your product or service. As a newspaper editor asks herself, so must you: “What do the readers really want to know?”

Most newspaper editors today have to admit that what readers want is tomorrow’s news yesterday. So be timely. Your clients have specific issues that need solving, whether they’re about your product or service or their own business struggles that you can help untangle.

Pick the right sources.

Research will be a big part of your social media planning, so make sure your sources are on the cutting edge of your topic.

You’ll also want to provide analysis to help guide your readers’ absorption of the information you provide. Most readers today—of any format—don’t feel they have the time to connect all the dots, so tell them why the information you’re sharing is relevant to them.

Do the work for them by writing on point, underscoring the impacts and keeping the content valuable. You’ll be rewarded with clients, followers and fans who trust your information and know you won’t waste their time.

Sit down now and write a list of burning questions the people you would like to have as fans and followers are asking. Later, you will conduct regular research to keep this list current. For now, the most pressing questions that are top of mind should form the initial core of the topics for your editorial plan.

#3: Decide How You’ll Fulfill the Content.

Who will regularly do the information-gathering, writing and distribution for your content? Is it you? Or maybe you have staff that can do it. Before you can determine volume and frequency, you’ll want to figure out what your business can reasonably deliver.

One thing to keep in mind: whatever schedule you set for yourself or your staff will no doubt require more time than you think, especially in the beginning. Getting started with social media content has a learning curve, so be prepared for the extra time needed to get comfortable with the process.

According to the recent 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, most business owners can maintain a very respectable social media presence in six hours a week, including research and production time.

#4: Create Your Plan.

Now it’s time to create a plan. You can use a number of different methods to help you build your content strategy.

Mind-mapping

Try mind-mapping for higher level development. If you have some themes that you would like to explore in intricate ways, mind-mapping helps you flesh out the many angles around any given idea. It can also help you plan how you would like the components of your social media plan to interact. Freemind, XMind and Mindjet are all popular mind-mapping programs.

Editorial calendar

The greatest time-saver and strategic tool in your content-planning arsenal is an editorial calendar. One option is this Google docs-based social media calendar to lay out your content by date and topic. This gives you an easy-to-follow look at the formats you use and what part of your theme you want to deliver during a given day or week:

Using an editorial calendar helps you bring clarity and purpose to your content—on a committed schedule. Never underestimate the power of a deadline!

Keywords

You can also add keywords to your calendar, so you know which words you should be including in your content about a given theme. Google AdWords and Wordtracker both offer free tools to help you find the most valuable keywords for your subject.

Content cycles

A great deal of the content we respond to, whether by creating our own posts about it or directing readers to what someone else has said, happens as breaking news. As you chart your content, be sure to leave space for news from others.

Some content planners create a formula centered on blog posts: Monday for best-of lists; Tuesday for product/media reviews; Wednesday for personal experience stories; Thursday for an editorial on a controversial topic; and Friday for fun, freewheeling commentary or guest posts.

Interviews make great content as well, and because they happen less frequently, you can target individuals for monthly, bimonthly or quarterly rotation. And don’t forget about video! Share clips from the interviews you conduct or vlog your how-to article on a given week, rather than writing it. Now you’ve added YouTube as another platform to post your content.

More great content ideas are found in these Social Media Examiner articles: “5 Easy Steps to Creating Reusable Social Media” and “4 Steps to Driving Faster Sales with Social Media Content.”

#5: Schedule Your Content

To schedule your content, consider what formats you will be sending and how often. Applications such as TweetDeck, HootSuite and SocialOomph will let you simultaneously post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

Platforms like HootSuite allow you to schedule your tweets for future dates. When you type your post into the left-top field, you can use the calendar button to choose your release date.

But a strong word of caution here. Automating posts, when done carefully, is an effective way of pushing content when you can’t be there to do it yourself. But consider the following:

  • Twitter and Facebook both have applications that will push to the other when you post to one, so know if you have set that up.
  • Whatever Facebook RSS app you use to pull your blog posts to your profile or fan page may also be given permission to update automatically.
  • If given the proper permissions, HootSuite and TweetDeck (and others) can push content automatically, without you scheduling it, so they may also tweet a new blog post, for instance, when you’ve already done so using another app.

All of these various permissions can lead to an embarrassing loop of repeat tweets and/or Facebook status updates if you’re not careful. Consider going manual until you understand exactly which permissions you have opted into for each platform.

Quality Over Quantity

You don’t have to post every day to create an effective presence with your social media. Find the frequency that makes sense for your business and go with that. Remember, quality must always trump quantity. If you can’t maintain the quality level of your content at the rate you’re trying for, reduce the frequency until you can.

Whew! Seems a lot to do, right? Well, the beauty of content planning is that it will create its own cycle. Use responses and questions you get to one area of content to begin planning your approach to deepen understanding on a given topic or to explore another.

The single most important component to your editorial planning should be your ability to absorb new information and create valuable content from it.

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