exOOn iMarketing

Social media can bring marketing success to your business in many ways. Its important to know what exactly it is youre trying to achieve before you start. This will enable you to track your success and tweak your various methods easier to work on once things have started rolling with your business.

There are many different aspects of marketing in which social media can assist. Whether you are aiming at driving traffic to your site, generating referrals and sales, or just plain having a way to communicate with both current and prospective clients, social media makes this entire process much easier to accomplish.

There are a few things to keep in mind, however. The simple goal of accumulating connections through social media outlets is not the only thing necessary for a successful business. Having lists of thousands of followers or friends in your various social media platforms may be nice, but it will not make you the successful businessperson you are striving for if nobody does anything but make small talk.

You want to establish a plan for not only obtaining these followers, but converting them into actual paying clientele. Another option would be to add them as associates or affiliates. Its important to have some type of product or service each of these potential clients can relate to, in reference to their own needs. Yet blatant sales pitches could result in rapid loss of your followers or contacts. Try to find a happy medium per se, where you will be providing quality information or suggestions these contacts will find useful.

One way you can tell if social media advertising is really something you should be considering for your business: The amount of top-drawer ad agencies that have sprung up or changed focus, shifting their attention from traditional advertising to zero in on social media.

Even social media platforms themselves hire these agencies, to create ads for their clients. For example, New York-based Lotame, whose clients include Flixster and Bebo. Then there are Sometrics, Siteheart and SocialMedia.com… SocialMedia is geared specifically to social ad platforms, offering to render ads containing Twitter messages, comments from web communities and data from your site.

Lotame boasts it “goes beyond industry norms by applying a social data layer to audience segmentation”. They call this a “zero waste” advertising solution – and their clients include Flixster and Bebo. In fact, visiting their website can give the do-it-yourself social ad creator some good clues as to what to focus on, when creating your message. Just take note of phrases such as “interactivity over clicks”, “meaningful audience engagement”… “The medium is the message and social ads are the solution”… Their recent new hires include John Thomas, PhD, formerly with Crimson Hexagon, specializing in social media analytics.

In short, there’s some major money and brain power going into monetizing social media.

Further proof is provided in a Knowledge Networks May 2009 press release, which gives statistics for: “Proportion of Social Media Users Who Turn to Social Media When Making Purchase Decisions”, giving the lie to nay-sayers who insist people aren’t haunting social networks to buy. (They aren’t – but they do!) This particular PDF press release lists the following categories as containing anywhere from 10-24% active purchasers in these specific areas:

- Travel/travel services
- Banks/financial services
- Clothes
- Shoes
- Eating out/restaurants
- Cell/mobile phones and service
- Personal care products
- Cars/trucks
- Groceries/food
- Prescription/OTC drugs

The study was conducted through the Home Technology Monitor (TM), a service that accurately monitors technologies people use.

But there’s more… Dell markets effectively through Twitter; Facebook measures ad relevancy and appeal through real-time apps that allow users to “Like” or “Report” ads (with one-click reasons available as to why they feel negatively about a particular ad). It’s at the point where The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) took the big step of setting standards in May 2009.

Which brings us to the inescapable conclusion: No matter what your opinion, it looks as if social advertising is here to stay. How will that affect your business advertising?

In many ways, social media advertising is still in its infancy… but there are strong signs it’s finally growing up. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has set measurable standards; mainstream companies have sprung up around it; almost all the major social networks not only have it, but have made a series of rapid changes just within the 18 months. Facebook changed its privacy policy (secretly at first) so it could do whatever it wanted with feed, content and photos posted by users; then changed it again after the secrecy blew up in their face. Twitter is still figuring out ways to advertise. Bebo and Flixster have hired New York ad megafirm Lotame to administer their platform. (read more…)

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Module One: Social Marketing Quick Start

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Are you considering just putting one of your existing banner ads on a social site such as Facebook?

Don’t. At least… not yet…

It’s important to remember you are dealing with two different mediums. What works on one – even if it’s your strongest ad – may not work on the other. There are a number of mistakes I’ve seen marketers make, when creating their own social ads, and impersonal headlines beginning with anything even remotely close to: “The Untold Truth About…” – ones that sound like a sales pitch – will turn people off faster than a slap of ice water. (read more…)