Find Out the Myth and Mastery of Social Media Strategy

IT’S known by many names and it’s all the rage! I’m talking about social media – also known as social media marketing, social media optimisation, SMO, SMM and social networking. For businesses it has tremendous potential and value, but in simple terms social media is just another communication channel with the world.
But instead of delivering a sales or service message via advertising or marketing, with social media you’re talking to people in the way you would with friends, colleagues or strangers who share the same interests.
Social media used to be for the young Net Generation, as Don Tapscott (Author of Grown Up Digital) calls them, but now the average age on Facebook is 35. LinkedIn has a huge membership between 35 and 54!
As David Mercer, Head of BT Design, told me recently the older generation just can’t help hijacking the Net Gens’ home turf. Or at least words to that effect. Is it fair? I can see his point but the fact we all use phones doesn’t seem to affect the younger generation’s perception of ownership of the mobile world.
Even my eight year old is using social media in the form of Club Penguin (Disney’s MMOG, Massively Multi-Player Online Game). By the time he is in business, social media will be just as integrated in his life as email and mobile phones, if they’re still around.
With 400million active accounts on Facebook getting over 120million unique visitors each month, social media is not going away. But it’s important to remember what your objective is if you want to get involved with social media for personal, business or branding reasons.
Different platforms have different personalities: LinkedIn in business oriented while Facebook is social and works better in engaging individuals. Twitter is real-time news and information on everything from clubs and coffee shops to finance and biochemical research. So each platform should be picked to meet the characteristics of objectives.
Remember, too, that other countries have big platforms. China’s platform is QQ and has over 500million users, Orkut has over 100 million users with over 70 per cent of them from Brazil and India. In Russia, Vkontakte has over 60 million, so pick your playground carefully.
Most of the major platforms offer advertising. Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube all have a pay per click advertising option which can be targeted at an audience with surgical precision...well, field surgery at least. Let’s say I wanted to get people to book me to run workshops in their business.
I could place an advert on LinkedIn targeting Marketing Directors of businesses in the UK with over 250 staff, or perhaps select a few niche industries such as finance, retail and manufacturing. If I get my advert right I will only attract clicks that are likely to convert and, of course, I only pay when they click!
A word of caution: We all put so much information about ourselves on social media that with a little research people can easily find out a lot about you and your business. Reputation management has never been more important.
Using LinkedIn as an example, let’s say I want to meet Mr Smith, CMO of a blue chip brand. I look him up on LinkedIn and see that he is a member of a group called Future Trends. I can also see that he is connected to a friend of mine called Thomas. I join the group called Future Trends and ask Thomas to ask Mr Smith if he could tell me more about this group.
Do we think that hearing from Thomas that someone who shares a common interest would like to meet him would be of interest? One would hope so. There are many ways to manage social media but there is a level of lateral thinking that helps.
When setting up a social media strategy there are many monitoring tools that can be used to plan who you should engage with and where you should have a presence. One of my favorites is Social Radar from Infegy. It gives you a visual representation on how social media accounts are connected, a road map of who’s talking to who on the web.
Through this you can see where most conversations are taking place on your topic. These people are called Influencers and they are an important part of a social media strategy as they help organisations and individuals control the conversations.
Let me tell you a story. A well-known journalist was writing about a big brand’s new sports car on his blog. The journalist was an Influencer because over 50,000 people subscribed to read his blog on a regular basis. His opinion of the new car’s looks was based on a photo he’d seen and unfortunately for the manufacturer the opinion was not a good - the words “back of a bus” and “angry bulldog” come to mind.
Shortly after his opinion hit the net, postings start to appear on blogs and forums echoing his comments. Before long the opinion of even those who have never seen the car is a negative one.
Now if the brand had been monitoring the social biosphere they would have quickly picked up this story and through sentiment monitoring [WHAT’S THIS??] they would have been able to see its negative connotation. They could h,ave seen the topic growing in importance and acted on it. How I hear you say!
Well, my first step would have been to contact the journalist and invite him to experience the car in person. Let’s face it, brands are about experience not just looks. Imagine this...
You invite the journalist to join you for a track day. When he arrives he is presented with a shiny new, highly-polished, top of the range version of the car. First impressions...it looks better than it did in the photos.
Then a test driver shows him how smooth and quiet the car is before slamming it into sports mode to demonstrate the near 200mph speed that the car gracefully achieves in the blink of an eye. After spending a day experiencing this luxury car the journalist has a different opinion.
In the next blog he writes about his fantastic day and admits that the pictures he’d seen didn’t really do it justice. He then enthuses about his positive EXPERIENCE with the car. Very soon his readers have changed their perceptions, too, and the online conversation has been controlled and made positive.
It is through this careful monitoring and strategic engagement that social media can be used as not only a PR machine but also another market to channel. Let me explain...
Using a Twitter client on my iPad I am able to see on a map the names of people who are talking around me. This is being picked up by the geo-tagging of where they where when they last posted a message. I used this in a demonstration in a London restaurant which also had a meeting room and private dining area. To our surprise we found that the CEO of King of Shaves was tweeting next door!
It was too much to resist so we responded to his Tweet and invited him over for a drink and a discussion about how the restaurant might be able to help him and his organisation.
We had a fairly fast response saying that he would drop in when he had a chance. You can imagine how long such a meeting would have taken to set up – if at all – using the traditional route to a CEO of receptionists, gate keepers, PAs etc. Social media opens up opportunities never before available.
Staying on the subject of Twitter, real time search allows you to stoke while the iron is hot. If I was monitoring or searching for the words “need+new+monitor” I would find people who have recently Tweeted that they need a new monitor This information could be very valuable to an online electronic shop.
Engaging people when their requirement is in the forefront of their minds and creating a process that is easy to fulfill this requirement can translate into direct revenue. Software like Radian6 can monitor most conversations taking place on the web in near real-time. It is an engagement tool allowing you to watch, listen and respond - as part of a strategy this is a vital component.
Someone once said that if you see the bandwagon you are already too late to jump on it. What should you consider before leaping on to the social media bandwagon?
First, what is your objective? Are you using social media for PR, brand awareness, a channel to market or because you what to listen to the chatter from your industry?
Second, you should define a strategy of what goals you want to achieve and what message needs to be given to achieve success.
Third, who is going to manage the project? To run social media campaigns properly, you’ll probably need the services of a manager who has good writing skills and a marketing or PR background. This will have a cost implication so you’ll to set KPIs and targets to ensure you achieve a return on the investment.
The good news is that by using YouTube or Facebook to communicate with engaged customers or group members you will discover the cost of contacting your audience is minimal. During his election campaign, Barack Obama was able to communicate with over five million people instantly at no cost on almost a one-to-one to personal level.
Today he has almost 10 million fans on Facebook alone – a few hundred thousand behind Lady Gaga. There aren’t many ways of connecting with an audience that size for free, are there? Can your business operate as efficiently as that? As Obama would say: Yes you can!



Damon Segal

Founder and M.D. Emotio Design Group
www.emotio.co.uk - www.seo-services-uk.eu

Having come from a traditional marketing and design background Damon has seen drawing boards replaced with Macs and paint brushes become Wacom Tablets.

In 1996 Damon built his first website on Adobe's PageMill software and was hooked on the internet; which was great because help was always just a click away!

Having been heavily involved in website design, development and marketing since this point Damon has seen innovation happen on a daily basis. It is one of the fastest-moving industries in the world and limited only by the imagination and skills of those working in it.

Damon is on the Advisory Council for the Global Marketing Network and is a practitioner module advisor for BPP/ARU/GMN Global Marketing Practice MSc, which he also helped create and write. Damon also speaks professionally for a number of organisations including the Academy forf Chief Executives, the London Chamber of Commerce and the Institute of Direct Marketing.

Damon founded Emotio Design Group to help brands and business define and deliver integrated marketing services and collateral and to improve their marketing effectiveness. Although Emotio is primarily focused in the digital arena, website design and development it remains strong in branding and its traditional skills of design for print.

Emotio provides websites, branding, marketing consultancy, brochures, search engine optimisation, PPC campaign management, social media optimisation and more. Damon's extensive client list includes Brady Corporation, Bestway, Forever Living Products, Shaun Leane, BNI and The Royal College of GPs.

Contact: +44 (0)20 8385 5050
Email: dsegal@mac.com

If talking to yourself is the first sign of madness why do we twitter? Take the poll http://ow.ly/16sAi

Have you seen the new Emotio Design Group Website http://ping.fm/pyg3g, check me out int the top right corner

Innovation in Internet Marketing

Engaging consumers on a personal level with new and exciting ideas

So where are we now?

Consider these amazing statistics: There are over one trillion unique URLs on the web at any one time – that’s one million million pages. Globalisation is becoming more relevant as over 25% of the world population has access to the internet and the importance of consumer personal engagement is all the buzz. In the UK 18.3 million households (70%) have access to the internet. Over 150 million people access their Facebook account every day, 65 million of these via their mobile device. People are watching hundreds of millions of videos a day. In fact, every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. So with these facts in mind, how do you take an innovative approach to creating and marketing a web presence?

How the money flows

It has been reported that online retail spend reached £21bn in the UK last year with that figure expected to triple over the next decade. Over the same timeframe traditional spending will fall from £265bn to £247bn, or so says the crystal ball that is Reuters.

According to Paypal, 2010 will see a 235% growth in online grocery shopping to £6.25bn. On Christmas Day 2008, with all the shops closed, online shoppers spent over £100m., and in November and December in 2009 Americans spent $29.1bn online. (source: comScore)

As a response to this demand. we have also seen UK online advertising spend increase to £17.5bn in 2008, representing almost 20% of all media spend in the UK.

So what does this mean? It means businesses and retailers need to get smarter in the way they attract customers and generate sales. Competition is going to be fiercer and margins are going to be attacked even more with consumers being able to compare prices quickly and easily. The focus must be on brand trust, loyalty and differentiation in order to influence market share.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

In just six years Apple’s online music store iTunes has picked up 25% of the US retail music market, selling over five billion downloads, Facebook has gained over 300 million users and Twitter has grown 1,382% from February 2008 to February 2009. One of the reasons for Twitters amazing success was its open architecture, this creating the conditions for users to innovate and shape the way twitter is used.

Innovations like these change our understanding of how the world works. Ten years ago, if I wanted to find a song that a friend told me to listen to I had to go to a shop and buy the track. Now, I can see what my friend is listening to on his Facebook post then click and hear it immediately free of charge on a site like Spotify.

To keep up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies is almost a full time job in itself. Even more important is having the foresight and understanding of where future internet trends might head.

To understand this we need to examine the environment

• Personal profiling and community advertising will start to target customers more effectively than ever before.
• The growth in broadband and connection speed will allow more rich media to be delivered, bringing on the rapid growth of Web TV and premium content. This will allow personalised advertising to be delivered via this new exciting medium.
• Consumers will be more informed than ever before with live search becoming a growing trend, allowing people to find real time information and reviews.
• Web semantics will enable search engines like Google to improve their understanding of words and documents, therefore producing better results.
• More prominence will be put on personalisation and localisation. With a large increase in global urbanisation these factors will heavily affect online sales and customer engagements.
• The growth of smart mobile phones will mean that consideration for mobile content must be given when creating a website.
• The importance of site speed and usability will factor in search engine friendliness. Faster, better-structured sites will be looked at in a favourable way.
• Google personalised search will have an effect on site rankings as Google shows results to searchers based on their last 180 days of search history and behaviour, although my understanding is that top rankings will retain a high position even if they may be displaced by one or two positions. The trick will be to look for ways to take advantage of personalised search - for example, making sure your locality is set correctly or that you have a broad spectrum of on-page optimisation that will cast a bigger net.
• Social media spheres will influence consumer trends whilst social media monitoring will provide an insight into your brand and sector. Engaging consumers on an emotional level will help grow loyalty and communicate brand differentiation.
• An integrated approach to managing social media will need to be defined and adopted in order to streamline management and keep messages consistent. With so many platforms now available, attracting literally billions of visits each month, solutions are being created so that accounts can be linked, allowing single posts to gain the maximum reach.

In Summary

‘Only the paranoid will survive,’ said Andy Grove, chairman of Intel. ‘The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.’ This kind of paranoia leads to constant innovation in order to stay ahead.
Innovation should not be confused with change or creativity. Change is not always innovation, changing your website for a better-looking new one is not innovating. Being creative is only having the ideas for innovation, whilst innovation is actually taking those ideas and making them real.

Many of you have creative agencies and creative directors but the real question is how many of you have innovative agencies and innovation directors?
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. As Frank Tibolt says: Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

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Damon Segal
Founder and M.D.
Emotio Design Group
www.emotio.co.uk

Having come from a traditional marketing and design background Damon has seen drawing boards replaced with Macs and paint brushes become Wacom Tablets.

In 1996 Damon built his first website on Adobe’s PageMill software and was hooked on theinternet; which was great because help was always just a click away!

Having been heavily involved in website design, development and marketing since this point Damon has seen innovation happen on a daily basis. It is one of the fastest-moving industries in the world and limited only by the imagination and skills of those working in it.

Damon is on the Advisory Council for the Global Marketing Network and is a practitioner module advisor for BPP/ARU/GMN Global Marketing Practice MSc, which he also helped create and write. Damon also speaks professionally for a number of organisations including the Academy forf Chief Executives, the London Chamber of Commerce and the Institute of Direct Marketing.

Damon founded Emotio Design Group to help brands and business define and deliver integrated marketing services and collateral and to improve their marketing effectiveness. Although Emotio is primarily focused in the digital arena, website design and development it remains strong in branding and its traditional skills of design for print.

Emotio provides websites, branding, marketing consultancy, brochures, search engine optimisation, PPC campaign management, social media optimisation and more. Damon’s extensive client list includes Brady Corporation, Bestway, Forever Living Products, Shaun Leane, BNI and The Royal College of GPs.

Integrated Strategy for Social Media Optimisation

I am currently working on a strategy to integrate and track social media plaforms

I am currently creating a strategy for integrated social media posting

Life in the fast lane of the information highway

IMAGINE that having a website is like owning a car. Before you buy one you have to decide what you want and what you need.

Should it be fast, economical, luxurious, basic, flash, powerful, loaded with gadgets etc? All these factors will affect the cost of your car; some cars have great engines but don't look good, some cars look great but don't have all the gadgets.

Websites are much the same. You may have a fantastic e-commerce or content management system but the front end of the site – the bit your clients see – may look basic or, dare I say, unprofessional.

Let’s go back to the car analogy. You could buy a middle of the range car with an average engine and then spend money later adding skirts, spoilers, decals and a great paint job.

Or you could go for the whole package and get a luxury fast car that comes with all the whistles and bells. It depends on what you need and what you can afford.

Remember some cars can be upgraded later with extra gadgets and even a more powerful engine. Just like a website.

Think back to when you bought your first car - it was probably the best you could afford at the time to get the job done.

But cars age and technology moves fast, so that car you bought with the CD player could well now benefit from being able to connect to your iPod. You might even decide after a few years you need a bigger boot and more storage space. Just like a website.

Usability is important. When I was younger, I owned a car with a door you had to lift to unlock it. I had to pump the gas three times before turning the ignition and only then would it start.

What if your website worked the same way? If you gave a visitor the keys, do you think they would be able to get the car started? A website - like a car - should work the way we expect it to.

Someone recently told me he hated the fact that so many websites look the same! You could argue the same with cars, after all they usually have four wheels, headlights, brake lights, a steering wheel and an engine.

Most of them put things in the same place, too, but this is for the user’s benefit. As soon as you move the ignition to the middle of the car (like Saab did) or the gears to a lever on the steering column then people get confused and are invariably put off.

Websites are the same. Usability means common factors like logos, navigation, site maps and home buttons should be in a standard place.

That’s not to say innovation doesn’t have its place, but innovation needs to be intuitive and when it's not it can cause more harm than good.

What would you think if you went to buy a car and it had the spare wheel on the roof, eight headlamps and six narrow doors? That’s the kind of user issues some badly-designed websites create.

Now let’s consider maintenance. You wouldn’t expect your car to run forever without looking after it, and you don’t expect all external factors to stay the same.

You know that if you don't change the oil from time to time the engine will break. And if a new law regulates emissions, or your car gets so old the manufacturer stops making spare parts, then things need to change.

It’s exactly the same with a website. If you don't clean your database from time to time, or Google changes the way it looks at a site for indexing, then your site won’t be as effective as it once was.

Here’s a trickier concept to grasp, but persevere because marketing a website correctly is crucial. it’s a very important point. Imagine your pockets are deep enough to run a Formula 1 car, your team hires the best driver and invests a fortune making sure the car’s technology will make it perform to the highest standards.

The only problem is that one team doesn’t know what the next team is doing to ensure they are in with a chance of winning. Odds are the team with the best driver and best car will win, although the mix might be the best car with a good driver just keeps up with the best driver with a good car.

Well, it's the same principle with search engine optimisation. You might spend lots on getting the structure of your website 100% right for Google but with an average digital marketer (the driver) implementing the search engine strategy your results might not be fantastic.

Mind you, you might get the best SEO and the best marketer and still find someone else is doing it better. Perhaps they had more money to spend on a link-building campaign.

Finally there comes a time when you need to change your car. Maybe you got bored with it, maybe you need a bigger one or perhaps you need to make a better impression when you pull up at your client's office.

For these same reasons you will need to change your website, too. Life moves fast online, keeping up is not easy - but sometimes it is necessary. The bad news is that one year of website life is like three car years, so you will have to change your site more often than you would like.

But at least you’ll keep ahead of all the others on the information highway.