by Eric Brown Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of� The Social Media Bubble . I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future be any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined. But as with all struggles, there has been a bright side, a bubble burst quickly trims out the weeds and the low hanging fruit.� Perhaps a Social Media Weeding is forthcoming, � 2010 has been the year that many small and mid size businesses have taken the plunge, and embraced the throws of Social Media Marketing. With that nearly every unemployed straggler has hung out their Social Media Consultant shingle.� As reported in the Harvard Business Review,� “During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.” Low Barrier to Entry Whenever the barrier to entry is low, to non existent, pitfalls loom. While the real estate bubble happened due to a multitude of reasons, whenever someone can sell a condo several times before the builder finished construction, and each selling party profits, all is well and good until the market falls off. It then becomes musical chairs and the last person standing is holding the bag. When profit occurs absent anyone really doing anything or adding any value, a Weed and Trim typically follows. Problem is, we aren’t very adept at history or awareness. Paneria Bread is My Office Nothing against the Nomads or� Entrepreneurs, we all started somewhere, but when your only cost of business or overhead is your laptop, lots of crazies are suddenly internet marketers and social media marketers. And, by all means, some of this lot are pretty smart, however once the check writers, the business owners start requiring Results, many of these Cast of Social Media Characters will evaporate as quickly as they spawned.� What is the Correction Results, or lack there of will lead the correction. Business isn’t as complicated as we try to make it. If you are doing internet marketing or social media marketing for your client, and they aren’t selling more stuff, you may well get fired, as you should. Marketing is and has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money.� Engagement, Conversation, Connections and all of the buzz words of today won’t cut it if sales leads don’t increase. The truth is, Social Media Marketing is so much more than a facebook page and a twitter account, and there are lots of businesses and agencies doing a stealer job, however, many are not, and it seems that the honeymoon may be coming to a close for those that lack the experience of delivering a real and measurable result. Are your clients selling more stuff from your Social Media Marketing Campaigns?� We would love to hear your feedback. You can connect with Eric on twitter or at The Urbane Way ,� Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Is 2011 The Year of the Social Media Bubble

by Jennifer Laycock A few weeks ago I wrote a handful of articles on how to develop a proper social media strategy by developing goals , breaking those goals into supportive goals and matching goals to appropriate tactics . Those three articles outline the foundation that needs to be laid for any good social media plan, but your job doesn’t stop there. In fact, if you want to do things properly, your job is just getting started. First, let’s quickly recap what your process would look like if you were to map it out based solely on those three articles. For each of your primary goals, the process might look a little something like this: You would have started with your primary goal, broken it down into supportive goals, matched those goals to appropriate tactics and determined which social media outlets best allowed you to implement those tactics. After a few weeks or months, you’d sit down and ask yourself if you’d met your primary goal. There’s really nothing wrong with going about the process this way, but there is a better way. What you need to do is understand the area between the outlets and success…that grey area where things can go right or wrong and you can be completely oblivious. Understanding Micro Goals Within that grey area is where our micro goals are going to live. These goals will sound familiar to most of you, because they’re actually the types of “goals” that get kicked around by people who know very little about social media strategy. Things like number of Facebook followers or number of RSS subscribers. Things that on the surface are almost worthless, but when combined with a solid strategy actually become crucial to the long term success of your campaigns. Micro-goals are basically the various numbers you can tally up from your involvement in different social media outlets. They can easily be tracked and tallied over time and they give you a concrete gauge of your interactions with consumers and how those interactions are changing over time. Establishing Micro Goals You’ll need to have worked your way through your strategy to the point of selecting your social media tools before you’ll be ready to establish your micro goals. For the most part, there are universal micro goals that will need to be tracked across the board for all companies. These will serve as the starting points to help you realize what you should be tracking. You’ll also need to have a solid understanding of your goals and supportive goals so you can fine tune your micro goals to your specific needs. For example, everyone will want to track the number of RSS and Email subscribers to their blog, but only some companies will need to track the number of PDF downloads or the number of leads generated from the blog. Here are a few examples of specialized micro goals that might be tied to specific campaign goals: If you are using Facebook to drive people to events or sales, RSVPs will become an important part of you campaign and an essential micro goal to track. If you’re using Flickr to build up press relations with bloggers and mainstream media, tracking the number of times your Creative Commons licensed photos are used will be important to track. Sit down with your team, talk through your strategy and examine the list of actions consumers can take on each of the social media platforms you plan to utilize. Then add these to your list. Your finished product should give you quite a hefty list of things to track over the course of your campaign. The Next Steps Now that you understand what micro-goals are and how to establish them, you’re ready to learn how to put them to work to improve the performance of your campaigns. In my next post, I’ll talk about how to use these newly defined micro-goals to fine tune your social media efforts as you’re moving forward with your campaigns. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Understanding and Establishing Micro Goals for Your Social Media Campaigns

by Stoney deGeyter Note: Recently I’ve gotten some ribbing from friends and colleagues about my exceedingly numerous multi-part posts. In order to wean myself off my favorite form of not-having-to-think-about-what-I’m-going-to-write-about-next, I’ve combined all 12 parts of this series into a single post. Enjoy! Part 1: Guilty of Crimes No One Committed A lot of people subscribe to the “Guilt by Association” theory in online marketing. This theory suggests that you are who you associate with. I agree there is some definite truth to this mindset, but, like a lot of things, it can also be taken to a paranoid extreme. This fear leads some people into a paralysis that ultimately hinders their online marketing efforts rather than helping them. “Guilt by Association” extremists work hard to keep themselves squeaky clean. They tread extra carefully with who they associate with in an effort to ensure that they are never found guilty of crimes they haven’t committed. In order to stay “pure”, they avoid having online relationships with some who they believe may have broken some rule at some point that, likely, nobody even cares about. Part 2: Google’s Guidelines Don’t Rule the Web With Google controlling so much market share, many business owners and online marketers are scared of doing anything that might seemingly violate Google’s Guidelines. We know Google looks at both positive and negative attributes, including your associations, when developing your overall trust profile. But we often do ourselves a disservice when we let Google’s Guidelines dictate everything we do on the web - even in areas that don’t have any specific connection to Google. There is nothing wrong with keeping a clean profile and ensuring you don’t do anything that violates the search engine guidelines. There is also nothing wrong with making sure you associate your online profile with people you know will help you and not hurt you. But there comes a point where it borders on paranoia, at best, and counter-productive, at worst. Part 3: You Have No Control Over Who Associates with You One of the problems with worrying too much over your online profile is that you have little to no control over who associates themselves with you. Anybody can link to you, anybody can scrape your content, anybody can share your post with their friends, and anybody can retweet you. If you’re unhappy about who’s doing any of these things, your sole recourse is to contact them, ask them to stop, and then cross your fingers. Google (and the other search engines) know this. They knew it back when they made links a part of their algorithms. They knew it when people started scraping and duplicating your content. And they know it now in an age of RTs, Likes, Mixxes, Stumbles, and whatever else we do with content we like. Google will not hold you responsible if someone promotes you and then goes off and violates Google’s Guidelines. Part 4: You are Responsible for Who You Associate With If there is one constant in the world of online promotion, social media profiles, and search engine rankings, it is that you do have some responsibility for who you choose to associate with. In the real world, it is often said that you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they have. If you’re associating with thieves, liars, spammers, and cheats, you don’t have to be a thief, liar, spammer, or a cheat to get the reputation of one (or as an enabler of one). Either way, your associations affect you. Part 5: You Are Not Responsible for the Entire History of Who You Associate With There is some truth, both in real life and on the web, that you can learn a lot about a person by who they associate with. But it is also true that you cannot not be held accountable for the actions of every person you’ve shaken hands with. In the social sphere of the web, retweeting or liking someone’s single message is not an endorsement of every tweet, post, thought, or blog they ever published. Even the worst offenders do something right! Making note of the positive doesn’t suddenly hang all their negative around your neck as if you’ve endorsed it all. Parts 6-10: yada yada yada Part 11: Everyone’s Got Some (Negative) History No matter how squeaky clean you want to keep your social media profile, the only way to stay squeaky clean is to not associate yourself with anyone . The only person who does not have something negative in their profile is likely the person who has no profile whatsoever. Or you can check the complete historical profile of every person before you RT, Stumble, Like, or whatever. Of course, even with those who pass the test, what guarantees do you have that they won’t do something shady in the future? Not only do you have to check the historical profile before you connect with them, you have to keep checking back to make sure you still want to be connected with them. Part 12: We Are All Violators Sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you’re going to violate some guidelines somewhere, including Google’s. It’s inevitable. Which is why we can’t live and breathe by every guideline that Google puts out. Keep in mind, those who try hard to stay violation-free are often those that violate guidelines the most. They just hide it better. And the search engines likely know this too. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Guilt by Association: Do You Really Know Who You Are Linking To, Parts 1-12

by Jennifer Laycock Every now and then I find myself on the phone with a potential client trying to talk them into putting our conversation on hold and giving my Search Engine Guide’s Associate Editor Stoney deGeyter �a call. Why? Because they’re in a position where they need to focus on both search engine optimization and social media to build a successful site, but they only have the budget to do one at a time…and at this time, they need to put social media on hold and focus on search engine optimization. As much as I enjoy working with companies to build sustainable social media strategies, the truth is my services are not always going to deliver the best bang for their buck. There are times when it simply makes more sense to focus on search engine optimization. In fact, making the right choice of where to start your marketing efforts can be essential to generating the additional revenue needed to invest in BOTH Social Media and SEO. If you’re in the position of trying to figure out where to start, here are three key ways to decide search engine optimization is your best starting point. (On Thursday, we’ll take a look at when it’s best to begin with Social Media.) Clue #1 When You Have an Established Web Site, but No Traffic Let’s say you’ve been doing business online for several years. You have an established web site and you’ve been using it successfully to generate leads or drive sales. You have a nice amount of traffic and fairly good conversion rates. You’ve just reached a point where you’d like to increase business and your existing efforts aren’t cutting the mustard. This is a good time to bring in a search engine optimization expert. A good SEO will be able to sort through your analytics and match what they find to solid keyword research in order to�determine the most effective way to get your product in front of potential customers who may be looking for it. They can build off the foundation of age and credibility you’ve established to seek out new clients and get your site in front of more targeted searchers. When this is the case, investing your money in search engine optimization to pick up the customers who are actually looking for (but failing to find) your product or services, makes�the most�sense. Clue #2 When Your Product or Service has a Research Based Sales Process There are some products people fall in love with at first sight. We call these “impulse buys.” There are other products that require a fairly lengthy research process before a purchase is made. These are the types of products that align perfectly with search engine optimization. If you sell a product that costs more than $25 and that has competition from other similar products, you likely fall into the realm of research based sales. This means people will start with broad searches (i.e. portable dvd player), move on to information gathering purchases (i.e. best portable dvd player under $100) and finally search with a specific product in mind (Phillips PET741B/37.) For these types of products, it’s absolutely essential to make sure your site is properly optimized. If you’re not connecting with these customers at multiple points during the research process, you’re highly unlikely to connect with them when it comes time for them to buy. Clue #3 When You Sell Something People Already Want If you’re spending tons of money on offline advertising (billboards, radio, tv, print, etc…) but your site isn’t properly optimized, you’re making a huge mistake.� In fact, if you sell any product that’s already well established and popular, but you aren’t getting the type of traffic and sales you’d hoped for, it’s probably a good idea to focus on SEOing your web site before you do anything else. A quick trip to a free keyword research tool can be very revealing when it comes to this clue. If legions of consumers are searching for the very thing you’re selling…search engine optimization should be your first stop in the world of online marketing. If it’s not, you’re simply leaving customers sitting on the table for your nearest competitor with a marketing budget to scoop up. The Best Internet Marketing Campaigns are Integrated In an ideal world, every company would have the budget to invest in a truly integrated online marketing campaign. They would be focusing on search engine optimization, analytics, paid search, social media and online reputation management. The teams for each of these specialties would be working in tandem to test, refine and launch the most effective campaigns possible. Since this isn’t always possible, it’s important to focus your funds in the area that delivers the strongest and fastest reward. This will often enable a company to increase sales and profits enough to justify investing in the next item on their marketing list. Ideally, this cycle continues until you’ve got a strong marketing presence in all areas of the web. Until then, invest those first funds wisely. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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How to Know When Your Site Needs SEO Before Social Media

In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn’t tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location. Words which have a low discrimination value may have a higher discrimination value when combined with neighboring words. Hot and dog might have a different meaning when they are next to each other. As explained in this Wired article : Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.” But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.” The concept of discrimination value also has value outside of search. If you get feedback from an anonymous person on a third party site it gets so much weight (maybe none). If you get feedback from someone who is not anonymous it gets more weight. If you get feedback from a paying customer it gets much more weight. One of the most powerful levels of discrimination is indeed payment. If a person pays you the (typically) you know who they are & they have expressed significant interest beyond what most people will do. I think online business models which require payment from the typical user are not hyped and are not considered sexy because those sorts of models are often slow growth due to the penny gap and the requirement of greater trust to convert. Whereas a programming marketer can hear of a new network (say Pippers) and create 40,000 bogus accounts in an hour. The owners of Pippers can then talk about their explosive growth rate in the media, which earns them media coverage. In turn this increases their ability to raise capital and continue their “growth.” But many of the social networks end up being a bag of smoke that will fade because they aim to bucket people as beings in a database and are so broad as to have little discrimination value. I have been reading You Are Not a Gadget and he compared the depersonalization on the broad social networks to the beauty of an oud forum he is a member of. Much like charging for admission, obscurity is a filter which improves the level of discourse. Compare the comments on *any* niche topic site to what you find on Youtube. If you can show me a site which is consistently worse than Youtube (outside of site like 4Chan which specialize in creating campaigns to try to make epileptic people have a seizure) I will buy you a beer then next time we meet. My wife deleted her FaceBook account because she was annoyed at some people’s behavior on it. Part of the problem with the social networks is that they are so broad and so frictionless that your activities on them really don’t matter. As a marketer there are a couple ways to play such networks largely ignore them be friends with everyone use bots As a marketer the first of those options means you are saving your time for higher paying areas, and the second of those options means more people seeing more distribution of whatever content you create. But many of the helpful aids are at best dubious short term opportunistic ploys . The third option means you are one of the people who is going out of their way to make the web worse, but many will. Generally any given month I haven’t been on Facebook for more than 5 minutes outside of writing & targeting ads, or approving a few real “friends” and hundreds to thousands of other people who claim to be my friend. But if you message me on FaceBook there is a precisely 0% chance of getting a reply. When FaceBook launched Beacon a few years ago they wanted to sell peer pressure as an ad unit. If brands can show that your friends did something then maybe that can help lead to a cumulative advantage sort of environment which has you follow along. Beacon was such a flagrant violation of user privacy that it was quickly shot down by the market. But with the new FaceBook like button, they are trying to use like button clicks to put your name on ads : “Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.” In the short run it may work, but in the longrun I don’t like the concept. The reasons are many. You can agree with one particular thing a person says and like it while being nearly diametrically opposed to their general philosophy on life. For example, when we launched that “How Google Works” infographic last week one of the reporters who wrote about it also mentioned how sleazy and nefarious the SEO industry is, and yet he was willing to promote the efforts of an SEO because it was published on a blog with a sister acronym in the domain name. … Of the 3,000+ people who voted for us likely less than half of them know anything about me, or even my association with the site. You can like one product from a company, but not like their other products. I have worked with GoDaddy as a registrar for years. And I have had no complaints on that front. But they also sell some search engine submission service that I would cringe to see my name promoting. You click the like button once on one page. Years later the business you liked is trading in another area…they moved from remnant inventory to spyware, and you recommend them. An individual can have multiple lines of work. You might like Thom Yorke’s role in Radiohead, but you might not like his political views or his solo work. Imagine when someone buys a car that you passively recommended which has a manufacturer defect. One of their loved ones gets killed and you eat the blame. Just like businesses, people change over time. This is especially true in the area of business, where a former partner or friend goes out of their way to betray your trust and screw you. How do likes work with 301 redirects? How do they work when the content of the page shifts from genuinely useful to hawking trash with a hyped up sales letter? A like doesn’t have much discrimination value. And it shouldn’t last very long. Why did you like something? When did you like it? Who knows. Did you like Toyota right up until the brakes didn’t work? After you get out of the hospital, how do you feel when your friend asks you why you are still promoting their products? Did you work for a digital sharecropper overlord like Jason Calacanas who required you to push their junk elsewhere? How did you feel when your friend asks you why you are promoting his trash after he canned you with 1 week notice while boasting how they are nearing break-even and have over 8 years of cash in the bank? Once people experience that will they become jaded and stop recommending things? And if there isn’t a backlash against the like button then given enough time one of your friends will like almost anything. It doesn’t matter the product/service/offer … if your pool of “friends” is wide enough then one of them is receiving an affiliate commission for pushing something, one of them owed a favor to the merchant, and one of them liked the merchant because they picked up a tab in the bar last month. A wave of 100 million blond hair 18 year old girls who are lonely have joined FaceBook friending up with the desperate and then promoting scammy wares to them via automated clicks of the like button. And then of course there will be services like SpikeTheVote. Sure a fad might work in the short run , but given enough time and there will be friend recommendations for almost anything. Once the novelty wears of does any of it matter? In time any database record can be an ad targeting mechanism. Will I be promoting some of the products my thousands of “friends” create or endorse by a click of the mouse which changes purpose after the fact? At first online petitions were powerful because they seemed to have mobilized swaths of people. But then people realized that a vote represented nothing more than an automated form submission and clicking send. 2 clicks of the mouse. Not much discrimination value.

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I Like it, I Love it, I Want Some More of It

by Jennifer Laycock Here’s the thing about goals. They’re well intentioned and broad in focus and we wave them around as if we’re really proud of these lofty ideas we hope to achieve. But unless we take the time to create a plan of action to reach them, they rarely amount to more than warm-fuzzy inducing line items. The problem with the way most people reach goals is that they do it without a proper plan. They establish a goal of increasing sales and then they rush off to social media sites to try and boost their sales. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t. Generally, it’s dumb luck either way. Successful Marketing Relies on Formulas Think back to your days in advanced math in high school or college. Remember how it was never enough to get the proper answer? You had to demonstrate your work and show the steps it took to get there? There’s a basic concept in both math and science that requires you to “reproduce” your work. This is why math and science rely so heavily on formulas. The world of marketing is really no different. Yes, there’s an extraordinary amount of creativity required in the creation of your message…but the processes are incredibly formulaic. Relying exclusively on the creativity with little regard to process will not only make it difficult to replicate success, it will also make it difficult to learn from you failures. This is why your process can’t move into the creative realm once you’ve defined your top three goals. It must move into the realm of micro-goals. Break Down Your Primary Goals into Supportive Goals Just like those annoying math teachers who wanted to make sure you understood the process, I want to impress just how important it is to follow a process when you are building your social media strategy. I’ve already written about the need to establish goals and even walked you through the concept of developing high level goals. Today I want to explain how you take those top level goals and break them down into smaller, supportive goals. Following this process will help you reach the point where you can select your social media strategies based on what will help you achieve your goals rather than what “everyone else is doing.” (If you haven’t read my post ” Understanding the Three Primary Goals of Social Media ,” you may want to take a quick moment to go get some background.) Step One: Examine Your Top Level Goal Let’s say one of your top goals for social media involvement is to monitor the conversation around your brand. Perhaps you are launching a new product or perhaps you’ve been suffering from a lot of negative conversation online and you are ready to address it. The temptation with this goal might be to jump in the conversation and start listening to everything that’s being said. A better plan is to sit down and consider a few smaller goals first. Think about the various goals related to monitoring your brand. Your list might look something like this: Each of these four sub-goals are a very important part of how your primary goal integrates into social media marketing plans. They’re also necessary to define so you know you are taking the steps needed to actually reach the primary goal. Consider how they all work together: 1)����� Select a Monitoring Program: It’s not enough to simply want to monitor, you need to decide the depth if information you wish to collect and how you’ll be organizing it. If you’re a small company with a few mentions, a free tool like Google Alerts may do the trick. If you’re a larger brand or you need the ability to sort mentions by sentiment, you’ll need to research and purchase a more powerful tool. � 2)����� Determine a Plan of Escalation: If you’re taking the time to track the conversation, you also need to have a plan for responding to it. You need to sit down and ask yourself what deserves a response, who will give the response and how to track the follow-up and results. � 3)����� Parlay Coverage via the Blog: One of the biggest benefits to monitoring the conversation is the fodder it can provide for your blog. Whether it’s pointing out a mention, responding to someone else’s thoughts on your posts or simply writing content to address common concerns or compliments, it’s important to have a plan in place to use what you learn from the conversation. � 4)����� Engage with Influencers: Another benefit to monitoring the conversation is seeing who is talking about you. Taking the time to review these conversations, research the person talking about you and then engaging them in conversation can be essential steps toward building the relationships that will help you improve your brand’s online presence. � Each of these sub-goals plays an important role in allowing you to leverage social media to reach those higher level goals. If you move too quickly toward implementing your goals, it’s easy to overlook them. While you may still experience a level of success without taking this step in the process, you’ll decrease your chances of success significantly. Don’t rush into social media. Take your time and take it step by step. You’ll find you’ll build a fuller, more comprehensive strategy that provides better direction and more concrete results. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Break Your Goals into Micro-Goals to Make Them Achievable

Do you like Web Analytics? Do you want to stay up to date on the latest developments in the industry? Recently, a few Web Analytics “geeks” decided to start an audio podcast to interview key people/vendors in the Web Analytics space. The podcast also covers topics related to Web Analytics such as Mobile Measurement, Social Media Tracking, Engagement, etc. With over 20 episodes and 20,000 downloads so far, the podcast has been well received and we’d like to help spread the word. In the most recent installment, you can hear Google’s own Phil Mui so click here to listen to that podcast . You can subscribe to the podcast via RSS at www.beyondwebanalytics.com or you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes . You can also follow the podcast on Twitter . Enjoy! Posted by Adam Greco, Beyond Web Analytics

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Like Web Analytics? Check Out The Beyond Web Analytics Podcast

by Jennifer Laycock Earlier this week, I wrote a post about the need to build a social media strategy around specific goals instead of simply launching a presence because “everyone else is doing it.” Today, I’m going to map out the three primary goals most social media outreach campaigns fall into. If you’re still trying to figure out how and why to get involved in social media outreach, consider these three categories and ask yourself how they might apply to your business. Three Primary Social Media Goals When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually either aimed at: Building/Strengthening the Brand Driving Conversions Increasing/Monitoring the Presence Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals. � Let’s take a closer look at these three areas and how they might apply to your social media efforts. Goal #1: Build the Brand When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them. These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors unless you have an exclusive product. Otherwise, you’re forced into the unwinnable battle of competing for the lowest prices and the fastest shipping. Think about the things that make your company different from your competitors; your Unique Value Propostion . This is the thing you want to use social media to built awareness of. If you’re a service professional, target a specific niche and build a blogging and Twitter strategy around that. Demonstrate your expertise in working with a certain type of client and then seek out those types of clients to have conversation with. Look for new ways to connect with them and encourage your current clients to socially share your articles with their networks. Goal #2: Drive Conversions One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you’re looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions are an easily trackable goal in the realm of social media. Sit down and write out a list of all the potential actions someone might take while engaging with your company’s web site or while interacting online. Obvious options like buying your products or becoming a lead spring to mind, but don’t forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, retweeting a blog post or downloading a white paper. Read over your list and think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts. Goal #3: Increase Presence � Finally, we come to the goal most often associated with social media outreach efforts; increasing the conversation about your brand. After all, social media is all about the conversation. It’s about the only space in the world where consumers talk to each other and to companies in an environment that can be tracked, sorted and followed-up with. This makes social media a prime outlet for PR driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them. Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you’re launching new product and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, it’s all trackable. When it comes to the conversation people might be having about you online, ask yourself a few questions. Who do you want to hear talking? What do you want them to be saying? Who do you want them to say it to? These are your starting points for setting up key goals within the realm of increasing your presence. You’ve Set the Stage, Now Start Building a Plan Looking at your business with each of the above goals in mind helps you set the stage for your social media efforts. This post isn’t aimed at telling you what to do, I’m simply trying to get you to figure out why you want (and need) to do it. If you’re small business looking to take your social media efforts up a notch (or maybe even just get started,) take the time to define at least two goals from the categories above. Once you’ve identified your desired outcome, you’ll be a lot more ready to start mapping out the path to get there. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Understanding the Three Primary Goals of Social Media

by Jennifer Laycock Earlier this week, I wrote a post about the need to build a social media strategy around specific goals instead of simply launching a presence because “everyone else is doing it.” Today, I’m going to map out the three primary goals most social media outreach campaigns fall into. If you’re still trying to figure out how and why to get involved in social media outreach, consider these three categories and ask yourself how they might apply to your business. Three Primary Social Media Goals When we look at online marketing, there are three broad categories into which nearly all social media related goals can fall. They are usually either aimed at: Building/Strengthening the Brand Driving Conversions Increasing/Monitoring the Presence Starting at this broad level and thinking about the goals you have for your business can help you begin to write up a list of realistic ways in which social media might help you reach those goals. � Let’s take a closer look at these three areas and how they might apply to your social media efforts. Goal #1: Build the Brand When it comes to building and reinforcing your brand, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It gives you the strongest and broadest opportunity to both find your target audience and to engage in conversation with them. These days, you have no choice but to differentiate yourself from your competitors unless you have an exclusive product. Otherwise, you’re forced into the unwinnable battle of competing for the lowest prices and the fastest shipping. Think about the things that make your company different from your competitors; your Unique Value Propostion . This is the thing you want to use social media to built awareness of. If you’re a service professional, target a specific niche and build a blogging and Twitter strategy around that. Demonstrate your expertise in working with a certain type of client and then seek out those types of clients to have conversation with. Look for new ways to connect with them and encourage your current clients to socially share your articles with their networks. Goal #2: Drive Conversions One of smartest reasons to use social media is for the potential boost it can have to your conversion efforts. Whether you’re looking to drive sales, increase leads or simply drive people to action, conversions are an easily trackable goal in the realm of social media. Sit down and write out a list of all the potential actions someone might take while engaging with your company’s web site or while interacting online. Obvious options like buying your products or becoming a lead spring to mind, but don’t forget about other valuable actions like subscribing to your newsletter, retweeting a blog post or downloading a white paper. Read over your list and think about the different ways you might be able to use social media to increase conversions for each item. Often times, this is the best way to start planning your social media efforts. Goal #3: Increase Presence � Finally, we come to the goal most often associated with social media outreach efforts; increasing the conversation about your brand. After all, social media is all about the conversation. It’s about the only space in the world where consumers talk to each other and to companies in an environment that can be tracked, sorted and followed-up with. This makes social media a prime outlet for PR driven companies who want to know what customers are saying about them. Setting up even a baseline of social media monitoring can go a long way toward helping you follow these conversations. Whether you’re launching new product and aiming to get people buzzing about it or trying to reach out to a new target audience to share information about one of your best selling services, it’s all trackable. When it comes to the conversation people might be having about you online, ask yourself a few questions. Who do you want to hear talking? What do you want them to be saying? Who do you want them to say it to? These are your starting points for setting up key goals within the realm of increasing your presence. You’ve Set the Stage, Now Start Building a Plan Looking at your business with each of the above goals in mind helps you set the stage for your social media efforts. This post isn’t aimed at telling you what to do, I’m simply trying to get you to figure out why you want (and need) to do it. If you’re small business looking to take your social media efforts up a notch (or maybe even just get started,) take the time to define at least two goals from the categories above. Once you’ve identified your desired outcome, you’ll be a lot more ready to start mapping out the path to get there. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Understanding the Three Primary Goals of Social Media

We created the Google Apps Marketplace to make it easier for businesses and universities to benefit from the rapidly growing ecosystem of apps in the cloud. Apps in the Marketplace come in many sizes, from bite-sized apps that focus on providing a single feature to larger standalone apps that run major business systems and processes—and they’re all conveniently integrated with Google apps. We believe it should be as easy to discover and purchase cloud apps for your organization as it is to get mobile apps for your smartphone. And, once you install and evaluate an app, it’s easy for your administrator to deploy them to users with just a few clicks. (Check out this video to see how it works). We’ve added some great new apps since we launched in March and today we’re bringing you 16 new apps to the Marketplace. They represent a cross-section of the innovation happening on the web around integrated applications, where information is shared between applications allowing people to get their work done, faster: Jive : Jive Social Business Software combines collaboration, community and social networking software, allowing you to engage employees, customers and the social web. Harvest : Harvest is a simple time tracking application that makes it fast and easy for businesses to track billable hours and create invoices. Floorplanner Pro : Floorplanner Pro provides a quick and easy way for real estate agents and facilities professionals to create and share interactive floor plans in both 2D as 3D. Check out our post on the Enterprise Blog for more information on all 16 apps, or go right to the Marketplace . Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise

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Bringing sixteen more apps to the Google Apps Marketplace