To be successful at social media you need to have a plan.  As the publisher, you control the power to distribute your content through digital media platforms such as blogs, mobile, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.  Most businesspersons are overwhelmed with all the options and how to implement them.  These six steps provide a roadmap to use social media to achieve optimal results for your business.

Step 1 –Determine Social Media Value for Your Business

• Develop an understanding of social media and online communities – How can you gain traction for ideas and grow your network to benefit your company?
• Determine goals – What does your company want to accomplish with social media?
• Evaluate social media – Is it a good fit for your company/institution?

Step 2 – Identify Challenges Facing Your Business When Implementing Digital Marketing

• Determine organization’s changes – how will your company adopt social media?
• Demonstrate value added – how will you gain support for this new, often misunderstood initiative within your company?
• Determine your social media team – who will design and implement your social media strategy?
• Determine your audience – who do you want to reach?
• Determine competition’s social media activity

Step 3 – Select the Best Tools

• Choose social media communities – select the tools that will best support your goals.  Setup the Applications – Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, Mobile, blogs
• Train your team on using the tools – optimizing profiles, frequency of use, portraying professional image
• Guide the team on Marketing the Tools – gaining followers, building your network and engaging your community
• Leverage Current Marketing – integrate digital media with your current marketing efforts

Step 4 – Develop Content

• Develop compelling content – content that your community wants to read, content that will benefit them and content they will share with their communities
• Remember SEO best practices – use keywords and key phrases
• Include trackable links – content with links to your hub or online environment, video or photos produce best results
• Post content frequently – consistency is key, good content with few hard sales
• Develop Action Responses – ask questions, opinions, advice; direct the user’s response for feedback, to engage in conversations

Step 5: Content Distribution

• Apply widgets to drive viral action – like buttons, share, and repost
• Syndicate your content – RSS feeds, NetworkedBlog, email
• Use applications and tools – simplify efforts, schedule in advance, tracking URL’s
• Integrated digital media strategy – design, implement and manage your social media and integrate it with traditional advertising, online solutions, business networking and integrate it with other social media networks

Step 6: Feedback

• Monitor company chatter – your team should use Google alerts, searches, free and paid tools
• Prepare for feedback – prepare for potential effects on your company, plan how your company will responds to positive and negative feedback
• Evaluation and reporting – through tracking and monitoring determine the effect of your social media strategies and what changes in the landscape have affected it
• Determine ROI – what is the return on your investment from your digital marketing strategy, identify the RGV (resources generating value)
• Adjustment – review your strategy and make the necessary changes and implement the next phase.

The vast changes in media have triggered a revolution in marketing.  Rupert Murdoch noted it in 2006.

“To find something comparable, you would have to go back 500 years to the printing press or the birth of mass media… Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now, it’s the people who are taking control.”

Business Response

Business is quick to acknowledge the changes but their response is varied.  In a recent survey of small business owners

“67% agreed that social media is a good way to increase business, yet 39% did not plan to use social networking in their marketing plan in 2010.”

79% of the  Fortune Global 100 are using at least one social media platform.  Most of the companies have had success with social media.

Office Max: “Marketing is all about change… At OfficeMax, we’ve embraced social media and incorporated it into our marketing strategy to reach today’s digital consumer through humor, entertainment and personalization.”

Cisco: “We see social media, such as blogs, as a great way to build your business and tap into the ideas and input of people using your products.”

Another study suggests “47% of brands are still in the experimental phase with social media”, meaning they “exhibit lots of social activity with little connection or integration with each other.”   Businessweek reports

“Over the last two years, social media have dramatically transformed the pace at which information is shared….71% of companies plan to increase their investments in social media, but only a third have guidelines for how it should be used.”

Clearly there is a marketing opportunity!  But business owners and marketing managers are overwhelmed with the new learning curve and question its effectiveness. Agencies are active in the social space, trying to make sense of all the new tools and prove its value for their clients.  Yet a new evolving group, focusing on Integrated Media Marketing and using social media as art of a comprehensive strategy, is opening up new markets and strategic opportunities.

How are you on implementing Social Media into your marketing efforts?

Traditionally marketing is about advertising or promoting something.  We scream “something”; we hope it is loud enough to interrupt the consumers’ attention and motivate them to take action.  That’s one way to do it.

Marketing has progressed — customer databases target select groups and the internet provides customers with search that directs them to company websites. We say something to the world, await a response and then respond back.  But the communication is still one way.

Social Media, the New Solution?

Enter social media. Two-way conversations are realized in real time – open communication is the objective, controlling the message is almost impossible. The focus is to promote conversations among customers and potential customers. Each conversation is a “touchpoint” with the consumer and provides the company with insights, data and new marketing connections.

To date most marketers see social media as a tool or a component of the marketing mix. Social media is much more than a promotion tool; it is the “atmosphere” or cloud in which more traditional efforts are magnified, grow and flourish.  It requires a comprehensive strategy to be successful.

Social media has begun to impact business communications (e.g., branding, customer service, recruitment, organizational development).  But it has not been integrated into ongoing traditional marketing efforts and the marketing mix.

Integrated Media Marketing, Generating Marketing Capital

Enter Integrated Media Marketing, the next step in the marketing revolution. This strategy is the seamless integration of traditional marketing with online, public relations and social media. This builds on the recent Forester study,  No Media Should Stand Alone which suggests;

“All types of online media can play specific roles in meeting marketers’ objectives — especially when seamlessly working together.”

From the outset Integrated Media Marketing is designed to be holistic; it is not just adding social media as another silo to the other media channels; but blending or “entwining” the components (TV, radio, online, public relations and online marketing) as a unified strategy.  Social media must permeate all elements of their marketing mix, as the driving force of an Integrated Media Marketing Strategy.

This Strategy augments and synergizes the different media components to generate a new asset, marketing capital. The resulting marketing capital is greater than the sum of each of the media inputs, generating new value added by

• Expanding exposure by effectively driving your message across all media
• Efficient use of marketing dollars
• Accessing the viral power of user distribution
• Addressing sensitive and negative issues
• Expanding customer touchpoints to gain new insights on their brand (corporate, employer); interactions on customer service; opportunities for recruitment and product research.

The Obama Presidential campaign successfully generated marketing capital with a unified brand of “Change”. President Obama’s team used all forms of social media and wove them seamlessly with traditional media and PR, while “integrating online advocacy into every element of the campaign.”  His expanded marketing capital resulted in an empowered volunteer network,  high approval ratings, 90% of donors were under $100 and a landslide election victory drawing from political center.

An Integrated Media Marketing Strategy develops engaging customer relationships which generates new marketing capital and a sustainable competitive edge.

Strategy! Strategy! Strategy! -  the key to successfully integrating social media into your marketing mix.  Business Week points out that  companies are moving from Discovery to Experimentation and finally to Adoption in their social media experience.

With this growing expertise, experts agree that 2010 is the year for Developing Strategy,  Integrating Media and Designing Metrics.

As Social Media Marketing is becoming more strategic, companies are adopting a strategy to align their objectives with metrics that define and reflect an Integrated Media Marketing approach.  This will define their success. Mani Karthik compiled an awesome list of ten social media presentations by thought leaders in the industry. These companies are using a social media strategy to achieve their objectives. We thank Mani for including the latest Entwine presentation as the first on his list.  We shared this presentation with executives at the Salem Roanoke County Chamber event in Salem, Virginia.

Who’s following You?  Have you looked in the mirror lately?

What’s the fastest growing marketing tool for businesses today?   It’s Social Media, and did I mention it’s free? We call it BIZ2.0. It’s a new way of thinking and doing business. For simplicity let’s focus on three of the most popular business tools - LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

So you’re collecting Connections on LinkedIn, Friends on Facebook and Followers on Twitter.

• What’s your criteria for following back?
• Are you effectively building your network?

Chris Brogan, a well respected social media thought leader, wrote “You’re Doing it Wrong” openly discussing how we participate in social networks. Here are some of his comments:

• You follow too many people on Twitter.
• You don’t allow blog comments.
• You add people to LinkedIn that you don’t know very well.
• You have ads on your blog.
• You use partial RSS feeds.
• Your blog posts are too short (too long).
• You shoot really long videos and don’t edit.
• You don’t follow people back.

Shawn Welch wrote a follow-up post suggesting that “Social media is not the place for instant celebrity…” and adding

“It’s tempting to join a network like Twitter and follow everyone under the sun because it’s easy and that feels like success. But even if you pick up 500 or 600 auto-follows or a few polite follow-backs, you’ll quickly find you’re not the success you think you are.”

Shawn states there are two key principles to social media:

Patience — slow growth wins over aggressive expansion

Build relationships along the way, interact and engage

What’s your strategy?

• Which tools are you using – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook?
• What is your strategy for building these networks?
• What are your criteria for accepting a Connection, Friend or Follower?

The Tools – Each tool has a different reach and target market – who uses it.

Reach:

• Facebook - 400 million people globally are active users -50% active users log on to Facebook in any given day and more than 35 million users update their status each day
• LinkedIn - 60 million professionals with high personal incomes
• Twitter -18. 1 million unique visitors in December 09- 579% growth from December 08

Who uses it?

• Facebook – 35+ demographic now represents more than 30% of the entire user base,  55+ audience grew a whopping 922.7% in 2009.
• LinkedIn - In US 52 % are men and 48% are women; 38% make over $100k per year.
• Twitter – 70% are over 25; more females than males

BIZ2.0 Strategy
It’s clear that social media is impacting the business world as documented in Jeremiah Owyang’s Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009. Social media is re-defining and expanding relationships in the global business community.

The key to BIZ2.0 is the building of a strong and relevant network. In the traditional business world, networking is considered a very valuable marketing tool for sales, recruiting, exposure and building relationships. In a WEB 2.0 environment, BIZ2.0 is becoming a tool to build your personal brand, become a Thought Leader and generate targeted sales opportunities. This network represents you and reflects on the work that you do. In addition you now have opened your contacts to the business world.

Social media tools are new to most business people. For the most part they have not developed a strategy to build their valuable network. Many people just collect friends — as many, as fast as they can. They are called open networkers. There are no criteria. You are virtually accepted on a cold contact, based on their belief in open networking or referral from another follower. The more the merrier! The alternative is to step back and develop your personal BIZ2.0 strategy using your own social etiquette.