What only 20? Well, it’s 20 really good reasons. Seriously, study this post. It covers all the keys.
This list of 20 reasons is a great primer for anyone who’s trying to understand social media. It covers all of the key subject areas. These are just the headings. To read the full post click the link at the end. (I’ve underlined the bits that I think are most important.)
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Branding
Create a buzz
Online reputation management
Establish yourself as an expert
Word of mouth
Build relationships and become more personal
Open up the line of communication between business owner and millions of potential customers
Small businesses can compete with the large companies
Social networking with potential clients and customers from all over the globe
Get great traffic- Not only great traffic…. but freakishly crazy amounts of traffic.
Increase your link-ability
Helps with search engines -Link juice from a quality site = higher ranking in the search engines.
Much cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising
Your company is more accessible - An accessible company means a more trustworthy company.
Direct conversation to a specific niche - There are so many social networking, social bookmarking, and social news sites that are dedicated to specific niches. You have the ability to speak directly to these people and not have all the other noise of unrelated topics getting in the way. If you are speaking their language, you have a better chance of them actually hearing what you are saying - and you’re getting the RIGHT KIND of following.
Provides another way for potential customers to find you - If you’re not high enough in the search engines for potential customers to find you, they can still find you through social media. So, even if you’re not on the front page of Google, it doesn’t mean you can’t receive traffic. Social Media has the potential to send you TONS of traffic - when done properly (I’ll write more on that soon!).
It’s a way to explainyourself - One of the reasons some businesses are skiddish about social media is because they’re afraid of negative comments. It’s possible to receive negative comments. But, social media provides the platform to explain, to make things right. The fact of the matter is - if someone has something negative to say they can say it. Ignoring them doesn’t stop the damage. But, when you reply, you are seen as a business owner who cares, who wants to make the customer happy, and that you’re human. Social media is a two-way conversation, so go ahead and defend yourself - just do it proactively.
Show Your Stuff
Find out exactly what your customers want - Social media is amazing in so many ways, as you can see from the last 18 reasons. But, what is so cool is that you don’t have to wonder what your customers want. You want to know what they want?Ask them on social media, and they’ll tell you.
Your customers can play an active role in the business - Instead of focus groups, let your customers play an active role in your business. Let them offer suggestions, let them share their likes and dislikes - all on social media. You might find yourself ideas for new products and services you’d never have without them.
Bottom line - marketing is about getting out the word, engaging in conversations, taking suggestions, problem solving, educating your audience, and promoting your company, product, or service. One of the best ways for small businesses to create buzz is through social media.
Social PR expert Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism is a great overview of the rapidly expanding Social Media space.
This is a simplistic, but very attractive overview. It’s a good start, but it doesn’t help with understanding, and in the few months since it’s original publication in August, 2008 it’s aready a bit dated.. In any case, this attractive graphic has become very popular in slide decks.
Brian breaks the Social Spectrum down into the following groups of tools, services, communities, and networks:
Ben Huh, the guy behind ICanHasCheezBurger.com, created a community which now numbers over 1 million unique visitors a month, all from funny cat pictures with captions. I kid you not. He knows what he’s talking about. His monthly uniques almost tripled in 2008.
How did he do it? Well, here are 15 of his top tips.
One of the web’s most unique sites also comes with the most unusual name, I Can Has Cheezburger (dot-com). The name comes from one of the captions on the jillions of crazy cat pictures found on the site. You can browse the pictures, copy them to your site/blog/profile, or create your own funny caption in 3 easy steps. (And remember cats have poor grammar and spelling abilities.)
Ben knows what he’s talking about. Here is a summary of his 15 keys to building a community. The link to the full post is at the bottom.
1. Convert Casual Users into Fans
The number one rule of creating a great community is to enable people to share the positive experience that they’ve had on your site. Your aim should be to convert casual users into fans because fans are the ones that will share your content with others.
2. Love on Your Existing Fans, but Not Too Much
3. Empower your Users
4. Make More People Happy
5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market
6. Don’t Skimp on Great Content
7. Provide Ways to Give Feedback
8. Power of Little
Offer users lots of small, simple things to do on your site that don’t require login, such as rating, commenting, saving a favorite, creating an account and finally (hopefully) they will do the most difficult thing of all, contribute to your site.
9. Encourage ‘Thefting’
10. Be Willing to Prune Your Community
11. Measure the Number of Shared Experiences, not Users
12. Shared Experiences = Goodwill
13. Create Info Porn
People love to look at data about themselves. It the reason why there is a mirror in practically every elevator that you’ve been in. If you have data about your user’s behavior on your site then show it to them. Update it on a daily basis and they will come back on a daily basis. One of the most popular pages on Lol cats is the page that tells people how many ‘fans’ they have.
14. Don’t Pay Contributors
15. Don’t Confuse Sharing with Marketing
When your users share content with others they are not marketing. They don’t even think about it in that way and in turn you shouldn’t treat them as marketers. Don’t force marketing messages at them, it will burn their trust.
Many people have no clue about what Social Media is and how it can benefit their business. This basic primer will help clear things up a lot.
In case you might have missed it, there is a lot going on today in what's been generally termed 'Social Media'. As you may know if you've read the other content on our site, we feel this isn't just a little trend, it's a major revolution. We foresaw this day coming, we just didn't think it would happen so quickly.
Let's start with a quick definition of what is making the web 'social'. If you look at when online conversations started, it was before the web itself. It started with Prodigy and CompuServ, and things like IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Then came AOL and chat rooms. It started with services that had forums and chat. When the web started forums were kind of slow to catch on, but it was inevitable. The web needed to grow up a bit first.
When the web started, in 1994, it wasn't social at all. All the sites were about telling or selling. Then came online reviews. Sites like Amazon invited people to write reviews of books and products in general. Amazon saw the power of social media very early on and they have been a leader ever since.
During all this many different web-based forum systems came into being. Most people would not know their names, and only a few like PHPBB (PHP Bulletin Board) are even moderatly well-know in web tech circles. But forums proliferated. They even generated a variety of 'super-forums' like YahooGroups. These enabled groups of people to gather, converse, and share info.
Amazon innovated in the area of user opinions and review further by letting you give a simple thumbs up or down for each review or comment. Now we had opinions of opinions. And it added even more value.
Then came the first wave of Social Networking. Yeah, I know it seems out of place on the timeline here, but that's because the initial social networking sites took a while to catch on, and they were eclipsed by later sites that got the formula right. These early sites were things like Plaxo, and Classmates.com, then came services like Friendster and Tribe. Those sites created a little stir, but it wasn't until several years later that MySpace came along that the true potential of social networking started to become apparent.
Next came blogging. People started sharing their thoughts and opinions in what were initially called web logs, and this got shortened to the term 'blogs'. Blogs weren't inherently social, but the early bloggers weren't just blogging, a few were creating platforms or applicaitons for blogging, and they added the ability for readers to comment. That is when blogs became a cornerstone of social media. These blogs generated micro-communities around the blog's topic(s) and the online 'social revolution' really started to pick up speed. Early blogging platforms included services like Blogger which was acquired by Google. Blogging really started to hit a chord when WordPress was born.
The blog wave created a whole group of new online publications or online magazines like TechCrunch, Engadget, and Mashable. These are now major media properties which originally started as simple blogs.
Then came content sharing. Sites like YouTube and Flickr allowed people to upload things and share them with friends and the whole world in general. Not only did they let you share content, they let your visitors comment on that content and rate it. This made YouTube. The fact that you could tell what other people were watching the most, and you could see what was rated highly, enabled people to filter through the mountains of junk and find the few gems. And the fact that people could register their own opinions of the content, was very engaging.
Another key area of content sharing was brought to the fore by link sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. These let you share interesting news stories, or web sites with friends and the general public.
All of these personal thoughts, and opinions, and comments, and ratings, and rankings, are a big part of social media, but they are not the whole picture. A big part of the picture is semi-hidden. It's the communities of people with common interests. This aspect is somewhat invisible because it's implied, but make no mistake, even though it's not as obivious or readily apparent, it IS a huge part of the magic of social media. Finding people like yourself, and sharing new discoveries is incredibly valuable. It's how things spread in the real world, and it's a huge part of the value online.
Lastly, I have to mention the newest wave in the social revolution, micro-blogging. Services like Twitter are taking the online conversation to a whole new level.
And there is more to 'social media' like online games, and virtual worlds, but this post was only meant to be a primer and I will leave those for another time.
What should you do?
First, I recommend you create a blog. Originally, blogs were mainly about sharing personal insights, and interesting stuff found around the web. Then it grew to become more communal, in that readers were invited to comment. This creates a dialog and is very engaging and creates a micro-community.
Next, I recommend you add forums. These will snowball as your posts, and your follower's posts and conversations attract even more followers. This is not easy, but it’s not extremely difficult either.
Whether you go the forum route or not, part of the benefit of a blog is that the search engines value new content very highly and it bumps your search rankings significantly. Any regularly updated or new content will boost your ranking in the search engine results.
If you have any questions, contact us.We're here to help.
Social Media is with us to stay, so how do you manage your brand message effectively? Control yourself.
You can't avoid the social media tsunami. Your prospects, your customers, your employees, and your detractors, all have access. In the past you could carefully control your brand message, yet even then a problem would occasionally crop up that would test the best PR skills. Today you have to step up to a much higher level.
Today's web society is used to an active conversation and it's not always civil. How you respond reveals a lot about your organization and its culture. Everything you say and do should be treated like a public conversation. It's a conversation that's right there in writing for all to read. You need tact, diplomacy, and restraint. You can't control what someone says to you or about you, but you can control how you respond.
You need policies. You need awareness. You need social skills.
In the past your brand could have more of a one-way message. Today, you need to be ready to respond effectively. You can't stop negativity, but you can control the conversation by how you respond.
In early 2008, Comcast realized they had a problem when people were posting negative info about their service online. Most brands would run for the hills, bury their head, or call their attorneys. Comcast tackled it head on and won. They put a team of customer service people on it. They contacted the disgruntled customers directly online, and they addressed their problems. This resulted in a lot of positive results. These customers who were willing to complain publicly, were also willing to report their newfound admiration for Comcast publicly.
Today, many other brands are monitoring what the public is saying and responding. They use various search tools to check on postings at places like twitter, and Facebook. They use those same tools to get a
And real-world, off-line efforts often make their way back to the online conversations too. GoDaddy recently started a campaign of proactively calling customers to see if they needed any help with anything. I got one of these calls myself. I was very impressed. They actually helped me trim some unneeded services and save some money! They also helped me figure out a feature that I had wanted to use, but did not have the time to explore. All at no charge. I was very impressed.
Then I noticed a major online personality posted a message on Twitter recounting the same experience. Now that's the way to handle customer service in the era of social media.
It sounds easy, writing a blog, but it’s not. There are some key tricks for doing it right. Here are the Ultimate Blogger’s 8 critical elements from Dean at CopyBlogger.
CopyBlogger.com is a great resource for bloggers. They really get it. I agree with almost everything they write.
What do they think is the main missing ingredient? Copywriting skills. Brian Clark says "Write in a strategic, persuasive, and compelling manner."
Like Ice Cream? Well, not exactly, but this video definitely helps explain the concept of Social Media.
It's not the best explanation, but it helps. The main message is that social media brings social behaviors like recommendations from friends to the online world. We all like to get and give recommendations, and the more we hear about something from others, the more likely we are to check it out. Also, social media allows niche interests to find each other. "Oh, you like pistachio ice cream too?"
If you still aren't sure about what Social Media is, and if you have 4 minutes to spare, this will help.
This is just a summation. For the original post and comments check this link to the Interactive Insights Group blog.
This list of 20 reasons is a great primer for anyone who’s trying to understand social media. It covers all of the key subject areas. These are just the headings. To read the full post click the link at the end. (I’ve underlined the bits that I think are most important.)
In case you might have missed it, there is a lot going on today in what's been generally termed 'Social Media'. As you may know if you've read the other content on our site, we feel this isn't just a little trend, it's a major revolution. We foresaw this day coming, we just didn't think it would happen so quickly.
You can't avoid the social media tsunami. Your prospects, your customers, your employees, and your detractors, all have access. In the past you could carefully control your brand message, yet even then a problem would occasionally crop up that would test the best PR skills. Today you have to step up to a much higher level. 
