Tips for Entering the World of Social Media. =Important read=
Tips for Entering the World of Social Media.
Source: http://content.opportunityknocks.org/info~se-entering-social-media.php
Navigating through social networks is a whole lot more than setting up a profile on a social network or writing a blog post. Here are a few things to consider when entering the world of social media.
I. Social Networks - Giving the Community a Voice, Listening, Interacting and Engaging
Success within Social Media relies on the same concepts of any good relationship. The key is a two way open dialog. You must introduce yourself, converse, and listen.
Within the blogosphere, the best way to get noticed or to make an introduction is to first get to know who you want to know you.
The Internet has developed into a wonderful landscape of opportunity for those who love to watch and track the behavior of others and professionals who strategically target consumers based on their behavior. There are several search tools, discovery sites, and social book marking tools to find people with specific interests.
The first rule is to give the community a voice and to listen. Part of letting them know that you are listening is to respond to what they are saying. This can be achieved through comments on sites or by commenting on your own site and linking to another.
Your audience will keep coming back to your site for more if:
You have positioned yourself as an expert in an area of interest
Your ideas are on the cutting edge
You provide entertainment, education, or inspiration
You've built a community that is able to interact and contribute their own ideas and thoughts.
II. Social Networks are Leading the Trends in Marketing, Sales, Public Relations and Customer Service
"You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit." - Harry Truman
Word of Mouth marketing is rallying the right people to influence their peers to respond in a certain way, tipping the scales in the favor of a product or service.
The key is to find the right target audience, the ones that have the most influence over others. It is no longer about marketing your message to the masses, but to the select group that matters.
The trick is to be authentic and real in your message and what you deliver. This emerging way of marketing means giving control to your fans to create your market place, which means you need to provide a solution that creates raving fans.
This trend began with Amazon.com's revolutionary idea of gathering data on the behavior of their consumers in order to sell more books. Each time you make a purchase on Amazon.com, it will suggest to you other things that might be of interest to you based on what other consumers with similar interests have purchased.
This idea has grown into what we see today in social media such as services like del.icio.us. The service shows you the accounts of others that have saved the same url as you have, implying that you may be interested in other urls that person has saved.
Google's efforts to index everything on the web allowed for voices to be heard freely. Google works endlessly developing more and more tools that provide a platform for collaboration across the globe.
Another major player that has changed the marketplace is eBay allowing for a peer to peer marketplace on a massive scale.
III. Making Your Message Viral
As already discussed in the previous section, the keys to making your message viral are:
It must entertain, educate, and inspire
It must start with the right audience that will find value in the message and have the necessary connections
So, here are the steps needed to run a successful campaign:
Step 1 - Research, Listen and Watch. You must know who your target audience is, what they know already, what they need to know in order to support your efforts, and what is important to them.
Step 2 - Participate in Order to Build Relationships. Do not jump in with a pitch. People are tired of being sold to. They trust their peers and network connections and turn to them for advice and suggestions. However, keep in mind that it is important not only to become part of the social connection, but to do so sincerely. The person representing your message must already be connected within the network or infiltrate it mostly because of sincere common interests.
Step 3 - Engage, Entertain, Educate and Inspire. How to do this depends on what you have learned about the values of your target audience. You may want highly produced videos. You may want user-generated clips. You may want rambling words. You may want a precise speech. Each situation should be treated in each unique way, not a one size fits all.
Step 4 - Listen, Measure, and Respond Accordingly. Whether you were looking for a sales or a call to action, you lost a significant amount of influence if you are not using the tools that are readily available to measure the response to your campaign. What should you measure? Everything you can. Each statistic has value in how you should follow up, what worked, what didn't and so forth. Do not rely on an agency to tell you how things should work based on the statistics they have gathered, they may not be relevant to your group.
IV. Increasing the Exposure
Word of Mouth/Viral Marketing is only as good as the reach. you can create the most creative, inspiring, entertaining concept, only for it to 'collect dust'.
Success relies on the right people with the right connections and the right credibility to be inspired to spread the word.
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, has a great example. Most people know the story of Paul Revere's ride that told "the British are coming." Great example of word of mouth/viral marketing; But, have you ever heard the name William Dawes?
At the same time that Revere began his ride north and west of Boston, a fellow revolutionary, a tanner, by the name of William Dawes - set out on the same urgent errand, working his way to Lexington via the towns west of Boston. He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. but Dawes' ride didn't set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren't alerted. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through - Waltham - fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro-British community. It wasn't. The people of Waltham just didn't find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word-of-mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn't. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?
The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. Revere's news tipped and Dawe's didn't because of the differences between the two men.
So how do you find the rare people you need to find to make your concept 'tip'? By helping them find you through their natural behavior using:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - This is how a page is ranked during a search result. This is an industry that stands alone with many complex methodologies. However, active participation in social media, which includes updated content and links throughout the web, is an excellent way to increase exposure throughout the web as well as raise your ranks in the search engine war.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS Feeds) - RSS feeds are a way to filter in content from blogs, news sites, and other forms of online media. Many people have already begun to subscribe to specific RSS feeds on the topics they want to know about. It is important to understand RSS and how it works to ensure your message can get into that filter.
TAGS - Tags are still evolving as a way to receive and organize the unlimited amount of information, but they are a way for like minded people to share information across the web.
V. Know How You Are Going to Respond Before You Need to Respond
The web has opened the portal to a global dialog. Many early adopters have already started participating. The greatest challenges faced at this time is organizing all of this information and understanding the ripple affect of someone's 'voice'. If a concerned citizen decides to blog about politics, government, or the customer service he received from a company recently, what affect will that have?
According to Chaos Theory, seemingly irrelevant actions can be the cause of major events.
Participating in the ongoing online dialog should not be considered an option for an individual that is trying to build a business or a reputation; It should be a top priority, even if you are only monitoring discussions that might come up about you, your competitors or your industry. With so much noise out there, the best way to monitor is to build a network of friends that are participating in the conversation and will alert you when your attention is needed. The best way not to lose control of a brand image is to participate in the conversation, and to lead an guide the dialog.
SOURCE: http://content.opportunityknocks.org/info~se-entering-social-media.php
Sherry Heyl
Sherry Heyl is the CEO and Idealist for What a Concept, the first social media agency in the Southeast. Her responsibilities include business development and collaborating with clients to develop online communities of raving fans by integrating streaming video, blogs, podcasts, RSS, and virtual worlds into communication plans for B2B, B2C, Non-profit and Higher Education organizations. Sherry has been recognized as a thought leader in social and collaborative technologies and trends through invitations to speak for many varied associations, conferences, and private events.
She was a key organizer of SoCon07, the first Social Media un-conference in Metro Atlanta and is currently planning SoCon08. Sherry sits on the board of the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum as the Programs Director, the board AiMA leading Association Partnerships and the National Advisory Board for KSU Communication Department. Sherry was a 2007 Nominee for the Women in Technology Woman of the Year Award. Sherry is a graduate of Florida State University with undergraduate degrees in Marketing and Creative Writing.
www.empoweringconcepts.net sherryheyl@gmail.com
Source: http://content.opportunityknocks.org/info~se-entering-social-media.php
Navigating through social networks is a whole lot more than setting up a profile on a social network or writing a blog post. Here are a few things to consider when entering the world of social media.
I. Social Networks - Giving the Community a Voice, Listening, Interacting and Engaging
Success within Social Media relies on the same concepts of any good relationship. The key is a two way open dialog. You must introduce yourself, converse, and listen.
Within the blogosphere, the best way to get noticed or to make an introduction is to first get to know who you want to know you.
The Internet has developed into a wonderful landscape of opportunity for those who love to watch and track the behavior of others and professionals who strategically target consumers based on their behavior. There are several search tools, discovery sites, and social book marking tools to find people with specific interests.
The first rule is to give the community a voice and to listen. Part of letting them know that you are listening is to respond to what they are saying. This can be achieved through comments on sites or by commenting on your own site and linking to another.
Your audience will keep coming back to your site for more if:
You have positioned yourself as an expert in an area of interest
Your ideas are on the cutting edge
You provide entertainment, education, or inspiration
You've built a community that is able to interact and contribute their own ideas and thoughts.
II. Social Networks are Leading the Trends in Marketing, Sales, Public Relations and Customer Service
"You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit." - Harry Truman
Word of Mouth marketing is rallying the right people to influence their peers to respond in a certain way, tipping the scales in the favor of a product or service.
The key is to find the right target audience, the ones that have the most influence over others. It is no longer about marketing your message to the masses, but to the select group that matters.
The trick is to be authentic and real in your message and what you deliver. This emerging way of marketing means giving control to your fans to create your market place, which means you need to provide a solution that creates raving fans.
This trend began with Amazon.com's revolutionary idea of gathering data on the behavior of their consumers in order to sell more books. Each time you make a purchase on Amazon.com, it will suggest to you other things that might be of interest to you based on what other consumers with similar interests have purchased.
This idea has grown into what we see today in social media such as services like del.icio.us. The service shows you the accounts of others that have saved the same url as you have, implying that you may be interested in other urls that person has saved.
Google's efforts to index everything on the web allowed for voices to be heard freely. Google works endlessly developing more and more tools that provide a platform for collaboration across the globe.
Another major player that has changed the marketplace is eBay allowing for a peer to peer marketplace on a massive scale.
III. Making Your Message Viral
As already discussed in the previous section, the keys to making your message viral are:
It must entertain, educate, and inspire
It must start with the right audience that will find value in the message and have the necessary connections
So, here are the steps needed to run a successful campaign:
Step 1 - Research, Listen and Watch. You must know who your target audience is, what they know already, what they need to know in order to support your efforts, and what is important to them.
Step 2 - Participate in Order to Build Relationships. Do not jump in with a pitch. People are tired of being sold to. They trust their peers and network connections and turn to them for advice and suggestions. However, keep in mind that it is important not only to become part of the social connection, but to do so sincerely. The person representing your message must already be connected within the network or infiltrate it mostly because of sincere common interests.
Step 3 - Engage, Entertain, Educate and Inspire. How to do this depends on what you have learned about the values of your target audience. You may want highly produced videos. You may want user-generated clips. You may want rambling words. You may want a precise speech. Each situation should be treated in each unique way, not a one size fits all.
Step 4 - Listen, Measure, and Respond Accordingly. Whether you were looking for a sales or a call to action, you lost a significant amount of influence if you are not using the tools that are readily available to measure the response to your campaign. What should you measure? Everything you can. Each statistic has value in how you should follow up, what worked, what didn't and so forth. Do not rely on an agency to tell you how things should work based on the statistics they have gathered, they may not be relevant to your group.
IV. Increasing the Exposure
Word of Mouth/Viral Marketing is only as good as the reach. you can create the most creative, inspiring, entertaining concept, only for it to 'collect dust'.
Success relies on the right people with the right connections and the right credibility to be inspired to spread the word.
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, has a great example. Most people know the story of Paul Revere's ride that told "the British are coming." Great example of word of mouth/viral marketing; But, have you ever heard the name William Dawes?
At the same time that Revere began his ride north and west of Boston, a fellow revolutionary, a tanner, by the name of William Dawes - set out on the same urgent errand, working his way to Lexington via the towns west of Boston. He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. but Dawes' ride didn't set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren't alerted. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through - Waltham - fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro-British community. It wasn't. The people of Waltham just didn't find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word-of-mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn't. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?
The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. Revere's news tipped and Dawe's didn't because of the differences between the two men.
So how do you find the rare people you need to find to make your concept 'tip'? By helping them find you through their natural behavior using:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - This is how a page is ranked during a search result. This is an industry that stands alone with many complex methodologies. However, active participation in social media, which includes updated content and links throughout the web, is an excellent way to increase exposure throughout the web as well as raise your ranks in the search engine war.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS Feeds) - RSS feeds are a way to filter in content from blogs, news sites, and other forms of online media. Many people have already begun to subscribe to specific RSS feeds on the topics they want to know about. It is important to understand RSS and how it works to ensure your message can get into that filter.
TAGS - Tags are still evolving as a way to receive and organize the unlimited amount of information, but they are a way for like minded people to share information across the web.
V. Know How You Are Going to Respond Before You Need to Respond
The web has opened the portal to a global dialog. Many early adopters have already started participating. The greatest challenges faced at this time is organizing all of this information and understanding the ripple affect of someone's 'voice'. If a concerned citizen decides to blog about politics, government, or the customer service he received from a company recently, what affect will that have?
According to Chaos Theory, seemingly irrelevant actions can be the cause of major events.
Participating in the ongoing online dialog should not be considered an option for an individual that is trying to build a business or a reputation; It should be a top priority, even if you are only monitoring discussions that might come up about you, your competitors or your industry. With so much noise out there, the best way to monitor is to build a network of friends that are participating in the conversation and will alert you when your attention is needed. The best way not to lose control of a brand image is to participate in the conversation, and to lead an guide the dialog.
SOURCE: http://content.opportunityknocks.org/info~se-entering-social-media.php
Sherry Heyl
Sherry Heyl is the CEO and Idealist for What a Concept, the first social media agency in the Southeast. Her responsibilities include business development and collaborating with clients to develop online communities of raving fans by integrating streaming video, blogs, podcasts, RSS, and virtual worlds into communication plans for B2B, B2C, Non-profit and Higher Education organizations. Sherry has been recognized as a thought leader in social and collaborative technologies and trends through invitations to speak for many varied associations, conferences, and private events.
She was a key organizer of SoCon07, the first Social Media un-conference in Metro Atlanta and is currently planning SoCon08. Sherry sits on the board of the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum as the Programs Director, the board AiMA leading Association Partnerships and the National Advisory Board for KSU Communication Department. Sherry was a 2007 Nominee for the Women in Technology Woman of the Year Award. Sherry is a graduate of Florida State University with undergraduate degrees in Marketing and Creative Writing.
www.empoweringconcepts.net sherryheyl@gmail.com
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