Thirty years ago, in their groundbreaking book, Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout identified a major problem for professional marketers. It has only gotten worse since then. The modern, Westernized cultural landscape is completely oversaturated with marketing messages. Every direction we turn, we are bombarded by new opportunities to buy and entreaties to PAY ATTENTION. As a consequence, jaded consumers are tuning out the ever-present marketing messages. The advent of Social Media, with its emphasis on user participation, gives marketers a golden opportunity to become relevant to their target market through the development of authentic, interactive relationships.

What is Social Media?
Social Media is all the rage right now. The press is in love with it, companies everywhere are jumping on the bandwagon, and there are literally thousands of seminars and blog articles telling people how to get involved. Thanks, by the way, for reading mine.

But what, exactly, is social media? As most people define it, social media is a category of web sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. This includes include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, microblogging sites like Twitter and Plurk, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

The reason it’s so popular is that, with social media, the internet has finally fulfilled its promise of making everyone authors. Now, with very little effort or investment, ordinary people can publish their thoughts, share their opinions, and generally bore and annoy a lot more people than they ever could before. Needless to say that a lot of what’s out there is a complete waste of time.

Businesses both love and hate social media. For the companies that are savvy at it, social media represents an opportunity to turn their brand advocates loose on the world. If your target market is the group of people that has fallen in love with social media (mostly young folks, though that’s changing, especially with Facebook and LinkedIn), you can create real buzz quickly for new marketing initiatives. But, you have to be careful: any sort of bad PR travels at incredibly fast speeds. This is why so many companies focus their social media efforts on customer service and fighting fires.

Why Companies Need to Understand Social Media

1. Old media is no longer very effective. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI. 90% of viewers who can skip commercials do so.
2. Social Media is not just “for the kids.” The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55–65 year old females.
3. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences.
4. You don’t control the message. There are 200,000,000 blogs, and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
5. 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
6. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web.
7. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements.

Bonus fact: 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find new employees. Your homework is to get on LinkedIn if you aren’t already.

Developing a Social Media Strategy
The question is: why should a business be involved with social media? As with any marketing initiative, it’s important to know the goal before jumping into the deep end. Some companies may want to increase their customer base, generate leads, or drive sales. Others are out to build awareness, educate customers, reach new channels of customers, or improve internal communication. You and your clients may have different reasons to get involved with social media. That’s okay. The important thing is to know what you want to get out of it before you jump in head first.

Today’s Key Social Media Tools
There are literally thousands of social media tools out there, and new ones are being created every single day. No person and no business can participate in them all, nor should anyone try. Undoubtedly, sooner rather than later, there will be some extremely popular new social media category in years to come. For now, however, there are really only four types of social media tools that really matter. I’m going to briefly describe each one and how they can be used in a modern marketing strategy. When using any of these, however, it’s important to remember that successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Social Networking
Defined: Social networking sites focus on building online communities of connected people. Normally these are people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, though there are constant jokes about the difference between your online “friends” and those in the real world. These sites include MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Social Bookmarking
Defined: Social Bookmarking a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of tags. This tagging is the process by which multiple users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content.

Most social bookmark services enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Microblogging
Defined: Though there are other microblogging sites out there, Twitter is the social media tool of the moment. Featuring 140-character “tweets”, the value is not in telling everyone what you had for lunch, but in providing valuable content for your followers. This establishes you and your company as experts in your field and can grow your audience very quickly.

Blogging
Defined: A blog is a type of web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. You’re reading a blog right now.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Five Keys to Social Media for Business

1. Know your brand and market: As with every other business and marketing initiative, it is critical to understand who you are and who your target market is. You cannot be all things to all people; if you try, you will only water down your brand and become irrelevant. Pick a niche and own it.

    
2. Focus on great content: In addition to creating your own content through blogs, one of the most valuable services you can provide is to be a filter for the information overload your prospects, customers and network are feeling. By focusing on great content that others in your niche have created, your social media can become that valuable filter for pointing out the best content. Do this consistently, and you will earn a reputation as a valuable and trusted expert.

    
3. Engage with your public: Remember, we’re talking about social media. The nature of the medium means that you want to interact like a real person, not like a robot (or algorithm). One of the best ways to get engaged with those you follow is to join conversations where appropriate and offer answers and suggestions. Social media, when done right, is about conversations, not messages from a loudspeaker. Conversations are always two ways. If you’re not interacting with people, you’re not going to move the needle.

    
4. Give it some personality: Don’t speak with an authoritarian corporate voice. Don’t sound like your company’s web site or press releases. When blogging, it is critical to post under a specific author’s name and to have that author’s voice come through. And that author should post from her experience. The best posts comes from first-hand information. So use case studies, write in the first person (eg, use “I”), tell your readers how you solved a particular problem, etc. It lets readers know that you know what you’re talking about; hence, you become an authority voice in your niche.

    
5. Cross-Pollinate: Taking content that appears in one form and twisting it in ways that make it more available in a another, or to another audience, is one of the secrets to success in this overcommunicated marketing world. When you hold an event to present information you can promote the event in various social media networks and then capture that event and post the audio to your podcast, slides to Slideshare, and transcript as a free report for download. You can string 5 blog posts together and make them available as a workshop handout or a bonus for your LinkedIn group. Or, you can be like me and take your notes from a guest lecture at a local college and create a blog post out of it.

   

Never look at any content as a single use, single medium, act.
    

Image by D'Arcy Norman and used under the Creative Commons license.