The 4 Customer Types of Social Media

Happy 2009. Okay. Now that we got that over with.. Let’s dive into something of more importance… Social Media Marketing for your Small Business! YAY!

Jason Baer has a great post over at Convince and Convert called the 7 Critical Elements of Your Social Media Strategy. The post is brilliant for the small business owner wanting to get more involved in social media.

Why is his post brilliant?

It talks more about the internal business development than what TOOLS you should be using.

I am all for using Twitter, Plaxo, Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIN but if you don’t have the traditional elements of your company connected… you are going to fail.

In the post he lists the third step in the seven step process as: Where is the Audience Cyclically? This explains that there are four different relationship patterns inherent in the promotion of your company.

Awareness: Maybe heard of you.

Interest: Heard of you. Visited your Site. No Purchases

Action: Made a single purchase

Advocacy: Raving Brand Lunatics. (Jackpot)

I decided to re-name them and go over how they fit into the overall social media marketing strategy.

Jason suggested that you should only pick two of the 4 Customer Profiles listed above when you are planning your social media strategy. I can agree with the fact that two is more than enough but I would suggest picking only one for your social media marketing strategy.

Why Pick Only One?

If you have planned your SM strategy correctly it is a part of your overall marketing strategy. You only have a limited amount of time and resources to fully promote your business. If you can use SM marketing to only target ONE of the groups… the strategy will be stronger and more effective.

This is especially true for beginners in the world of social media. One is enough for now.

Next up we will be talking about how to target each of the groups.

Social Media of 2009 – Keep An Open Mind

I am always try to browse 123 Social Media and there was a great post by Barry Hurd called Social Media Benefits – Marketing Comes With a Warning Label. In the post Barry talks about the disconnect between Customer Engagement and Customer Service in the graph shown on this page. There is also a huge dissconnect between business owners and the use of social media marketing.

The entire graph makes a lot of sense except for the bottom of the graph where Customer Service is listed at 17.5%.

We could go into an entire post about the benefits of Social Media to customer service but I wanted to focus on what Barry was talking about in his post.

The Concept of Having An Open Mind with Social Media

As you can tell by the graph, customer engagement is the top reason why Marketing Executives would use Social Media Marketing. I have been preaching this ever since I started my blog. Social Media is very much a “brand development” tool for small business. It is hard to use Social Media for lead generation sources (though it is starting to shift towards the positive on this subject).

As we enter 2009, marketers of all shapes and sizes need to be more open to the idea of adding an element of social media into their marketing mix. With the Internet growing and sites like Facebook and Myspace churning millions upon millions of people daily, it is the time to start focusing on using this medium of promotion.

So why is it hard for marketers to have an open mind about social media?

It isn’t fully explained!

Marketers and Social Media Mavens need to work together in order to focus on a workable model for ROI and brand development on the Internet. Both parties need an open mind to work together in order to keep the “Integrity” of the tool while building a tangible benefit.

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Social Media Trends of 2009

I found this via Jon at Spatially Relevant.

Trendsspotting had a great post on Christmas eve called Influencers, Predictions slides collection. Issue 1. Social Media Trends 2009. You can view the Slideshare

I wanted to re-post and share it because it is a wonderful breakdown of the future of social media.

Social Media Marketing is about Emotion not Automation

Doug Karr at the Marketing Tech Blog has a post this morning called You Know Your a Smippy When…

Before we get started into the Smippy world. I’ve known Doug for quite awhile and would count him as THE one that helped me get into social media specifically blogging. I pretty much take everything Doug says as fact and trust his judgment without fault. He is def. one of my SM mentors.

Part of his post is a rebuttal against my Twitter Auto DM Petition.

Now… I am not going to take offense to the Smippy comment. I actually think it is pretty hilarious. The beauty of social media is that you can freely express your opinions and other people have the right to disagree.

There is one thing I am NOT against and that is social media marketing. My company’s future is built off the concept that you can use social media for brand exposure, as well as, increased sales. Though I think there is a fine line with taking a marketing medium and bastardizing it by setting up direct responses without any regards to the person on the other end.

I’m going to cite an article by Seth Godin called  The Rapid Growth (and destruction) and Growth of Marketing.

Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.

The business owners and marketers that were focused in mass marketing in the past try to systematize processes, “How can we take this tool and automate it to get the most BANG for the BUCK?” When you use Twitter Auto DMs you are not respecting the fact that I chose to follow you. I don’t want to know about your new e-book. I will find it on my own if you were that compelling to follow in the first place.

Any product that automates social media tools is slowly sucking the personality out of your brand (personal or corporate). You cannot try and automate a tool that is rooted in permission based marketing.

If you aren’t taking the time to personally thank people for following you…

Aren’t you just collecting another mailing list?

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My Twitter Auto DM Petition. Sign up!

I am not a huge fan of Auto DMs. To be honest with you I hate them. There are a few times when Auto DMs on Twitter should be used but most of the time the answer is no. I wanted to start a Twitter Auto DM petition.

Reasons Why You Would Sign

1. You find Auto DMs completely void of personality.

2. You find Auto DMs are not genuine.

3. You just dislike Auto DMs in general.

Sign below in the comment form if you dislike Auto DMs. Steal the logo and put it on your page. Spread the wealth. Spread the info.

Or if you completely disagree with what WE are doing..

That works too.

Sign below in the comment form.

Two Rules of the New Web: Be Simple and Be Sticky

Mark Evans had a great blog a couple of days ago called Is Anyone Paying Attention? Talk about some great everyday life visuals to relate to the transitioning of the web from cluttered to de-cluttered. I’m pretty sure I either just made up the term “de-cluttered” or someone said it to me sometime. All of that aside, Mark has a line in his post that was funny and hit me hard at the same time.

The lack of attention is troubling but, ironically, no one seems to be paying much attention to it.

The millennial generation is slowly seeping into the workforce and using productivity tools more often than not. Mark was right when he said online services and websites have one shot to get the attention of the over-used and over-supplied public.

You have ONE shot. ONE.. Numero UNO. Single.

Just one shot to catch the attention of the consuming public. Simple and Sticky. That’s our creed. That should be everyones creed.

Make your website as simple as you possibly can. Use good, smart design to untangle the maze of sales content and information you want to display and put up what gets attention. You have less than 10 seconds to capute MY attention.

Are you going to stick me to a message or push me towards a competitor?

20 Things We Have Learned from Blogging

Ben Barden over at the Top Ten Blog Tips has a genius post about the 10 Things I’ve Learned About Blogging.First off, Ben has a great blog where he posts the top ten reasons for anything pretaining to social media. I wanted to take the 10 things he has learned from actually blogging and add another 10 from my personal list. I have also given my thoughts to some of his top ten. So let’s get this partayyyyy started.

Ben’s Top 10 Things He Has Learned from Blogging

1. You Need to Choose a Topic You Know and Like. (This is number one)

2. You need to enjoy Writing. (You need to enjoy thought promotion and learning. I hated writing before I started blogging. Just believe in what you are writing about)

3. You don’t have to reply to every comment individually. (You should try and comment as much as you can but I agree with not having to do it ALWAYS)

4. You shouldn’t rely too heavily on one traffic source.

5. You shouldn’t worry about a high bounce rate.

6. You don’t usually get links by asking for them.

7. You don’t launch a forum when you have very few readers.(I don’t know why you would even think about a forum haha. )

8. Your posts need to be different

9. You can waste a lot of time on social networking sites.

10. You’ll meet some great people. (Amen)

Great tips and I suggest you go and read, subscribe, and learn from Ben.

My Top 10 Things I Have Learned from Blogging

1. Always Try and email the people who comment on your posts.

2. Do more than the other guy. Hustle. Hustle Hustle
If you need to wake up 30 mins earlier so that you can finish a blog post. Do it. If you need to stay 30 mins after work to finish up a project because you wrote a blog during the day. Do it. If you can’t handle the concept of spending some time on social media. Don’t do it.

3. You should always retweet and share posts you loved!

4. Use Google Alerts for content ideas. It has worked for me numerous times.

5. Use Niche-Geographic based social networks. I use Smaller Indiana. This helps with local. community support.

6. Get out into the community and network offline. It will help build further support

7. You should always put your blog URL on your business card and email signature.

8. Always measure the time you are spending online. If the return is not there… switch up your strategy.

I keep a paper where I measure the time I have spent online. I take that and relate it to sales growth.

9. Do not focus too intently on content. Get the thing written and change it later.

10. Video Blogs spice up a traditional blog. Try one ever so often.

Controlling Word of Mouth Marketing Using Social Media

A good friend of mine, Hazel Walker over at the Networking Strategist has a great post called Word of Mouth is Always Working. If you read my blog pretty regularly you know that I am a huge fan of two things:

1. word of mouth marketing

2. social media marketing.

There is one point I wanted to take out of Hazel’s blog post and relate it to social media and using social media for brand development. From Hazel’s blog:

“WOM is the most dangerous form of marketing, in that you cannot control people. They may carry the wrong message or a negative message.”

As a social media marketing and design company we try to focus on building messages that can be carried or echoed across many different types of people (you know…something that sticks!). The beautiful thing about social media marketing and the Internet is that you CAN control word of mouth marketing to an extent. Let me step you through a scenario. For sake of argument I will use XYZ company as an example.

Let’s say XYZ decided to create a website for a group of people out of state. Let’s say the project didn’t go so well because of a lack of management on both sides of the issue. We all make mistakes right? They finished up the project and the client decides to spread a “virus” across the channels or the Internet and through their friends:

“XYZ company is the worst to work with! They didn’t even hold our hand and pat us on the head because we took time out of our day to deal with them!”

The truth of the matter? Even though XYZ did an excellent job in saving the project and pushing through to try and satisfy the client… they still spread the “virus.”

The beautiful thing? The client’s friends who are INFECTED will get online and search for XYZ… guess what will come up? Everything good. If you are spending time investing into activity on the Internet, you will find that your content, your best clients content, and your use of social media will hit the search engines first (at least that is what we have found).

Social media marketing is very much rooted in the development of BRAND. If you can figure out how to balance your social media use it will be worth it in the long run. Nothing dissapears on the Internet.

Have you searched for what people are saying about your company?

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Getting Companies to Buy the “Social Idea”

What An Exciting Time! My company Brandswag had it’s 2009 Planning Meeting this weekend at our offices in Indianapolis. It was fun to have everyone together to talk about growing the business. One of the topics of conversation was the process of selling social media marketing to corporate America. Another way to look at it: How do you sell the idea of “viral/echo” marketing to companies between $10-$150 million?

Amazingly Seth Godin had a blog post recently called Selling Ideas to a Big Company. Seth always seems to save the day when I am debating something important like social media marketing to corporate America. In the post Seth talks about two things you HAVE to HAVE in order to sell an idea to BIG business.

1. They have to be in the business of buying ideas.

2. They have to trust you.

If there was one thing I took from the post it was the fact that…“if you have an idea for a company that doesn’t know how to buy it, move on. And if you want to be in the business of selling ideas, find an industry that has experience buying those ideas.”

The top two reasons are not debatable when it comes to selling social media to corporate America. They have to believe in the concept of social media marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. They also have to trust you as a social media advocate or “trust agent.” (You can hit me later for using coined terms)

You cannot force the idea of adding in social strategy to an overall marketing plan. If you have to CONVINCE someone to use social media….

they will not.

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Social Media of 2009: Cash Is King Not Content

I love predictions. Plain and Simple.

I find it fascinating when they are dead on and just as fascinating when they miss the target by a mile. Jason Falls wrote a post this morning called Social Media Predictions of 2009. Jason has been asked to be involved in a collaborative effort to try and predict what social media will look like in 2009. He is joined with the likes of Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Ann Handley, and Jeremiah Owyang. There are two quotes I wanted to touch on and then give my own predictions of 2009.

Chris Brogan: “Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn’t come the way people thought it would.”

Charlene Li: “The movement is rooted in a desire to have quality, not quantity, as people cocoon in the face of the economic crisis.”

The two quotes above pretty much explain what I believe 2009 will look like to the social media environment. There were a couple of quotes sprinkled in and out of the pdf doc that explained the same concept.

Social Media of 2009: Smaller/Niche and NOT Hemorrhaging Cash

Cash is King Not Content.

I have always been dumbfounded that some social media companies can be valued at billions of dollars and only be hitting a hundred million in revenue. Social Media of 2009 will be forced to figure out a revenue model or close their doors… even IF they have 10-50 million people on the site. Content and community development will always be key but it will not keep salaries paid and servers running. Cash will be king in 2009 not content.

We will see social sites shrink and become more niche based because of the tightening of development funds in the market. Ning developed a brilliant system for niche social networks. I expect them to grow larger in 2009.

I am looking forward to 2009 being a great year in the social media marketing and social media development world. Keep your heads up and push forward. We have a great tool on our hands that is changing the world.

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