Social Media — A Primer

Web 2.0, social media, folksonomy, convergence, social software, meta content, tags...tag clouds. There are a lot of buzz words out in the marketplace but not a lot of easily-grasped sense to go with them. Web 2.0 is about both speaking AND listening. The internet in Web 2.0 is a series of conversations had throughout the world. Engaging in social media can be a powerful way to market to people using social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. They are all there in these connected communities talking to each other, about each other and also about their experiences of the world. And like it or not, sometimes that includes you.

Social Marketing: Commitment and Caveats

Before injecting your brand into the world of social marketing, though, you must commit not only to the speaking part — Twittering and posting — but also the listening part, which is arguably more important. There are lots of channels to speak through but that also means a lot to listen to. And sustainability — sticking with the speaking and listening over an extended period of time — is the other big commitment you must make.

So how do you do all this without going crazy? First, on the speaking side, pace yourself. If you’re writing a blog, for example, it’s easy to get carried away in the early going. Don’t exhaust your life’s pent-up stories and opinions in the first month with daily entries. A regular schedule of posts is more important than high frequency. You don’t want to get blogged out.

Being efficient in your broadcast strategies also helps. Try to enter content in as few places as possible. You can set up for your Twitter entries, for instance, to be published automatically on your Facebook page. Just keep in mind that you will have to listen to each channel in which your content appears. So besides leveraging efficient broadcast tactics, build a careful strategy for listening before you actually start to speak.

And when you do get going, use the automatic notification tools that many social media offer, so you’ll know when you or your brand is mentioned. It’s just another way to streamline your workflow.

Social Media Choices and Channels

The three primary kinds of social media are personal narrative, images/photos and video. For our purposes today, there are three websites for media and one to act as an aggregator. It isn't necessary to use all media. Some are harder than others to execute well and some make more sense for some businesses than others. There is a logical escalation, though, and if you ease into your social media efforts you‘ll be better able to maintain a balance — and more important not leave a media channel neglected.

The following summaries of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube will help you assess each channel and give you some helpful tips on how you can leverage their potential.

Facebook: Facebook is a great place to start with social media. It offers a large base of users and a lot of ways to connect with people. There are opportunities through defined groups, who find you because of their expressed interests or because of their geographic proximity to you. And Facebook also has an active advertising network that allows for ad
placement based on any one of a number of targeting factors including geography, age, gender, education and interests.

The downside of Facebook is that it is a closed system, gated by a username and password. This means that Google cannot index Facebook pages. So people who are searching for you or your product won’t find your Facebook content based on a search engine query. There has been some recent movement towards breaking that barrier down with the creation of Facebook “widgets” that allow you to include a designated Facebook area on your company or brand website. In this scenario, specified kinds of your Facebook content is published automatically to that designated area of your company or brand site.

Facebook is also a great aggregation point. Internal applications are in place that route to your Twitter, Flickr and YouTube content through your Facebook page. This is important as it allows you to leverage the bandwidth and functionality of these sites to make all of your content available in one place. In doing so, it can save considerable programming and server expense versus building and hosting such functionality on your own site.

Twitter: Twitter is essentially a platform for broadcasting and conversation. It is often referred to as a micro-blog. There was a book written about blogging called 'Nobody cares what you ate for breakfast'...Twitter IS about what you ate for breakfast, with a picture of your eggs. Twitter is about small snippets, happenings and announcements.

Twitter is a great way to make statements, but it is also about conversation. People who follow you can directly message you and you can talk directly back to them. Twitter is also interesting because it gives you then opportunity to listen in on other public conversations. That is, you can set up searches that send a notification any time someone mentions your name, your product or really any keyword you choose, giving you the opportunity to see what people are saying and, if appropriate, respond.

One big benefit of Twitter is that public comments (tweets) are available to all and are accessible by search engines. It is useful to know, though, that Twitter only keeps three weeks of tweets. Which is to say, commitment and regularity, again, are key. Don’t count on a search engine picking up your tweeted eloquence forever. You need to keep adding fresh content.

Tweets can include web URLs, photographs, very short videos and references to Google Map coordinates...all of which can be used in creative ways. For example, a man named Eddie Izzard is running the length and width of the British Isle. It’s the equivalent of running a marathon every day to raise money for Comic Relief. He’s tweeting pictures of his route and a google map showing where he is at every stop (View Eddie’s tweets at http://bit.ly/rKdep).

Twitter feeds are easily routed through the Status function of your Facebook page, allowing you to enter your content once and get it to two different destinations. I would go so far as to say that you should never enter your status in Facebook. Always route it from Twitter. Twitter, like Facebook, also offers a widget, which can enable sharing of content on your website, but don't let it fall silent. You don’t want to designate a Twitter area on your site, then watch it appear as an empty hole.

Flickr: Flickr is an online photo gallery. It differs from the photo galleries in Facebook or images entered in Twitter in one very important way: Metadata. Metadata is information added to the photograph, usually in text form, that connects information to the photograph. Metadata is referred to as 'tags' and it allows you to qualify the visual image by naming the people in the image, or the location of the subject or even a story about the image. Tags are a huge addition to the photograph because they allow your photographs to be searched by humans and by search engines. The crucial value of Flickr is that it becomes an external source that points into your website and your world in a manner that is findable by a wide range of seekers.

Flickr allows for comments and, like all the other channels, requires some measure of attention. If a consumer says something about one of your Flickr photos, you need to read it and assess if and how to use that information. Like Facebook and Twitter, the content you put in Flickr can be reused on your website. Flickr won't take the place of the static images designed into your web pages, but it can be a great way to include slide shows or images stored on your site with little effort.

YouTube: YouTube is Flickr for video. I am sure they would disagree, but in truth, that is essentially what it is. YouTube allows users to upload video to an account and attach searchable tags and descriptive text to each video.

YouTube has more traffic than Flickr, but its user interface is also less focused. The site likes to suggest other 'similar' videos that the consumer might like based on tags, names and descriptive data. Unfortunately, this means that a consumer watching your video on the YouTube site could easily wander off to other things and not come back to your messaging.

The good news is that, even more so than Flickr, YouTube encourages you to embed your hosted video on your site and gives you a lot of control over how it is displayed. This is actually even more beneficial than Flickr's assistance. Video is harder to host and display. So by leveraging YouTube's technology, you can add video to your site at no expense and have virtually unlimited bandwidth powering it. So when you hit that viral video home run, millions of people can be watching it at the same time without affecting your servers.

Also, like the tags associated with Flickr content, the meta information you add to a YouTube video points back to your site in a manner that you control and the search engines approve of because it is a qualified association, so to speak. Which is to say, it’s not from some bogus link farm trying to game the Google system.

The downside of video is that doing it well is not only time and resource intensive, it is not easy to execute well. If you aim for, say, a campy feel for your video and miss the mark, you will end up looking like you missed the clue train in a big way.

This may all seem like a lot of work and, in fact, it can be. The potential pay-off is huge, though, and with proper planning and a willingness to stay engaged in your social media conversations, you can achieve great results. The biggest pay-off is the chance to hear from your customers, to hear about what they think, what they need and what they want. If you can hear that, really HEAR them and respond appropriately, it will build your brand and make the effort all worth it.

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