Leverage Social Media

Let’s start simple.

When I’m working with a client, one of the key questions I ask is Where do you want to be 12 months from now?

It’s a critical question to consider before embarking on all the effort and money that will be set in play. Remember, in a social media/marketing strategy you’re not just paying Google for click-through ads each month. You’re directly involving yourself, your time and your money by building an ongoing relationship with your web traffic.

For a very small business, it’s usually more than enough to say we’ll start blogging consistently, build an audience and focus on all the tasks necessary to build a workflow of content and enroll others in the company to help. The goal being to build traffic and learn the ropes of blogging and engaging in conversation with other bloggers and your audience. I’ve seen this process work so well that many smaller businesses, typically in the services area, no longer need to worry every month about expensive SEO efforts. Blogging done right (content, connections and conversation) brings about a change in the way you interact with your customers versus buying advertisement to throw at them, hoping something will stick.

Of course, this is a simple strategy for smaller businesses that everyone seems to be climbing on board with these days - as well they should, in my opinion. People expect more than ‘billboard’-looking websites that haven’t been updated in months (or years, in some cases).

But what about a larger business, especially in the enterprise class? How do you develop social media/marketing strategies that leverage your efforts into business growth and keep you ahead of the competition?

Or, what if you have an idea for a start-up business that is social media/community-related? How would you go about doing that in a way that is not simply ‘yet another social network’ site?

How do you keep your social media effort alive and encourage those you bring along to stay with your business?

We’ll talk about these ideas in the next article. Stay tuned …

Tom

As I prepare for my panel at SXSW 2008 I decided to do some short video interviews with other professionals in Austin that are involved with social marketing strategies. Dave Evans from www.Digital-VooDoo.com and I where speaking this week about social media metrics so I asked him about doing a short podcast on this.
He makes some excellent points about how you can use what you know from traditional marketing metrics as a starting point for capturing and understanding metrics related to your social media efforts. It’s all about the conversation and that’ a great place to start.
Tom

PS the SXSW Panel I’m moderating is Saturday at 5pm.
So here’s Dave …