Social Media Training

How to Integrate Social Media into Your Marketing -- Part 2

Part two in a series of two. Read Part 1 here.

Social media can, and should, change the way you interact with your customers. But few companies can quickly transform their marketing the way a social media might require.

In the interim, integrating social media with existing marketing programs gives your business two valuable propositions: 1) additional support for your traditional marketing programs; 2) opportunities to measure social media effectiveness alongside your other familiar marketing efforts.

In the last installment, we considered how social media fits into your search and web presence marketing. Now we look at integrating social media into e-mail marketing, events and loyalty programs.

Social Media and E-mail

E-mail is the most popular way people share information online. A recent study shows 46 percent of content was shared via e-mail, 33 percent on Facebook and just 6 percent on Twitter. 

The sharing picture gets more interesting, though, when looking at “click-throughs” – the number of times people people click on the shared info: 40 percent of clicks come from Twitter, 35 percent from e-mail and 25 percent from Facebook. Visitors coming via e-mail stay longer, visiting 2.95 pages on average. Twitter visitors flit away quickly, only visiting 1.7 pages.

Making that click is so similar between e-mail and social media, that it’s smart to integrate the two:

• Add a “share” button to your company e-mail messages so people can share instantly in their preferred places.
• Use social media “chicklets” (linked icons) inside your e-mail and on your e-mail-to-web landinpages to encourage social followers.   

• Publish your e-mail newsletters on a blog and put those social chicklets there as well.
• Build your e-mail list by adding an e-mail list sign-up widget to your blog, Facebook page, and social profiles.

 

Social Media and Events

Social media is ideal to promote events, encourage buzz during it, and a way for people to engage afterwards. Services like Twitter are especially useful for “virtualizing” events because of their “happening now” nature.

As you begin to promote your event, announce a “hashtag.” Hashtags evolved on Twitter as a simple way to organize a pubic discussion around a particular topic. To create a hashtag pick a keyword and put the “pound sign” in front of it, like the one for the South by Southwest conference and festival: #sxsw.

Anywhere you post about the event use your hashtag. Tell attendees about your “official” hashtags so they can use and follow it; then watch the conversation emerge and grow. Monitor it by searching on your hashtag – and embed the conversation in your event site using a widget.

Use the same technique to hold “group chats” on Twitter. Pick a time, a hashtag and invite people to participate. Announce the chat through e-mails, social spaces and on your Web site. Bring in a subject matter expert or invite a Q&A session for your customers.  Do it regularly and build a following, or make it an “extended session” for your physical event.

The folks at wine retailer Bin Ends combined wine tasting and Twitter to encourage sales. On their Web site they identified the wines they would taste, provided free shipping, promoted the wine expert who would be commenting and invited customers to gather with friends, wine, a laptop and Twitter. The virtual events have proved so successful they now have a dedicated community, Taste Live and they hold virtual tastings on both Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media and Loyalty Programs

Most loyalty programs are in serious need of modernizing. Keeping them high-touch and high-value is key to success.

TastiDlite offers extra rewards for connecting your reward card to your Twitter, Facebook or foursquare account (see below), automatically sharing each “Tatsi experience.”  

Foursquare is a location sharing service that’s part game, part city guide and part social networking. People use their mobile phones to “check in” with friends, telling them when they’re at local spots. Each check-in earns users points, and frequent check-ins earn freebies. Merchants actively use foresquare as a way to reward and recognize customers.

Sites like foursquare and mobile technologies are allowing merchants to combine the physical with the virtual, rewarding and supporting customers’ digital lifestyles.  

Social media works best as part of a cross-media strategy. A little social media sprinkled in with your traditional marketing can go a long way to getting your business on the digital track.

This post also appeared in Orange County Local News Network.

How to Integrate Social Media into Your Marketing

Part one of a two-part series. Part 2 here.

Do any of these social media maladies sound familiar in your business?

The Shotgun Wedding: the proverbial gun in your back to get your social media presences going.

The “Two Twitters and a Facebook” Directive:  the boss wants to keep up with the competition and he wants it now.

The NTBE Bug: No Time, Budget or Expertise.

If so, you are not alone.  Businesses are flocking to social media sites in droves, often in an urgent effort to be hip, to connect with customers on their own turf, or as a fresh way to engage them.  

Your customers want something else.  They want relevant information where and how they like it, a personalized view of it, and ways they can share it in their own web spaces.

To truly bridge the two, a well-planned social media strategy is important to long-term success, but in the meantime there is lots of tactical  “socializing” you can do.

Five easy ways are:  using social media to support search results; using it with your web site; within your email marketing; for your events; and in your loyalty programs.

These five tactics are a good start to getting you on board with social media, meeting some social customer expectations, and for curing that NTBE bug. Let’s look at two of them to start.

Social Media and Search

Search is key to your “inbound marketing” - that is, the way customers find you.

Hubspot finds that companies that have blogs get 55% more web traffic. And a recent study found consumers exposed to a brand’s social media were more than twice as likely to click on its unpaid search links, and almost three times more likely to search for the brand’s products.

Social media can work hand-in-hand with your search optimization by socializing your existing content (your white papers, presentations, videos, etc.).

Your Web content can be distributed onto social platforms, expanding the concept of your “Web site” to your “Web presence” – linking them all to each other and to your Web site. This creates more search results, more places for people to find you, and allows them to choose formats that fit their personal information habits.

 

For example, “socialize” that whitepaper by making it available on your web site, upload it to Scribed, summarize it in a PowerPoint presentation and upload it to Slideshare and Scribed, videotape a brief interview about the topic and upload it to YouTube and iTunes, embed the video or slide presentation into your LinkedIn profile.  How about a Google Knol on the topic?

Don’t forget to “optimize” this distributed content with links to your website, choosing a clear title, including keywords in the description, and using any “tag” feature to enter words or categories people might associate with the subject matter.  

Social Media and Your Website

An essential social feature is RSS – Really Simple Syndication. It is a small bit of web code that people use to subscribe to and receive your updated content in their personal news items. The easiest way to add it to your web presence is to publish your newsletter or updates on a blog.  RSS is built into blogs.

On your website, invite social followers by placing icons and links to your distributed content, such as on Slideshare, LinkedIn, or YouTube.  This helps visitors find your official social accounts.  
 
Use social widgets to bring social content onto your website. Widgets are simple ”cut and paste” applications for this very purpose that require no programming expertise. Most social services offer you free widgets, but there are thousands available.

Some essential website widgets:

• A sharing widget:  let people instantly share your web page to their networks;
• Ratings, rankings or polls:  insert reviews automatically or get input from visitors using polls;
• Twitter and Facebook widgets:  bring your Twitter or Facebook posts onto your web pages;
• YouTube channel:  website visitors can browse your video library without leaving your site.

Now that your search and web site are going social, next we’ll look at doing the same with email, events and loyalty programs.

Cross-posted from my article in the Orange County Local News Network.

Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Policy

This is a reprint of an article written for Orange County Local News Network

On LinkedIn, the online business social network, there’s a lively debate raging with more than 800 comments. Someone posted the question “when hiring, is it ethical to check out a person’s social network activity?”

With that many opinions, it appears the rules of this road are murky.  The truth is that prowling around a job candidate’s social media activity may place your company at risk.

Social media is everywhere. Recruiters are tapping sites like LinkedIn to locate the next business superstar. Marketers are pulling out the stops to ignite a viral buzz. Customers are publicly exchanging love stories and horror stories about products and services.

But these forms of “conversational media” like blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube introduce new risks every businessperson must have on the radar.

An innocent misstep could cost real dollars in the form of brand reputation, regulatory fines or even a dreaded lawsuit.

Let’s circle back to that LinkedIn discussion. If your employee is checking out a job candidate’s social network activity and hiring based on the information found there, your company could be violating privacy laws, or laws governing background checks, such as the Fair Credit and Reporting Act, or perhaps the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. And, if the employee happens to go home and post something about the hiring on Facebook or Twitter, well, that could spell “discoverable” trouble—it could later be used as evidence.

Avoiding social media risk, like most other business risk, means crafting a sensible policy and educating your employees. A social media policy is simply good management.

There is no one-size-fits-all social media policy, but a few key things to consider in a policy are:

Respectful Workplace

Update your existing policies. Your company likely has policies that cover appropriate workplace conduct. Update them to encompass social media conduct and connections.  Online interactions can trigger harassment or discrimination charges, or privacy violations.  In once instance, a manager fired an employee by commenting on the employee’s Facebook profile because she disliked something the employee posted.   Make sure employees receive updated training about appropriate behavior extending into social networking with colleagues, and most importantly, subordinates.

Brand Reputation

Employees should understand that the line between personal and professional identity is blurring online. Our inter-connected web means that personal profiles, opinions or social content likely will wind up in Google, or on other social networks and can easily be tracked to a professional affiliation. Sometimes people don’t consider the distributed “network effect” of comments made online to friends. Outsiders may view remarks and construe them to be the company’s, potentially impacting your brand’s reputation.

Marketing

Marketers and agencies that work on behalf of your company should adhere to all social media website terms and conditions, including identity disclosures, age restrictions and rules regarding contests. Equally important, when they engage bloggers and others for word-of-mouth endorsements, they must follow new FTC rulings mandating endorsers to reveal any relationship with your company.

Workplace Safety

Employees should not use private contact information or private social network profiles for company-sponsored online activity. Revealing private information may place the employee’s safety at risk, and tying a company activity into an employee’s personal profile means the employee “owns” it, not the company.  Also, geo-location networking, where users publicly share their GPS locations, may jeopardize an employee’s privacy or safety. Be sure to review and address this increasingly popular tool.

Compensation

Specifically address whether after-hours company-sponsored social media activity is compensated or considered volunteer time.

Don’t be tempted to simply adopt another company’s social media policy. But to get you thinking, Social Media Governance, a website by an author on the subject, has a database of more than 100 social media policies. Institute a policy that addresses your specific business culture and regulatory environment. Consult a digitally knowledgeable attorney, and if needed, bring your social media specialist into the conversation.