Social Media Management Report

• Do you think Social Media is a fad?
• What are “Channels” in Social Media?
• Is it better to market online with Social Media or the search engines?
• How can I incorporate Social Media into my business marketing effort?
• How useful is Social Media for marketing?
• What is the best way to track results with Social Media marketing?
• What is a Social Media strategy?

Once you have had time to read the report, we will then send you our Social Media Action Sheet which will help you to clarify what steps you need to take to make sure you are successful in using Social Media in your business.
Let us know what you thought of the report and the action plan and how you applied it in your business.

This partnership between Yahoo and McAfee has been around since 2008 but it is the first time I have seen the unsolicited emails warning.  Apparently McAfee is now using SearchScan (in BETA mode) to automatically sign up at your companies website and then make an opinion about the quality of the material coming from that website.

McAfee SearchScan

While I am all for making the web a less spammy place, I have a few reservations about this practise.  First, where do you draw the line?  What is spammy, what is borderline and what is acceptable?  There are different levels of what is considered acceptable email frequency and tolerance across different cultures.  This is the same in the non-virtual world where you may bargain for a piece of clothing in one country and be expected to pay a fixed price in another country.

Don’t forget that as business owners we are paying for this as well.  For each autoresponder message that goes out to your genuine customers you are now going to get a percentage (albeit a small one) that go to McAfee for checking purposes.

My main concern is about McAfee’s response level to genuine mistakes or problems such as when your blog has been hacked and used for nefarious purposes?    McAfee seems to have a robust system in place for complaints but does it work or is like Google where they simply will not engage?

We would love to hear from anyone who has had any direct experience with McAfee and attempted to get these warnings removed from their website search results.  Please leave your comments below.

So after your event is done a dusted, it is a good idea to find out what people said about it.  This may yield valuable insight ion how to improve on your event management in future.

Many social media monitoring tools are available to let you know what is said about your company and your brand.  The most common one is Google Alerts.  These alerts can be extremely useful in immediately responding to any bad press as well as alerting you to some good press that you can amplify by syndicated the comments through the various social media and more traditional channels.

Being pro-active is the important part of monitoring and your social media policy needs to be constructed properly to allow those who manage your social media to respond with timely information and appropriate comments.

As long as you have integrated your social media with your blog, you can continue the discussion with the more vocal of your fans through follow-up blog posts and active commenting.  Polls are also a great way to keep people engaged and are easy to through into the mix.

Consider doing a webcast of your seminar or teasers from a live performance to keep in contact with those who did not attend you event this time round.

Last but definitely not least – Thank your fans! Yes this takes time but you can always get someone to help with that

The key to getting good exposure for your event and “creating the buzz” is to use a few different channels to get across you message.

Not all of the 1600 or so social media sites will be useful to your particular event so below I have listed a few that would be suitable to enhance the visibility of most events.

1. Flickr is great for sharing photos – it may be as simple as showing the event venue or photos of past similar events.
2. You Tube – how about a personal video message from the keynote speaker or a clip from the bands last live performance.
3. Slideshare – this site has great visibility with professionals and you can even use it to share your slideshows and videos on your LinkedIn company profile.
4. Facebook – gather your fans into one place by offering them sneak previews and special offers.  Facebook only content is essential to use this channel well.
5. RSS feeds – using your RSS feeds from your blog can increase your exposure of your event especially if you create a comments feed and syndicate both feeds across the web.
6. Twitter is great for building “on the day” buzz – consider having a dedicated tweeter at the event to give live updates.
7. Forums – don’t forget about the traditional forums (yes they are still alive and kicking) to generate discussion, especially if there is one in your niche.

Social Media is all about your audience finding you and by being present on a number of channels this will allow a lot more people to find you and your event.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you get the third part of this blog where we look at what to do after the event using social media monitoring.

Social media is “just another tool” to help you to promote your events that should be integrated into all of your other marketing and advertising efforts.  However, if you do include social media, it can be incredibly effective if you do it right!

Madonna Concert

First you need an audience – if you already have a Facebook fan base or a number of twitter followers, great.  If not you need to undertake some serious audience building before you will get some return on your investment in social media.  We use a mixture of organic and automated methods to attract followers and if this is integrated with your offline promotion you can build followers quite quickly.

Second you need great content – If you don’t give out great information your audience will evaporate – this is especially true in social media.  So, it is a good idea to have a content strategy where you develop a number of pieces ready to put out through the various social media channels when appropriate.  These content pieces should not only include the usual event information but background on the company running the event, topical news and last minute offers.

Third you need to develop your relationship with your followers and fans; Frequent and regular contact with your audience is necessary to gradually build trust and rapport by having REAL conversations.  This is the “cost” of social media – the time it takes you to manage your conversations.  If you need help with this we can manage your profiles for you and encourage the one-on-one conversations that make social media work.

So you may say, why bother with using social media if it is all that hassle?  Well, the results can be explosive.  You can get both short and long term benefits by gradually building a huge fan base that is both extremely targeted and very loyal and this translates to bums on seats.

In our next post we will cover some of the channels and tools you can use to help to promote your events through social media.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you get the second part of this blog where we look at various social media channels and tools to help you give your event marketing a kick start

Here are just three of the many things that can help you develop your social media strategy.

1.  Ask yourself – what is my aim for getting involved in social media?

Even if you already have an online social media presence it is worth re-visiting your aim of having that presence. You could  be looking to reposition your brand, increase followers to establish a loyal customer base or wanting to use social media for improving your customer service.

The aim of your social media strategy will then determine, to a certain extent, what social channels you use and how you position your self within these channels.  For example, if you have the aim of using social media to increase your website rankings, we would suggest using a blog as the  appropriate channel to do that.  The design of your blog, the content, the plugins you use can all help your search engine rankings.

2. Developing the Right Content.

The content you develop and also the language you use should be targeted to your customers.  So, if you have technical engineers as your target market then the language and content would have to be at the same technical level they are if you wish to position yourself as an expert.

Your content must be tightly focused around both your customers and also the central aim of the strategy. The most important point when delivering content through social media is that it must add value.

3.  Exposure – its no good if you can’t be seen!

Once you have a social media presence established, you need to use syndication to ensure wide distribution.  This can take the form of using twitter, rss feeds, bookmarking, site-maps, video, press releases to name just a few examples.  The aim of this distribution is to support the main aim of your social media strategy.

If you need help to develop your social media strategy drop me an email.

Social Media Jazz

1.  Have they been using Social Media for a while?

You don’t really want a new kid off the block but bear in mind Social Media itself is new.  So we recommend you use someone who has been using Social Media for at least a year.

2. Are they business savvy?

You really want someone who knows a bit about business if you want them to represent your company and build your social media profile and your online business presence. When your looking to hire a social media manager, make sure you ask them about business topics outside the world of social media as well.

3.  Do they know how to help you create a social media policy?

Having a set policy of who can say what and ensuring that all employees of your company know how to represent your company can ensure consistency of your message and help to build your brand in the right manner.

4.  Do they know how to help you create a social media strategy and then develop a successful social media action plan to achieve your goals?

If you don’t have an overall strategy to your social media activity you risk having a lot of activity in the wrong direction! You need a clear action plan with measurable results to bring you success.

5. Do they know about other internet marketing services?

There are a myriad of “other internet marketing services” that can be used in conjunction with your social media activities.  These can include social bookmarking, link building and other SEO tactics such as keyword analysis.  A well rounded strategy takes all of these other tools and tactics into account and gradually builds your online presence.

If your looking to hire a Social Media Manager, check our page “What We Do” to find out all of the things a Social Media Manager can do for you or send us a message here.

Social Media Jazz for Social Media Management

Nothing compares to the depth of the cringing shame felt on realization that your hastily typed nonsensical tweet was broadcast to thousands of followers, or you realize you’ve bombarded your contacts with irrelevant information. You start hoping that the volume of twitter traffic picks up to hide your tweet or everyone’s too busy to read it.

If this has happende to you then, maybe it’s time to start looking at the social media part on your internet marketing strategy.

Here are a few horrendously common social media faux pas which we’d all do well to avoid.

1. Have you ever hit enter instead of the space bar when using the tweet deck URL shortener to bit.ly a website address that you wanted to use in another application?

The result is that you post a link to a website that was never intended. What’s worse is that there’s no associated text so it looks like a blatant sell of your website. What a great piece of internet marketing strategy NOT. Make sure you put information in the Tweet Box which is ready to go to make sure you avoid accidents. You can also use something like tinyurl to shorten your URLs.

2. Consider this faux pas.  Setting up TweetAdder for a very targeted internet marketing campaign to business owners about your product and your last blog was about something completely irrelevant like wine for instance.

3. What about spelling – nothing annoys people more (especially in Britain) than poor spelling. Bring on the auto-spellchecker for Tweet apps.

4. While trying to post twitter updates to your LinkedIn profile you end up changing “Recent Status” several times and bombarding your followers with updates! Joy upon joy, you mumble to yourself! It’s best to turn off status notifications while fiddling with the settings.

5. Sending out personal tweets when you are using Twitter for your business is a huge no no in my books – comments like “I’m sooooo hung-over today” or “my kid has got this really horrible flu bug”. Well who cares really?

6. The best one though was succinctly pointed out to me recently by one of my colleagues who has this on his “Thanks for the Follow” message – “don’t you hate it when people try and sell you something straight away?” Yes I do Richard; I am so with you there!

So many people are missing the point of social media when using it for business. It is simply a way of having conversations and building relationships. The hard sell just will not work (has it ever worked?). The key point to remember with this media is that it gives instant market feedback via the un-follow button! Advertising and online marketing companies are making it easier for average everyday companies to blunder into the world of social media. There’s plenty of sniggering going around in the background about how certain companies are handling their online activities in social media and their overall internet marketing.

If you’ve been following the development of twitter like I have for the last couple of years, you will have noticed an increasing amount of whales.

Whales are what you get when Twitter is over capacity and simply can’t cope with the volume of tweets.

Also there is the dreaded Hootsuite message “API is busy, please try again later” when you try and load more tweets or when you first enter the application

Fridays are particularly bad due to the #FF or “follow Friday” activity

The downside for blog owners everywhere when twitter is down, is that if you have a twitter feed plugin installed it will show no tweets and instead give you the message “No public twitter messages” rather than the more accurate “we can’t display any of your tweets as twitter is currently overloaded”.  This is not good for social media companies like ourselves who pride ourselves on our frequent social media activity.

You do wonder whether their platform can keep up with its own popularity and how soon it will be before people start departing it shores for greener social media platforms elsewhere.

Leave us a comment and let us know whether you think there are more Whales than there used to be.

P.S. If you’ve never seen a whale before check out our social media management packages.