I’ve gone into the bullet list of search engine optimization, how it compares to newspaper advertising from fifty years ago, or even why people do it. Yet my version only connects for a specific audience… and Google has been kind enough to create this video (so you can get it straight from the horses mouth)

As part of that effort, you can visit my personal blog @ barryhurd.com to read up on some educational items that didn’t make it into the 123 site. This series of articles will continue on my personal blog an I’ll make sure to include a recap for readers here at 123socialmedia.com.

If you have any questions regarding this line of discussion, please feel free to leave commentary on either blog.

Different Media Types, Part One : introduction to the core five media types (traditional, digital, mobile, social, hyper)

Media Influence, the elements of communication : introduction to the basic eight elements of media.

What is Owned Media ? Employee conversation, client records, company brand.

What is Bought Media ? discussion of advertisements and paid marketing.

What is Earned Media ? ranging from word of mouth, to niche expert reviews.

What is Syndicated Media ? a description of anything and everything that will end up in places you never expected.

Social Media is not a singular conversation. There is no singular person controlling the buzz and there is no singular tool that gives you understanding of every topic.

The core problem is that the number of channels creating information is immense: there may be a discussion on topics that interest you on a blog, in a newsgroup, on Twitter, YouTube, or various mobile applications. While those conversations are all happening online, they all use different technology. If you related this to the real world: you would need different tools to monitor television, radio, newspapers, coffee shops, cellular phone calls, and every cocktail party conversation.

The conclusion to this core problem is education. You need to understand who is talking and why it is important to your business goals, along with steps you can take to take advantage of situation.

The First Stage: Build an outreach list

Beginning Strategy: read through this list of action steps once, then come back and define a few goals for why you are building an engagement list. You don’t have to worry about being precise and 100% concrete, most of your current ideas will have gone through several evolutions during this planning process.

Some important items you should ask yourself:

• Who are we trying to reach at the end? Possible types of users could be consumers, journalists, investors, or industry peers.
• What is the outcome of our outreach? Reducing new client acquisition cost, increasing customer satisfaction, streamlining product development, or refining market intelligence are all good possibilities.
• Are there likely metrics we can affect and measure? As a business professional, someone will be asking what results your engagement strategy had. Be prepared by keeping key metrics in mind during the process.

The Ten Steps:

Step One: review the following six social media sources. In all cases, do a preliminary overview of your industry, of any keywords that are top of mind, as well as the names of any industry or association groups. This gives you a good starting point to detail where you want to go.

• Facebook Groups
• Linkedin Groups
• Twitter
• Alltop
• Technorati
• Postrank

Step Two: identify local or topical clusters. Once you have an overview, go back and cross compare items you found in step one. Key areas to look for are detailing top blogs (Postrank and Technorati both provide general scores) and identifying groups of users that spread across several services (high ranked blogs typically provide links to Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter groups.)

Step Three: break down apparent clusters that make sense for your business. Define geographic, topical, market, and demographic silos that are applicable. For each cluster you establish, detail five to ten top individuals to interact with.

Step Four: establish your workload and labor commitment. Be realistic. If you have fifty individuals to interact with, realize personal outreach is going to take thirty to sixty minutes per person. For an extremely large outreach, this time adds up very quickly. If you don’t want to commit the time, reduce the number of people you are reaching out to. You should also consider investing more time up-front for your own learning curve.

Step Five: research and personalize. Go into every site and review the “about” page and the past three to five articles, along with the last 30 days worth of information on Google (search for the persons name using the “advanced search” function to view only recent information.) If they have a Twitter account, spend a few minutes reading recent activity.

Step Six: Review your strategy. One of the most important steps of the process is to go back and re-think your strategy based on all the information you have just gathered. In most cases basic tactics and goals stated at the beginning may be proven to be inherently flawed.

Step Seven: outreach. Remember to try two or three options. The best way to earn an honorable mention in someone’s rolodex is to offer something of value to them. This “offer” doesn’t have to be cash (although a lot of people love this…) and could revolve around some common benefits. Think outside of the box when doing outreach and do not be scared to pick up the phone! (also remember to have effective follow-up.)

Step Eight: build the relationship. Once you have taken the effort of outreach, continue working on continuing communication. If you have a web only relationship make a schedule to communicate through blog comments, twitter, and other web services. If you have the ability to meet in person, attend or coordinate regular events to build stronger personal connections.

Step Nine: pay it forward. During the course of research, outreach, and relationship building: attempt to detail three to five basic objectives for each contact. Your assistance in reaching small personal goals for each contact is a quick method for solidifying a memorable and positive relationship.

Step Ten: collect some good faith karma. After you have contributed to the conversation, begin to seed your communication with your own professional wants and needs. Continue to review your own contributions vs the requests you make, and be careful to maintain a balanced two-way relationship.

BONUS:

Ask around. In many cases, professional peers may have already done some of the work above. If they have, ask to share notes and compare objectives to leverage any synergies you may have. If they have not, ask them if they would find value in your research and get them to commit some support to the effort.

Conclusion

It pays to listen to the marketplace, educate yourself, and use your brain. You don’t have to be scared of taking action, but creating an outreach plan allows you to avoid obvious pitfalls and take advantage of multiple benefits.

Try to break this workload into digestible portions and don’t overwhelm yourself. It is better to commit to a smaller and more routine schedule that reaches some goals, than work yourself into a panic and quit before reaching any milestones.

*This post was originally published on my personal blog under Social Media Strategy. Please take a moment to browse my other articles for some additional perspective.

May 24th – Using Social Media in Political Campaigns (Bellevue)

Hosted by the Master Builders Association of King & Snohomish County
MORE INFO
The annual MBA campaign training school for candidates, activists and interested citizens. Learn how to use social media and digital information to plan a campaign, target a district or city, communicate with your voters, recruit and mobilize volunteers and (finally) pay for it all.

June 2nd – Growing Business Partners with Social Media (Seattle)

hosted by Washington Technology Industry Association and Disney Interactive
MORE INFO
This session is about identifying “core partners” in a digital marketplace. It examines the best practice strategy requirements for coordinating with friends and industry partners, methods to find new channel partners, and tactics to leverage against competitors in the market. Attendees will be used as real-time case examples: identifying synergies and common goals that allow both teams and individuals to coordinate budget effective tactics.

June 3rd – Digital Reputation, Why Your Name Matters Most (Portland)

BuzzRE Portland, sponsored by HomeQuest and Mrealty
MORE INFO
As real estate professionals, reputation is tied to everything you do: from generating leads and holding open houses, to shaking hands and working with premiere financial intuitions. In the digital world, your “reputation” defines first impressions and affects how existing connections interact with you. Attendees will learn methods of defending this important name based reputation space, as well as positive ways of generating business using pro-active strategies.

June 4th – Identifying the Unseen, how to identify your Bigfoot from digital tracks (Bainbridge)

Bigfoot Northwest Social Networking Conference  – Sponsored by Washington State Chamber of Commerce and Mashable
MORE INFO
In real life, forensic evidence draws a picture of things we can’t see. In the digital world, analytics and personal user data draws a picture about everyone on the web. This digital footprint tells us who is interested in your service and gives you the ability to learn more about potential clients, grow existing clients more effectively, and maximize online audiences using search sites like Google and Yahoo, to online review sites such as Yelp and Citysearch.

On June 2nd, join the Washington Technology Industry Association and 24 other business professionals as we detail actionable steps for growing business partners in the online space. The group will be led by Tim Reha and myself, with several of our staff on hand to examine case by case steps that you can use today.

Space is limited to 25 attendees to make sure everyone has personal, hands-on treatment and access to individual Q&A

Special thanks goes out to Disney Interactive Media for hosting the event.

The first one is for job seekers: How to Write a Resume, Interactive Personal Branding 101. - This includes several tips on maximizing your digital presence as a professional. It is really helpful even if you are “safe and happy” in your current position. The steps I review are valuable assets that gain over time and get better with age.

The second and third items are two webinars that I have the privilege to present for the Wall Street Journal.

Webinar #1 – Corporate Reputation and Online Recruiting. Confused about how Twitter, Facebook, and Local search interact with job hunting? This twenty-five minute presentation discusses some interesting points on how candidates in the digital world interact with business brands during the recruiting process. As an employer or a job candidate, both type of professional gain some great insight to how different cogs interact during the job process.

Webinar #2- Social Media Recruiting – this covers some useful tools for gathering information about candidates and potential employers. When trying to present a company as an “employer of choice” or trying to stand out as an “amazing candidate”, online information and your ability to find useful data creates dozens of exceptional opportunities that less savvy professionals don’t have access to.

Without diving into a long story about the technical features, I wanted to bring attention to Google’s video detailing the benefits of Google Places. It is simple, short, and sweet. It tells you why it is important to local businesses, provides some not-so-obvious uses, and is almost entirely free.  Google has also provided a simple $25 a month tagging system that allows business to highlight themselves on the Google map search results, which will provide some short term benefits as other business educate themselves on what a “tag” advertisement does.

If you are trying to understand how social media, digital reputation, and listening strategies tie into the recruiting model: I am pleased to announce a webinar I will be holding with the Wall Street Journal’s FINS recruiting team on Thursday March 25th from 2:00 to 2:30 P.M. EST.

While this webinar focuses on recruiting, it will be an action packed thirty minutes that covers both strategic insight and actionable items. There will be tools you can use to grow employee assets right away and executives of all types are encouraged to learn some industry tips for using social media to grow online results.

* Listening for relevant online conversations
* Strengthening your lead networks
* Filling positions more efficiently
* Refining your online presence

You can sign-up for the event by visiting the FINS site.

Reputation Toolbox, tools for online professionals : this is a treasure trove of resources for professionals wanting a crash course on personal branding. It includes several PDF resources that you can print and use to help define your digital footprint as a professional.

Hotel Reputations, search brand value under attack : displays how some market industries are being devoured by predatory search engine directories that siphon off related brand traffic. The basics of this article hold true for many different industries.

Xfinity vs Comcast, No Reputational Escape? : in February 2010, Comcast launched Xfinity as a new brand for high-definition television services. The unfortunate side effect was that the nearly launched brand was attacked by dozens of online critics including TIME magazine, the Baltimore Sun, and PC Magazine along with hundreds of Comcast consumers that were already unhappy with the service.

Supermedia, Idearc, Verizon, GTE ? Reputations don’t fade online : in the latest brand disaster, read about how Supermedia was created to resurrect the bankrupt Idearc on January 2010 and how this transformation is digitally connected to multiple points of information that are damaging the new name.

Search Engine Conquesting, brand and reputation : conquesting involves having ownership and control over multiple 1st page results on a Google search term for your brand. This allows you to maintain a greater level of management on important terms (your name, business name, etc) that are 100% related to your business needs.

I am really happy to announce that the service team at 123 has been developing our solutions into more robust offerings every day, the latest being our new Influencer Analysis consultative service.

What is Influencer Analysis?

In a nut shell, it is the ability to notate what individuals or groups are ideally placed to affect certain conversations. These conversations can be product or industry specific, ranging from corporate bloggers to consumer reviewers.

Our staff believes that influencers affect far more than just product sales. Influencers could be internal to your company or may represent researchers who are analyzing where to place investment dollars. In today’s marketplace, knowing how these conversations transfer into business objectives is a critical challenge. For larger businesses, having a strategic map of the top ten to twenty influence groups pertaining to your business opens up huge opportunities and avoids potential risks. 

Are you using a cookie-cutter?

Our work is insightful, driven by technology, and does not use cookie-cutters: an influencer in one marketplace is entirely different than an influencer in another.
(I.E.  Investors have little comparison to retail consumers.)

Our model is a manual research and consulting service, aided by a quickly evolving set of technical tools and digital trends. Influencer analysis therefore requires detailed understanding of the target objective, investigation of the business process, and tactical capabilities that are unique to each project.

Everyone is connected to someone. The typical number of social connections can vary between 50 to 200.

In today’s digital marketplace, social media sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter connect those 50 to 200 in unique ways. Depending on the exact niche and the individual, some social sites may lack participation, while other sites are completely dominated by specific industry professionals (topic communities, knowledge groups, etc.) The simple illustration on the left details how typical influencers appear, wiht the blue sphere identifying reach and audience potential. It is very important to realize that the example illustration has three dark spheres. These represent relationships with the influencer that are very strong (they could be co-workers, family, or close friends.)

This digital structure can then be mapped out against all forms of qualification data such as exposure amount, supporter/detractor status, friend counts, interaction levels, traffic levels, search engine exposure, process support points, etc.

All of the digital information is meaningless without tactical application to business objectives. This is why we have a consulting model that extends beyond simple technology tools, allowing us to draw revenue driving connections and reduce areas of cost.

When you begin mapping this information out with a strategic objective, things begin to get more interesting.

The illustration to the right details a small network of only eight people. This isn’t a ten of thousands or millions of people, but they are THE RIGHT PEOPLE for the objective at hand.

To examine why this is important, we need to look at different sample scenarios.

SCENARIO ONE: this is a network of the next big prospect or your competitor’s top sales executives. This information details who is connected to whom, providing your team with the ability to understand relationship channels and have additional research data to create the “perfect pitch.”

SCENARIO TWO: this is a network of your own employee group. Executive management (and human resources) can now see actionable data for relationships that exist outside of normal organizational structure.

SCENARIO THREE: this is a corporate project team needing to keep costs down and quality high. Requirement needs can be mapped out against the pre-established network talent pool, resulting in hiring decisions and development of social assets.

Interested in finding out more?

Take a look at our micro-site for Influencer Analysis.  Our team is always happy to answer any questions.