Once, all you needed to monitor your brand’s reputation was a newspaper subscription, a TV remote control, and an eager intern.

The web complicated the process, but a simple search would still unearth any nasty comments tucked in a dark corner of the Internet. Before social media, any disparaging remarks would sit, mostly ignored, until they were pushed off the page by other content or removed.

No longer.

Twitter and Facebook have given customers and competitors a stage and a megaphone to wreak havoc on any brand. They don’t need your permission and you can’t opt-out of social media. Someone, somewhere is talking about your brand and you can’t control what they will say.

Reputation management used to be a luxury reserved for large brands with massive agency resources. PR would swoop in and “handle” any crisis. Now a comment on Twitter can grow from a spark, to a brush fire, to an inferno in under 24 hours.

Here’s the rub, submitting a rebuttal press release with the facts will do nothing to douse the flames. The influencers who are spreading the message will most likely not see the press release. Worse, these folks are “spin-proof”. Clumsy attempts to manage the crisis will only spray gasoline on the problem.

Conscientious brands require a new socially-powered process for protecting and building their brands image.

Ignoring the Social Web is A Business Killer

A poor online reputation attacks every aspect your business like a cancer:

Marketing: Generating demand for a product is difficult if poor reviews, mentions, and Facebook posts stand in the way. An unattended reputation reinforces the notion that your brand is unresponsive, a critical flaw in a fluid marketplace.

Sales: Your prospects will go online to do their product research. Google will dutifully serve up brand news, the good and the bad. A search on LinkedIn will reveal any negative remarks circulating among LinkedIn’s 200 million professional members. The professional media, tipped off by Twitter retweets may mention or write a post about the latest juicy rumor. Without reputation management, your sales team will be walking into an ambush totally unprepared.

HR: The battle for top-notch talent is getting tougher every day. Candidates are doing their research and making a decision based on your company’s culture. Any negative comments left unanswered will factor into your candidate’s decision-making process.

Investor Relations: Savvy investors use RSS feeds and news gathering apps to keep them informed about companies on their radar. These tools are configured to scour the web and social media networks for any news. Simply ignoring these networks allows the media to shape the news without your input. We believe that IR Social Monitoring will grow in importance.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve seen poor reputation management impact customer service, point-of-sale, and internal communications too.

The Social Web is talking about you. Even if you don’t have the capacity to respond, your brand needs to be aware of the conversation.

First Steps

Set-up Monitoring Immediately
It’s important to have your finger on the pulse of your brand. At Fluency, We use a blend of 3rd party monitoring tools and good ole’ fashion elbow grease to stay abreast of our client’s brand online.

Your brand should focus on finding where your brand is being discussed and which players are influential in that space. Update this information weekly and be prepared to respond if something threatens to spin out of control.

Create a Pro-Active Reputation Strategy
Reputation Management is difficult to do in the middle of a crisis. Like most things, it’s important to be prepared with a comprehensive plan from the beginning. Our client’s start with identifying advocates, establishing a response process, and proactively building relationships with key influencers before a crisis hits.

Involve Your Entire Team
Ask your employees to keep their eyes open and report anything they see on the networks they participate in. Walk your employees through the process of reporting any news to the right stakeholders in your organization. Go one step further and reward anyone who uncovers and correctly reports any negative news.

Good News

According to a recent Harris Survey, of the customers that received a response from a company after posting negative feedback, 33% turned around and posted a positive review, and 34% deleted the original negative review. Customers are empowered and gracious. The key is finding the negative comment in enough time to make a difference.

What are your reputation management challenges? Do you have a strategy in place?

Once upon a time, SEO was sort of an “if you build it, they will come” proposition.  In the early days, 10-15 years ago, if you built a website with keyword-rich content that was also good for users, you’d rank well in the organic search results.  Later on, inbound links rose in importance:  if quality sites linked to you, and you continued to have quality, keyword rich content that was also good for users, you’d rank well in the organic search results. Nowadays, though, the landscape has shifted.

Traditional SEO is no longer enough.

Sure, traditional SEO will still give you a good chance at ranking well – for one position in the search engine results.  But if you’re not utilizing and optimizing social media channels, your site is probably drowning in a sea of competing sites.

If you don’t build it, users will.

And users aren’t always your best advocates, especially if you’re not participating in social media and optimizing it for search results.  At a minimum, you should protect your brand name by optimizing as many social channels for your brand as possible.  Merely focusing on SEO for your main website isn’t good enough anymore.

You’ve probably seen a typical search engine results page, with maps and news results integrated into the content.  The news results portion usually looks something like this.

What if that was your business?

While you can’t control the actions of others, and you can’t stop newspapers from covering negative news, it’s a good idea to have an SEO’d press release ready to publish when situations like this arise.  This way, the press release could show up in news search results instead of the negative story, illustrating in a positive way how your company is proactively dealing with a tough situation.

Get in on the conversation.

Conversation happens around your brand, whether you’re a part of it or not.  If you’re not part of the conversation, you may see search results like these for a branded search:

Ouch.  Needless to say, you can’t control what users say about your brand, any more than you can control what the media says.  But wouldn’t you rather have a search results page that looks like this?

Or like this?

All of these listings appear on the first page of a Google search for “zappos”!

Unlike Walmart, Zappos has optimized nearly every possible social profile for their brand.  Searches for “zappos” display the Zappos:
• CEO’s Twitter profile
• Wikipedia listing
• Facebook page
• Microsite about their business model
• YouTube channel
• Android Market app listing
• Slideshare profile

Nearly every listing on the first page of Google for “zappos” is a Zappos-controlled, and optimized, site.  And nearly all of them are social media properties – but because Zappos has optimized their profiles and the content, these social sites are ranking for the brand.

70% of consumers research a variety of sources prior to purchase; 30% turn to search engines first.  With the right SEO and social media programs, you can control your reputation and influence consumer purchase.

Have you had a challenge with optimizing social profiles for organic search?  Tell us about it in the comments!

The holiday season ushers in gifts, caroling, great food, and a less well-received corporate tradition – annual planning. Your digital marketing planning doesn’t have to be painful, it can actually be an opportunity to reboot your program and build momentum heading into the New Year.

The key to successful digital strategic planning is to be organized and focused on the right questions.

Often marketing teams consider too many planning factors, exponentially complicating their strategies. Constraining your team’s planning to a concise list of success drivers will your strengthen your strategy and insure that you’ve considered the most critical elements.

We suggest starting with these 7 Digital Strategy Essentials:

1. Specific and Actionable Objectives:
Ambiguous objectives are a recipe for wasted effort and organizational frustration. Use the quantitative strengths of digital media to set meaningful objectives with realistic data. For example the objective “Build Brand Awareness” is too vague to be effective. However, ”Create social platforms that enhance ability to engage with target audience” mobilizes your team and inspires compelling strategic options.

2. Your Value Proposition
Your product value proposition powers all of your digital communications. An effective value proposition states why your product matters to your target audience. Once defined, your value proposition’s story can be shared in fascinating ways across multiple platforms. Email can reinforce it with your customers. Paid media can use it to pinpoint customer pain points and drive traffic to your website. Social can create conversations and attract influencers who are inspired by your perspective.

3. Call to Action
What action do you want your audience to take? Do you want a sale, a subscription, or a donation? It’s important to be clear here because your messaging needs to be unambiguous, short, and persuasive. Selecting a call-to-action may seem simple, but you would be amazed by how many marketing strategies suffer because they promote everything and end up selling nothing.

5. Cross-Platform Integration
Marketing in silos is inefficient and hobbles performance. Zoom out from the tactics and see your digital marketing strategy as a whole. Social Media can ignite your SEO initiatives. Email turns PPC into a profits machine. Paid media can quickly optimize landing pages and pinpoint conversion bottlenecks. Considering cross-platform integration will leverage your marketing investments across all of your digital platforms.

6. Superb Execution
The best plans aren’t worth the whiteboards they’re scribbled on if you can’t execute. As you huddle with your team, set aside time to concentrate on superb execution. Ask yourself – Do you have the people, the expertise, and the raw materials to pull off your strategy? Get solid answers to these questions before a lack of execution sabotages your strategy.

7. Optimization
An effective digital marketing strategy is a living document. In order to evaluate performance you will need to put the right tracking and analytics programs into place. The feedback from these programs will be used to make smart decisions about creative, messaging, and resource allocation. Allocating time to discuss testing, analytics, and reporting will pay dividends in sustained performance improvements.

If you need help…

It helps to have a second pair of eyes to bring a fresh perspective to your planning process. We’ve helped Fortune 500 brands, government organizations, and hyper-growth start-ups develop breakthrough search, social, and email strategies. Give us a call at (734) 302-3300, we would love to help.

Most of us lived through the dot-com boom and bust. Like grizzled veterans we are instinctually skeptical about the next new thing. For many, social media falls into the category of potentially dangerous distractions. However, jumping to this conclusion is more dangerous than giving social media a second look.

Why?

Social is popular for a good reason. With over 800 million people regularly using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, business marketers know have access to the largest audience since the heyday of network TV.

Reaching this audience is getting easier by the moment. Every social network including the precocious upstart, Google+ is scrambling to package its audience into targeted media opportunities. Even more important though is that the cost of reaching this audience is still relatively cheap.

While there are valid reasons to be cautious when developing a social program, it’s becoming ludicrous to sit on the sidelines.

Why the Philistines will Get Crushed

As more businesses seek a competitive advantage with social media, social contrarians are finding it hard to adopt a wait and see attitude.

The problem is while you wait:

1. Your competitors are establishing brand leadership
2. Your competitor’s customers are recommending products and services to their friends.
3. Your current advertising is steadily eroding in value as it get’s trumped by high-trust social communications
4. Your are missing the window to test and gain valuable expertise while social is still cheap

Let’s dig in a little deeper:

Brand Leadership:
Social brands are using Facebook to reinforce why they are market leaders. Think about how Coke has aggressively leveraged its brand on Facebook and Twitter to kick Pepsi out of the #2 spot.

Other fast moving companies are marrying robust thought leadership programs with blogs, twitter promotion, and Facebook discussions to position themselves as industry leaders.

Your Competitor’s Customers are Killing You:
Every time your competitor interacts with their customers on Facebook, these communications ripple outward into the customer’s social network. This is free advertising for the price of a single post. Sitting on the sidelines cripples your customer’s ability to spread the word about your brand forcing you to use more expensive tools to solicit their support.

Your Current Advertising is Eroding in Value:

Just like a new car driving off the dealer lot, your traditional advertising dollars are eroding in value. We already know about the fragmenting of TV viewer audiences and how DVRs are making commercials extinct. But, something more profound is happening, prospects have lost trust in traditional advertising. According to Nielsen, only 14% of consumers trust advertising. Ouch.

On the other hand, 78% of consumers trust recommendations from their peers and family. Increasingly these recommendations are coming from a message on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Social Media Learning is Cheap (for now):

Profiles are still free on all of the social networks.

You don’t have to pay to tweet, Facebook, or make updates to LinkedIn. Even though the best social monitoring tools like Sysomos cost a bundle, you can still cobble together a decent view of your social activity with free tools. This means that you can start listening to your customers, analyzing your competitor’s efforts, and engage with your prospects at low risk.

On the other hand, playing catch-up against a well-entrenched social brand is getting more expensive everyday. Worse, playing catch-up often leads to embarrassing mistakes as a team tries to understand the complexity of social media. Rapidly developing expertise or getting help with your social media program – now is the best way to sidestep these problems

What’s Holding You Back?

Tell us, what’s holding your organization back from deploying your social media program?

Are you thinking too small?

Marketers tend not to think small. But sometimes management does, especially when it comes to digital marketing. Some examples of thinking small include:

• Planning a social program believing social media is free
• Suggesting that hiring interns will get the job done
• Ignoring email as a key platform, thinking that everything must be “social” or else
• Creating a SEO program based on a few keywords you know from gut instinct rather than using comprehensive research

Lots of organizations are still on the fence about digital marketing and are wasting their time and their people’s time with half baked tests that are based on the whims of a senior leader. What some industry leading marketers have recognized is that digital marketing done right presents a transformative opportunity to go BIG.

Good reasons why organizations are going BIG

There are two fundamental insights about consumers and digital media that every leader and marketer should know:

1. Consumers have made a permanent shift in their media consumption (at home and at work) toward digital, a trend that will only continue.
2. Digital marketing plays by a different set of rules: more frequency, more engagement, more diversity, and zero barriers to entry.

Consider this fact: consumers spend 28% of their media usage time on the Internet (versus 31% on TV) yet less than 15% of advertising is spent on the Internet (according to venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins).

Of course, big changes create an opportunity for even bigger achievements.

A few examples of Going BIG with digital marketing

• How do you build a world-class brand in under two years out of your garage? Enter Orabrush, a mouth brush designed specifically to clean the tongue and thereby clean your breath. First, the company created dozens of irreverent, poignant videos that entertained and explained the benefits of their product. The result was millions of views and many, many online orders. But, as a product sold in grocery/drug store, gaining distribution into large retailers remained elusive. So, Orabrush created $28 worth of advertising on Facebook, geo-targeted to Bentonville, Arkansas which just happens to be the world headquarters of Walmart. The ad copy included the following: “Walmart employees have bad breath.” The result was an order for over 700,000 plus brushes.

• Building a loyal database that will repeat your business because you own a direct connection. We all know that renting is extraordinarily expensive, especially when you truly have the means to own. So, imagine being a multi-billion company in massive competition for advertising and market share with one chief competitor not to mention a host of smaller competitors. That’s the situation that Coke found itself in back in 2005. Each year, Coke and Pepsi battled for ad spend and ad creativity. But the leaders at Coke realized something. Why rent or pay for media, essentially renting the attention of consumers? So, they built a plan around a massive loyalty program called MyCokeRewards, introduced in 2006. The result is that dozens of millions of consumers now participate, receiving email and social media messages from Coke that Coke itself owns. Coke can measure the specific loyalty from its consumers and send offers to targeted buyers and maintain a personal one-to-one relationship with each loyalty member. The program has been so successful that the company has extended the program to many other brands including Diet Coke, Sprite, and Dasani among others. Oh, and by the way, it’s the #1 visited consumer packaged goods website in the world.

• Launching a new car model without the help of TV or traditional media. Car launches are famous for out of control media budgets followed by massive incentives to push the sales through the dealers. In 2009, Ford decided to go big with a social and digital media launch of the Ford Fiesta. The Ford Fiesta Movement was created as a grassroots social media campaign to promote the new Fiesta by placing Fiestas in the hands of 100 social “agents” and having them promote Ford’s new vehicle through Twitter, blogs, video, and events, all without spending a dollar on traditional media. Each month, the agents would use their Fiestas to complete missions ranging from delivering for Meals On Wheels, taking Harry And David treats to the National Guard, or going on a random adventure to wrestle alligators. All of these stories were documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter unedited by Ford. In six months, Ford received 4.3 million YouTube views, 500,000+ Flickr views, 3 million+ Twitter impression, and 50,000 interested potential customers, 97% of which did not currently own a Ford. And, in the initial six day of sales, Ford sold 10,000 units. While Ford went small in terms of budget it went big in imagination and results.

Go BIG or go home with Big Hairy Audacious Goals

BHAG is a framework you can use for going big with digital marketing. Author Jim Collins coined Big Hair Audacious Goal or BHAG (bee-hag) to indicate a meaningful, organizational changing goal that gives direction and strategic advantage for years to come. Applied to digital marketing, a BHAG requires that you look at the trends of today and envision your industry years into the future. You then have to make a decision to create and aim for a vision of what’s possible. The key is not in making every possible change all at once. It’s about imagining the possibilities and making the strategic shifts one step at a time.

Media is becoming radically more personable, mobile, and social. There’s no barrier to entry with digital marketing which means your competitors and new competitors present grave new threats. However, with BHAGs on your side, you can lead your organization to the forefront. How is your industry changing and what are your BHAGs that can change the world?

Just when you thought you had PPC under your belt, along come some newbies!

If you have a website, you’re probably familiar with traditional PPC advertising options, like Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter.  But now when you consider your PPC strategy, you have to consider LinkedIn and Facebook ads.

So, how do you know what best fits your needs, without burning through a whole lot of ad dollars in the process? Here are a few things to consider:

Traditional PPC Search is About Conversions

Search PPC is best for getting that sale, lead, or desired action by placing your business message in front of people as they’re searching.  It’s a great way for marketers to harness demand – after all, the searcher is telling you exactly what they’re looking for.  It’s not unusual for companies to get more new customers from search PPC than from any other channel, online or offline, and to make money on every sale.

There is a down side, though.  If no one is actively searching for your business, product, or service, you won’t get any traffic from search PPC, and even the best campaign in the world won’t affect your bottom line.  That’s where social PPC like LinkedIn and Facebook comes in.

LinkedIn PPC is a Recruiter’s Paradise

LinkedIn isn’t a search engine. People don’t go to linkedin.com, type in keywords, and get a page of search results from sites across the web.  Sure, you can search on LinkedIn, but it’s basically a site search; and people use it to find individuals, companies, or groups with whom they’d like to connect professionally.  They’re not looking for an answer to a question like they are when they go to Google or Bing.

Here’s a matrix with the key features of LinkedIn vs. search engines.

So why do people go to LinkedIn?  There are many reasons, but here are a few:

• They’re looking for a job
• They’re looking to hire someone and are using LinkedIn for recruiting
• They’re checking the profiles of potential new hires
• They want to connect with colleagues they just met or used to work with

LinkedIn is, therefore, an excellent fit for advertisers who need to reach businesspeople in a particular field.  For example, businesses looking to hire new staff can target prospective hires on LinkedIn, with a hook like a hiring bonus or finder’s fee to encourage response.

What about Facebook?

At this point, you may be wondering why you wouldn’t run Facebook ads instead of LinkedIn ads for your business.  After all, Facebook has 800 million users, while LinkedIn is just over 100 million – why not cast your net where the fish are?

Facebook ads can be highly effective for businesses, but they don’t work the same way LinkedIn ads do, because people visit the sites for two different reasons.

If you’re trying to increase your fan base with likes on your business page, or promoting Facebook contests, Facebook ads work great.  But it’s hard to get users to leave Facebook, because it’s similar to a huge, really fun party that no one wants to leave.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is more like a business networking event.  People are there to talk about how they can help their business grow.  A whole lot of people are there to talk about getting a new job.  And they don’t mind leaving the LinkedIn site to learn more.

Every ad platform serves its own purpose.  Sometimes you need to host the party and get people talking; and other times, you just need to focus efforts on building your core business.  Consider your objectives carefully when assembling your PPC plan.  And remember, no matter what you do, test and refine.  That’s the key to success no matter which platform.

How have LinkedIn and Facebook ads Transformed Your PPC Plan?

Made a killer discovery? Tried and “Learned”? We want to know how you’ve utilized the newer PPC platforms and your point of view.

It’s frequent, it’s intimate, it’s consistently delivering on its promise.

Marketers seem to forget the main brand promise that drew people in, in the first place.  We instead turn to doodads and shiny objects out of insecurity.  We run tools to determine sentiment and share of voice.  And then we go out into the world of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and try to attract and engage an audience that will talk to us, give us insight into what works and hopefully influence others to jump on the bandwagon.

But it seems that in the Wild Wild West of the social media landscape, so many marketers have lost their sense of purpose, particularly those just entering the arena. Too often you see pop culture posts or sweepstakes that shout out “See me, click here” but have absolutely nothing to do with the brand or their offering. And like a supernova, the marketing effort may attract a few, but quickly dies without any sustained community or ongoing engagement, leaving your audience growth to stagnate.

For this reason, your plan must include the basics. Yes, social media is a way to engage with your customers about many things, but the fundamental reason they are even interacting with you is your product and offerings. If those are not part of the conversation, you are missing the mark.

Here are three basic fundamentals that should be at the core of your social media program (especially new or young programs):

1. Surface Your Value Proposition
Give a new fan a reason to like your brand.

Make sure you are highlighting the “reason why” behind your main offerings regularly so that anyone new to the site can easily understand why they should care about you instead of all your competitors.

Don’t be fooled by all of the clever questions and trivia posts out there. That alone is not enough. You are still marketing and if you don’t let people know the benefit of your offering, you’re not getting the point across. Of course social media affords you the creative space to promote that offering encased in trivia, pop culture, breaking news and all of the rest, but make sure your value proposition is at the core.

2.    Give Them a Reason to Return
While posts about people and companies who have successfully used your products and services are necessary to establish what you offer and why it’s relevant to the person coming to your social media platform, they need more than that to keep coming back.

This is where content regularity is king.  There is a reason why restaurants offer the same ‘special’ on the same day of the week – people who like that special have at least one day per week they want to come back and will probably come in on other days too.

Similarly, in social media, if people know you post certain content regularly, they incorporate it into their routine. For example, you can curate lists that are relevant to your industry on the same day each week or ask your audience to upload photos or videos as part of a weekly content strategy. Making it fun, regular and relevant will create the stickiness that is required to attract engagement, which will in turn attract newcomers.

3. Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content serves as a resource for people when they come looking for information. This also gives you an opportunity to establish your thought leadership. You know more about your brand and market than anyone else. Social media is the platform where you can shine.

The best evergreen content works in concert with a well organized blog, and a variety of rich media, drawing in video, photos, and long-form copy to attract different types of readers. Over time this creates a higher value for your target audience while helping your social media platforms gain traction on search engines. This way, social media serves to augment the information about your brand that is already out there. Combined with a strong SEO program, it helps with reputation management.

The digital marketing landscape has definitely changed dramatically in the last 5 years.  When there’s a new frontier, people often throw the rules out the window.  But brands still need to remember why customers engage with them in the first place. Social media offers an opportunity to do that on a more frequent, intimate basis. This is every marketer’s dream.  Watch it closely and like my husband will tell you about his Porsche – treat it with care.

What About You?
Are you using these fundamentals in your social media program?  Are you connecting with your customers on a regular basis about your real brand value?  Tell us about your challenges and successes in the comments below.

When kicking off any online marketing effort, one of the most effective and rewarding tactics is to establish a targeted landing page, separate from your main website. Use this landing page (and absolutely not your home page) as the destination for all of the traffic generated from your paid search, display advertising, and email campaigns.

So what’s in it for you?

1. Resonance: With a specific landing page, you have the opportunity to ensure that the headline, messaging, imagery and call-to-action all match and reinforce what the customer sees on the advertisement before clicking. This allows you to extend the brand story beyond the constraints of a rectangular banner, and deliver on the promise that the ad copy hints at. This type of tease/deliver approach, compounded with repetition of the brand message, can yield excellent results.
   
   
2. Endless Possibilities to Test, Test, and Test Again: Using Google Website Optimizer or a similar technology, a smart marketer can use the controlled landing page environment to test all the critical web page variables that affect the sale.
   
   
3. Higher Conversion Rates = More Sales: Ongoing testing of your landing page will allow you to increase your online conversion rate, often by factors of 10. Even small increases to your conversion rate can yield much larger sales gains than simply buying more web traffic, and at a much lower cost.
   
   
4. Establish Your Brand’s ‘Hero’: Another benefit of focusing your testing and analysis to a single web page is that you can more quickly determine the right combination of design, messaging and offer that work for your brand. You may learn that what your customers respond to is wildly different than what you started from.
   
   
5. A Wealth of Knowledge to Inform Future Marketing: Finally, all of the testing and improvements will result in an incredible amount of data and insights that will improve all of your marketing efforts. You can make decisions about marketing variables (color, message, placement, etc) based on learnings that have been tested against your customers and your product offering(s).

Think about putting together a simple, targeted landing page for your next advertising campaign. The opportunity for advanced learning in a compressed amount of time will be well worth the relatively small amount of work. And over time, your modest landing page may prove to be the best advertising investment that you’ve ever made.

The great b2b divide

A radical change in business-to-business (b2b)  marketing is unfolding
right in front of our eyes. And, that change is now reaching WARP SPEED.

What’s emerging is a corporate digital divide of have’s and have not’s. The have’s are the companies who are building brands, creating leads, and connecting with customers in profound new ways. The have not’s are stuck in the past with the same direct marketing and cold calling tactics that have existed for 50 years.

Social media is at the heart of this divide. For many b2b marketers, social media is a big, fat elephant in the middle of the room.  Most marketers actually want to take the leap but they are still struggling to convince their organizations.

• Can social media drive sales?
• How important is it?
• Where does it fit?
• What is the right kind of b2b social media strategy?

Social media has changed the b2b marketing game

B2B niche category leaders and organizations that create great content are forming a new type of marketing differentiation that will unlevel the playing field in their favor for years to come. They are utilizing social media to enhance and widen their reputation and brand presence. The good news for b2b marketers is that most of their competition is not playing as yet, so the playing field is wide open. At the end of the day, b2b social media strategy needs to make sure you show up where its most important and here are 5 strategies that do just that:

1. Influence consideration
B2b selling is about credibility, especially during the consideration phase. Have you ever sincerely asked: would you buy from your own organization? Does your sales team cringe with the thought of your prospects viewing your social media and websites? Research shows that buyers spend more time on their own reviewing content on your sites and third party sources than they do reviewing content you send them directly. This is where social media can help. With a blog you can create rich content that maps back to all the key factors in a buyer’s consideration. With Twitter and LinkedIn, you can reach potential customers and stay top of mind through a consistent drip of valuable, highly frequent information. By proactively creating the right content on the right platforms, your organization will be destined to win the consideration battle. But winning consideration is not enough. Your organization must also win the reputation battle.

2. Successfully manage your reputation
Do you have a plan for responding to a negative review? What happens when customer service turns into a fire drill? A strong social media presence can be leveraged to lessen the impact of such a crisis, big or small. Here’s how. First, be prepared: have a clear, step-by-step social media policy that has been vetted and approved before you need it. Second, quickly address the issue. Speed is your friend, don’t let the issue fester. Finally, leverage social media’s unique strengths. For example, with a blog you can explain a situation and your response in detail. Or with Twitter you can respond quickly and honestly in 140 characters while avoiding legal speak which isn’t compatible with a short-length platform like Twitter. Once you’ve taken care of your reputation strategy, you can move on to proactive opportunities like becoming a thought leader.

3. Establish thought leadership
What makes your service or product better than the competition? It’s your differentiation and in the world of social media, differentiation means that your organization has something meaningful and interesting to say in the eyes of your customers and industry: we define it as thought leadership content. Through social media, B2B marketers can leverage thought leadership to establish industry prominence and mindshare. This content truly becomes valuable when it arrives on the screens of customers and industry professionals. In order to achieve this distribution, a thought leadership program must connect with key social media industry influencers. There are social media influencers in every single industry. They write blogs, they tweet, are active in LinkedIn Groups, and they have big audiences that follow them. They may be your customers, potential partners, or industry enthusiasts. A proactive strategy that builds a relationship with these influencers and provides valuable thought leadership content will ultimately reach your prospects and customers. Taking it even further, what happens if your customers evolve into rabid fans?

4. Leverage brand enthusiasts
Customer loyalty in the b2b space has traditionally been based on quality of service and the customer relationship with the sales and account teams. Have you ever read tweets from a Salesforce.com customer who’s attended one of its summits? They are not customers – they are fans. There is a new level of engagement being reached by Salesforce and other b2b marketers with their existing clients. The simple math is this: a typical account manager has limited time to spend with many accounts and has to spread out just a few conversations a month per client. With the right social media presence, you could increase your frequency of contact by 5 or more times per client. Increased frequency can lead to early identification of service issues, prompting of a new customer need that leads to cross-sell, and the hand raising of fans who can publicly profess their love for your service.

5. Extend your reach
Effective social media content is becoming more and more of a factor in how search engines rank a site for various keywords. This trend is going to continue so if low cost, strategic site traffic is important to your business, then you need to get moving fast. A few first steps can include: optimizing a YouTube channel, ensuring your company LinkedIn presence is written with good keywords, creating or editing a Wikipedia entry for your business and key leaders, creating regular blog and Twitter posts that discuss relevant topics and link back to your sites.

Where are you headed with social media?

The digital b2b divide is real and you know which side your organization sits on today. The big question is what are you going to do with this information? In the next leg of the race, the winners will have more than ROI on their side. They’ll have authentic reputations that continue to expand, the mindshare and differentiation of being thought leaders, a base of industry professionals that act more like fans than customers, and they’ll have a free supply of new customer traffic from organic search.

The divide is a bit scary but it’s a clear opportunity for those that leap it and push its boundaries. Where does your organization sit and which of these challenges do you face?

Are you limiting yourself to pay per click advertising for your website?  Or worse, no advertising?  Then you’re leaving money on the table by not doing search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is defined as the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.   Generally speaking, sites that rank on the first page of Google (or other search engines) get the bulk of the clicks – as many as 80-90% of the organic clicks.  So if your site doesn’t rank well, or doesn’t rank at all, you’re missing out on customers.

You may also rank organically for your brand name, so you’ll appear in search results when people search for your brand – IF people are searching for your brand.  More on that in a bit.  But if you don’t show up for the other hundreds or thousands of non-branded keyphrase searches relevant to your industry, you’re missing a huge opportunity to get on the consideration list of customers earlier in the sales funnel, when prospects are in research mode.

And when SEO is done properly and consistently over time, you’ll be investing in the “free” clicks from organic search – meaning that your website does the advertising for you by showing up in the search engines.

“But SEO costs money,” you may be thinking.  “How does it make me money?  Won’t people just type in my website name and find me anyway?”

If you’re Amazon.com, yes.  If you’re most other sites, no.  Let’s think about how most websites get their traffic.

Your website might appear on all your company’s printed materials.  So anyone who’s come in contact with these materials theoretically has your web address.  For them to actually get to your site, though, they need to (a) have the materials handy when they’re by a computer and (b) correctly type your URL into their browser’s address bar.  And these folks are probably already customers, anyway.

Perhaps you use your company’s URL in TV and radio advertising.  That’s great, but unless your prospects have a computer handy when they see your ad, they need to remember that URL (and your company & message in general) when it comes time for them to seek you out online.

Or maybe you’re ahead of the curve and are using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising  to drive traffic and sales.  PPC is great – I’ll be the first one to say that.  On the other hand, you pay for every visitor who clicks on your ads.

By now, you’re probably thinking, “OK, either I’ll get very little traffic, or I have to pay for it.”  That’s where SEO comes in. Let’s look at an example.

Say you’re getting 1,000 visits per week, and 2% of those visitors convert to a sale.   Your average sale is $50.  Let’s also say that relevant high-volume keyphrases in your industry get a total of 500,000 searches per week, but your website doesn’t rank organically for any of those high-volume keyphrases.  And let’s say that if you had a first-page ranking for those terms, you’d get clicks from 0.5% of the 500,000 searches.

That’s 2,500 incremental visitors per week.

Taking the analogy further, let’s assume 2% of the 2,500 visitors convert to a sale.

That’s 50 incremental sales per week.

At $50 a pop.  You just grossed an additional $2,500 per week from free traffic.  That’s $130,000 in incremental sales per year.  Not bad for a little SEO.