Other classic things I hear at meetings are the need for a “viral campaign“, the desire to “develop an iPad application” or even to implement an “e-enterprise model” – and this is when, respectively, their company websites are not even SEO-friendly, their target audience is not tablet-ready, or their internal resources still cannot distinguish a browser from a widget (yes, this still happens in 2013). But all these experiences are actually very positive for me, as they helped me conceiving this blog post. It’s about time to stop this hype, and to go back to basics!

I don’t need to write a long article about it, as I’ve always been advocating the need for a rational approach to internet marketing, and a strategic approach to search and social media marketing. Basically, before engaging in the highest level of internet marketing activities, companies need to refocus on the following basics:

• a website optimized for search engines performance and conversion;
• a solid internet marketing strategy;
• clearly defined internet marketing goals, supported by achievable KPIs;
• a skilled and constantly trained internet marketing team;
• a social media / internet marketing policy for employees;
• content, editorial and engagement plans, consistent with strategy, goals and target audience;
• constantly monitored analytics, and an actionable analysis of data.

Does your organization have all the above basics in place? If not, don’t waste your time, money and resources trying to achieve a level of internet marketing you are not ready for. Just take a step by step approach, and you’ll eventually get there. But, first of all, remember to go back to basics!

The key to a successful re-engineering of the entire internet marketing and social media marketing set-up? Two major interventions, and both filed under “training”:

• strategic training for A and B level executives, that will allow to re-focus, re-plan, re-structure and re-organize the internal resources and the whole company focus;
• operational training for all employees, specially for those whose whose activities have an internet marketing impact, so they can learn the basics, and also the advanced topics of social media marketing.

To learn more about the importance of internet marketing and social media marketing training, check out my relatively new blog article about training – while the article has been published more than one year ago, the content and the Slideshare presentations included are still very valid to today’s internet marketing training needs. Or you can just get in touch with us, and we’ll figure out together what are your company’s training needs.

At my next speaking/reaching commitments I will be talking about some of the topics I already explored a lot over the last year or two: social media strategies, social media optimization, video optimization, and social media policies – of course updated to the latest news and insights. But I want to take advantage of this post to share the presentations I created on a new topic: social fundraising – a topic I’m particularly proud of since the two case histories are related to one of the most inspiring communities I ever been part of: Burning Man.

I put together the presentations embedded here for a lecture at the “Law and Economy Master on Arts and Culture” (Master in Diritto ed Economia per la Cultura e l’Arte, in Italian – DECA in short), held by a join venture of Sardinian Universities and their University Consortium in Nuoro, the institution running the DECA Master. I’ve been invited to teach a couple of classes on the topic of social fundraising for arts and culture, and I kicked it all off with a introduction of the famous Burning Man art festival in the desert of Nevada (USA), and with the principles that inspire the festival, its values and its community – with a focus on gift economy.

The first set of slides, after an introduction of the Burning Man principles and philosophy, start analyzing the concept of gift economy from historical, sociological and of course economical points of view. The presentation also introduces several sources for the gift economy, from the potlach of Native American tribes to the theories of social change of Marcel Mauss (from his famous book The Gift, 1923), all the way to the more recent applications of gift economy that can be spotted everywhere from volunteers marketplaces, time banks, open source and peer-to-peer technologies, or in hybrid forms in business models based on the freemium concept – or in the Creative Commons and Open Content standards on the copyright and digital rights side.

The second presentation is a classic presentation on social media marketing, strategies and planning – a few concepts I already shared a few times in several languages across the world. The third part of the lecture is where I actually touch base on a few concepts related to raising funds for cultural or charity initiatives by leveraging the power of social media, as well as a few online fundraising tools and applications available online for the now called “crowdfunding campaigns“. One note: there’s no such thing as “leveraging the power of social media“. For the success of a crowdfunding campaign , as well as for anything else crowd-ish, what it’s really needed is… doh, a crowd. A community, or a potential pool of supporters for the cause, a critical mass of followers turned supporters (or backers, as KickStarter defines donors) who will operate as a real grassroot booster for the campaign. Of course the turbo support of social media networks and tools helps a lot, but social media end up being more the infrastructure for the fund raising than the solution.

Power, as always, is on people’s side – but marketers (or fundraisers. in this case) can now get very creative with the fundraising infrastructure, provided that they are able to plan an effective engagement with their target audience. As usual, as for everything social media marketing, the key points are: goal setting, scrupulous planning, creative rollout, effective engagement, and full integration with offline messaging and initiatives.

…

The fourth set of slides is the one that gets me very emotional, as it shows a couple of examples of social fundraising campaigns that are very important to me – the first one from last summer when I joined the incredible IAM Temple Crew to build the Temple of Transition at Burning Man 2011. The case history shows step by step how a team of inspired and committed people distributed across the planet managed to raise around 140,000$ to build one of the most breathtaking art installation in the 25 years of history of Burning Man, just to gift it as a sacred space to the community, and to burn it in a transformational and strongly emotional rite of passage at the end of the event.

The last case history also included in the forth set of slides shows how some of the concepts and values inspired by the same Burning Man community (gift economy) are at the foundation of one initiative I launched with the support of my friends and business partners at Xister. We are currently developing an iPad application packed with kids games for toddlers that will be sold to raise funds for 8 European NGOs with active projects in the field of children’s education in Africa. The iPad4Africa project is a gift economy project and not a no-profit initiative – the difference lies in the fact that besides of giving to the charities network ALL the proceeds from the sale of the iPad app, we won’t get money back to refund our investment in the app development. That investment is our donation, our gift to Africa, with the hope that it will help raise enough money to support the education of thousands of children. More info in the presentation and of course on www.iPad4Africa.org.

Last but not least, it’s a duty and a pleasure to credit my fellow burners and amazing photographers Trey Ratcliff, Neil Girling and Scott London for the breathtaking images of the Temple reproduced here and on the Slideshare presentations. Big credits and kudos also go to all the smart, creative and brave desert brothers and sisters of IAM, the International Arts Megacrew I am proud to have joined to build the Temple of Transition at Burning Man 2011, and to the Xister team for committing with me on a important cause for Africa. No go ahead and start practicing gift economy today!

As part of a content strategy panel, I find myself in a situation where I had to “question the question“. As you can see from my presentation below, I started asking “Best content for what? For which channel? For which brand voice? For which target audience? And most of all, for which goal? So I needed to step back to “secure” a few pillars of social media marketing, classic intro to many of my presentations and, more in details, for the training sessions I teach: basics of social media such as social media targeting, social media strategies, social media performance by channel, social media resources. And closed the parenthesis with the now classic 4Ps of social media marketing (passion, patience, perseverance, proactivity), and the 4Ps Don’t of social media marketing (presume, panic, push, procrastinate).

When I started talking about content strategies, I had to “secure” another few pillars, starting with the teachings of the Cluetrain Manifesto, that more than years ago pointed out that markets (and brands) are conversations, and relationships too. Social media engagement is about talking to people with a human tone, being truly interested to their topics and being helpful in the conversations. Social media conversations must make sense, and be engaging. I also introduced another book who strongly influenced me on the understanding of social media engagement: UNmarketing, and it’s now classic payoff “stop marketing, start engaging“. Highly suggested reading.

Next step of the presentation was showing the audience how the Web has changed: web 1.0 was mostly about content, with the support of design. But in the web 2.0 social web, while the content still is important, the design has kind of lost importance in favor of the interaction. So the best approach to social media content is to be prepared for the right conversations having the right tone of voice and approach, beside of targeting the right people or groups (e-fluencers). I closed this session pointing out that successful content (specially the one that goes viral) generally falls within one or more of the 3Es: content must be educational and/or entertaining and/or enlightening. I like to add another 2 Es: engaging and ethic – and these two are not optionals. And I concluded this step of the presentation with an example of declination of social media strategies, where the content was not even “content“, but the goal of a brand to offer a smile to its customers. Who’s the visionary brand? KLM, check out the video here below.

Back to content strategies, I continued the presentation reporting the findings of a number of articles on the topic. A recent article published by Mashable suggests that there are five important keys in content strategies:

• Know your voice – Every thing you say on the social web should “sound” like your brand.
• Know your audience – Why do they follow/like you? It’s because your brand offers them something. Make sure you deliver.
• Time your content – Create an editorial plan and make sure what you say and when is relevant to your target audience’s needs.
• Solve problems – Help your audience, make sure you have the right information to share. Build trust, strengthen relationships.
• Be true – Your audiences will sniff it out if you are pretending. But if you are fun, honest and relevant, they’re going to recommend you to their friends. Isn’t that what social media is all about?

I also reported some findings from my good friend and social media expert Lee Odden, who recently published on ClickZ an article on content marketing, suggesting that there are four main effectively engaging content types: infographics, contests, videos and articles. Lee analyzes the topic giving good tips, such as those like adopting series of content releases instead of one-shot content, always be coherent with messaging, make sure content is also in tune with your conversion funnel and, most important, ask questions, seek feedback, promote UGC and use all social media channels to vehiculate your content.

I also shared more insight from other articles published by Social Media Examiner on the topic of content curation, a content strategy that can be beneficial in terms of gaining industry authority, as well as SEO relevancy – provided that content gets “curated” by an editorial team, rather than simply aggregated by unmonitored RSS feeds. Social Media Examiner suggests in various articles to adopt a publishing platform for content curation such as Scoop.it, Paper.li, Storify.com, Blip.Tv, Flipboard (for iPad) or iTunes (for podcasting) and to adopt a strategy of content curation that includes your proprietary content, best if 50/50 with other people’s relevant content.

I closed the presentation with a focus on the skills that an editorial team should have (copywriting, marketing, basic tech and plenty of curiosity), but also making the audience aware of “the dark side of content strategies” that includes many tricks and trap-holes to be aware of in the fields of digital rights and copyright, privacy and the need for a social media policy, and the blurred line between ethics and spam in social media networks and on the internet in general.

If you enjoyed this presentation, fell free to leave a comment to this blog post or on Slideshare, where you can find many other social media marketing presentations at my profile www.slideshare.com/massimoburgio.

Since we have active projects to work on, I find myself very often spending some time at the xister offices in the center of Rome (Trastevere), where there is also a community lifestyle that in my experience I can only compare to the Googlers at the Googleplex, but with an Italian spin. I love the open space on several levels and the awesome terrace where many meetings happens. Actually, since xister is an active workplace, there are constantly a number of meetings happening everywhere. I love to sneak in at many of them to get a preview of the constantly cutting edge marketing, design and technological creative solutions my friends come up with every day. In some cases (specially with old schoolers) I get pitched in on the fly for ideas or input, and I love to offer all my (free of charge) support, even if marginal in most of the cases – but I like when the input is on the training/skills side, as I know the shared knowledge will be further shared and treasured by the xister team on a number of interactive marketing projects.

A few weeks ago, while sharing the xister terrace with one of the automotive teams, I got asked some input on effective performance in online videos management, specially those published on YouTube. I grabbed a sheet of recycled paper and a pen and, since I love decalogues, I started drafting one on the spot – the one you see in the picture below, that I snapped with my camera phone to share it also through this blog. After reading it, I realized that even if the points are all there, the order of some points should be changed and some of the quickly drafted points needed more details – let’s see how I reshuffled the original YouTube videos management decalogue into the final one.

YOUTUBE VIDEOS MANAGEMENT: A DECALOGUE

1. Content first: always aim at quality (including HD resolution), and stick to the 5Es. Video content to be successful should aways be: Engaging, Entertaining, Educational, Enlightening, Ethic. Try to achieve at least two or three of this Es at the time for max viral potential.
2. Try to publish “video series” as opposite to single / standalone videos. Whenever possible, publish a trailer / sneak peak / coming soon video a week/few days before distributing the main video.
3. Always optimize the video files for search engines relevancy before uploading them: use strategic keywords for tags, metatags, title, description, etc. You can use free tools such as Metadata Hootenanny to perform your video metadata optimization.
4. Always fill in all the YouTube info fields when uploading a video file: use strategic keywords for title, description with URL, tags, categories, geolocalization info, etc.
5. If the video contains audio content, always publish an audio transcript in the description field. Use subtitles, annotations, choose a good thumbnail and leave the sharing and distribution option as open as possible.
6. Adopt also other online video sharing portals and services (such as DailyMotion, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Vimeo, etc) and manage the uploads centrally by using multiple upload tools such as TubeMogul.
7. Always monitor comments and reply to them promptly. Use comments to offer more video-related info and to drive traffic to landing pages by sharing links.
8. Explore and scout for similar / in-target videos and engage in the conversations by commenting and publishing a link to the video you want to promote.
9. Always share videos on social networks, targeting and engaging with the video content the appropriate target audience. Consider embedding to maximize video views, uploading and sharing from social network to maximize video distribution.
10. Among similar / in-target videos, spot those with the largest number of views (or strictly in target) and publish the video as video reply (link becomes available when clicking inside the comment box).

For more details on how to optimize videos for search engine also refer to this previous blog article on video SEO, where you will find plenty of video optimization tips and video SEO decalogues such as the one pictured below. Good luck with your online video management!

The article from Rosaura is so good that I decided to use it as a case of the month, simply “passing on” Rosaura’s fine social media thinking and insight to my English readers and followers. I strongly advice to those who speak Spanish to check out Rosaura’s social media blog in search of other social media inspirations. She got it totally right with the blog design, and also with her editorial and content strategies. Her articles about, for example, 5 tools to understand Twitter,  Instagram’s data, Starting small is the best social media strategy, Who likes what: demography of social media networks or The influence of Foursquare, just to name a few, have been interesting and inspiring readings for me last weekend. Rosaura also likes infographics (me too! and I guess every marketer does…) and she loves to create new ones when she’s not blogging about the latest cool infographics around in social media marketing. In brief, the RSS subscription to her blog is strongly suggested.

Now on with the topic and task of this blog article, which is to translate in English the information contained in the cool infographic about the Six Basic Principles for Social Brands (”Seis Principios Para Socializar Tu Marca“). The Six Basic Principles for Social Brands are: Characterization, Democratization, Vocalization, Systematization, Harmonization and Visualization. Let’s give all six principle a closer look with the translation of the processes described by Rosaura’s infographic – I will add some comments at the end of each point. I will start with Democratization, even if the infographic tempt me to consider Characterization as a first step – perhaps a 40° clockwise rotation of the elements of the infographic would help.

DEMOCRATIZATION

Good advice from Rosaura: fluid, fresh and frank communication is key in social media networking, specially from a brand. And social, as we know, it’s not “about me” but “about them”, so listen to your users instead of pushing content their way. I would have included the last bit with the next principle, as I see this being covered by the release of a social media policy, but it’s a good fit also here in terms of democratization of the brand. By the way, my advice to avoid potential brand crisis via comment is “The Good, The Bad, but not The Ugly” – meaning that I always advice to accept good comments (of course!) but also bad ones, if on topic with the conversation and politely expressed by the user. Ugly comments, such as defamatory, trolls provocations or offensive language directed to a brand or to other users, get canceled straight away and flagged as abusive / spam.

CHARACTERIZATION

Rosaura here put the foundations for setting the entire social media marketing infrastructure. Define your social image (including eventual avatars) and tone and voice of communication and issue a social media policy not only to define rules of engagement, but also to protect your brand, your brand representatives / social media operations team and last but not least your target audience.

VOCALIZATION

New channels need new tone of voice, and social networks need a social attitude, beside of a socially acceptable tone and voice of communication. After all your users know that they are interacting with a brand, but they also know that there are human behind such interaction, so let them feel that human voice and touch. So reinvent your brand for the social media space – both visually, verbally and socially. And don’t forget that keywords are always the key to get found, also in social media marketing (here I could open a big thread on social media optimization, but I prefer to give you a link to a previous blog post on the topic).

SYSTEMATIZATION

Here we go, gearing up for operations: editorial plans, content, social media optimization and content viralization – plus  social media marketing dashboards and monitoring/publishing tools. Rosaura got it all covered under the definition of channels, content strategies and media asset optimization, with a focus on the tools that your media marketing operation team will have to use to manage your social brand.

HARMONIZATION

Internal awareness on the social media relevance, strategics and company commitment, alongside with the coordination among company departments to unify (and optimize) the content of the communication, before of its tone and voice, has always been the hardest work for a brand social media marketer. This is why Rosaura suggests that all social media efforts should be concentrated to one single department. By doing so it will be easier to provide a solid and ongoing training support to your social media marketing operation, publishing and front end team, and it will be easier also in terms of having one focal point for all company communications to converge (by simply adopting a few organizational policies that define processes and internal fluxes) before “going social”.

VISUALIZATION

As I said at the beginning of this post, Rosaura obviously love infographics, and in this case she is even more on the spot with it. Because analytics its not only the way to measure the success of your online activities, it is also the key to management buy in for your social media marketing strategies, plans and budgets. Nobody, specially at executive levels, want to spend hours checking infinite spreadsheets full of data (unless you are not an analytics geek), and the powerful bird-eye representation and immediate focus on the most relevant insights can definitely save time when presenting campaign / channel results for budgeting or quarterly review purposes – specially if your company still invest massively on traditional media so the time dedicated in a meeting to the online/social could be sometimes chopped down to a bare elevator’s pitch.

Good job, Rosaura! Before closing this article, let me share with you a little “gem” from Rosaura’s  production, a video on “How to build a company using social media” that she produced with nice visuals and animations out of a classic infographic from 2009 that I still use today in my presentations, as it is actual today as it was two years ago (the image here on the right – click on it to enlarge it). Rosaura’s video is from the same year (2009), and it must have been a big production effort from her, as she didn’t just retweeted/linked to/published the original infographic, or simply translated it into Spanish – she extracted and isolated all key insights, adding capturing animations (like those made by Jess3) to educate to social media strategies the Spanish speaking world of marketing, a mission she is pursuing also through her activity as radio show host on social media marketing topics, or through her busy Twitter and YouTube accounts. Kudos again to Rosaura Ochoa!

Enjoy her animated infographic video! (infovideo? infomotiongraphic?)

Of course designing, planning and managing a social media marketing campaign is not as easy, as each of the points in my decalogue include plenty of sub-activities and campaign modules, so don’t think things are going to be easy as counting to 10. First of all, like Spinal Tap, my Social Media Marketing Decalogue has 11 points instead of 10. This is why I think there must be some sort of “ground zero” or “zero step” from where taking the first step, before actually do that step – and the zero step of course is the definition of social media marketing goals! But let’s see all the step of the process!

0) Define business goals for the online and social channels
As we have seen in many of my social media marketing presentations, the definition of business goals, and not just of channel goals, is the very first step of the process. The image here below shows some of the most common business goals companies should be pursuing online and on social channels.

1 – Define competitors, benchmarks, social media strategy, target audience and, most of all, e-fluencers
Before “jumping on Facebook” or any other social media portal it is suggested to study good benchmarks from your industry and run an accurate online competitor analysis. Also be sure to engage where your target audience is. Define your target audience and investigate on its online social behavior – most important, try to figure out who your e-fluencers are, you are going to need their help a lot. This is also where your social media strategy starts to takes shape.

2 – Choose and customize all strategic social media channels
Once your preliminary analysis is complete, it’s time to take possession of your social media spaces. The Conversation Prism designed by Brian Solis and Jess3 (image below) shows you how the online conversation is often fragmented, with clusters of your target audience everywhere, not just on Facebook. Optimization and customization here are key – you’ll need to create customized profiles whenever it’s possible, full descriptions with links and all, pictures, videos, customized maps, interactive tabs, custom apps, vanity URLs and all that it’s needed for a performing and relevant social media presence.

3 – Allocate resources (people, time, and knowledge to be shared) and make sure that all strategic communication processes converge on social channels
A company, specially a big brand, cannot face the volume of time-material work needed in social media marketing to monitor, engage, produce content and run all day by day operations. A dedicated team is needed and, in some cases, also the support of a dedicated, professional social media marketing agency. Also, this is not just the job of a Marketing department guy – or IT, or else. Non only the entire company should be involved in the new social media presence, but it is also important to make sure that all communications intended towards outside the company find also their respective, optimized social media output. It’s a long work that might require a redefinition of the communication processes, some guidelines and procedures, and of course good training.

4 – Define a social media policy for your employees, and run intensive training sessions for your social media marketing team
Training is key for your social media team, but also for A-level executives who should participate to the process (starting with the business goals definition), as well as any other employee. Generally a social media policy can help set the things straight, but the social media policy alone is no use if it introduction is not supported by intensive social media marketing training sessions to the management, the marketing team, the internet and social media marketing teams, the PR, communication and IT teams and, whenever possible, extended to all employees. As a matter of fact, good social media policies should be shared also with clients, business partners and suppliers, the entire “business ecosystem” of your company’s communication.

5 – Define and share editorial and engagement plans
Once your social media marketing profiles are set up and ready to go, what’s the next step? Listening to the online buzz every day, sure. And engaging, but how? Make sure you create a valuable form of engagement for your target audience. If you keep talking only about yourself nobody wants to listen. It is important to define, create, optimize and share on social networks content that can be appealing to your target audience, and possibly also that produces feedback/interaction. One other important thing to take in consideration is the convergence of all communication needs (from institutional/corporate to commercial, promotional and social communication) and their roll out calendar. It is important to create an editorial plan for the content you want to share, in order to make it easier to plan its production and distribution. You’ll also need an engagement plan, that should take in consideration a lot of interaction on “other profiles” (users, pages, groups) instead of staying bunkered on your owns. This is in general beneficial to a very effective engagement with your target audience.

6 – Define specific KPIs for each channels, and for different goals within each channel
Both your editorial and engagement plans should state specific goals and KPIs and social KPIs, possibly defined by channel, and of course proportional to the effort that your social media marketing plan is dedicating to each channel.

7 – Roll out of all engagement initiatives towards the target audience – pages, groups, tags, hashtags, apps, social ads, etc.
Wow, we are finally ready to go and launch! We had to wait until point 7 of the decalogue, but the preliminary work and the organizational and procedural work of goal setting, analysis, optimization and planning will certainly show its results! Now define a plan of actions that is tied with your editorial plan, engagement plan and overall goals, and you are on your way to success!

8 – Integrate across your social media channels the core messaging of all other communication channels, and social media content across all your communication channels
Easy to say, not so easy when it comes to actually implement this point. Yes your teams all across your company had their social media training, and your company might have also rolled out a social media policy and a set of procedures, but – will your company reach well to these changes? Sometimes it is difficult to change consolidated internal procedures (or just “habits“), but if you want your company messaging to be consistent, effective and pervasive, you need to make sure Integrate across your social media channels the core messaging of all other communication channels, and social media content across all your communication channels.

9 – Measure your results and re-evaluate your KPIs and Social KPIs. Integrate with Social CRM systems and methodologies.
All the above is useless, specially the definition of goals and KPIs if there is not a strong focus on the analytics of your social media marketing efforts. Many companies are still stuck to the “basic” old-school metrics of “visitors” and “page views“, which are useless in the social media arena. It’s more effective a very receptive, active and influential group of 1,000 power users than 1,000,000 fans who just press “like” or drop the occasional comment. It’s more “social” a video (or other content) that has been shared 1,000 times than the same content being “liked” 2,000 times. Don’t take these figures for granted, they are just ballparks out of my experience on clients’ projects, but at the end it all depends on your KPIs and social KPIs. Assess the effectiveness of your plans, initiatives and resources towards such KPIs and take action – change plans or even KPIs or goals, if needed! If your company has a CRM system already in place, it could be a great idea starting integrating all the social media marketing data in your CRM, making it evolving into a more dynamic and accurate Social CRM. Your CRM is a pachyderm with a closed environment that doesn’t allow to integrate new modules? No problem, today Social CRM platforms are practically an off-the-shelf solution, with plenty of solid options to choose from.

10 – Keep testing new social media marketing channels and strategies
The social media landscape is constantly evolving, to a point that it is difficult to forecast what the scenario will be in one year or even more. After the first wave of blogs and wikis (1999-2003) it came then Linkedin (2004) and YouTube (2005) before Facebook exploded (2006), followed by Twitter (2007-2008), while now we are in the full bloom of the geotargeted social networks, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and, again, Facebook Places, all in full mobile/smartphone integration, while our society is moving fast into the tablet and almost “wearable” computers and digital devices. [Note: the dates refer to when the portals / services started being popular, and not to their actual launch]. New communities keep popping up successfully, think Instagram, the community based on the geolocalized exchange of pictures taken with the cool camera iPhone app filters and features. Or the recently launched Google+ network, that we’ll discuss soon at this blog. A company or brand on its way to a comprehensive and effective social media engagement should constantly be following at least the major trends and, if tested with a reasonable rate of success, keep investing on those new channels and technologies – of course don’t forgetting the consolidated ones!

I hope this decalogue / recap will be of some help if you are figuring out which are the basic steps for engaging in social media marketing. Just be aware: the steps won’t be so basic!

Do you have comments and integrations to the decalogue? Also, do you want to share your experience in setting up a social media marketing plan / campaign? What was your methodology? Please drop a comment!

Over the last 6 months, and for the forthcoming months of this year, my agenda has been more populated by training and teaching commitments than conferences – that’s besides clients’ projects, of course. Everybody seems to understand that the key to engage on the web in a successful way is to “know what you’re doing“. And everybody in the online marketing industry, both on advertisers’ and agencies’ sides, needs to know exactly what they are doing when engaging with their online audience.

Global Search Interactive’s latest client, Telepass, put training and the ability of their internet marketing team to master all social channels as a prime goal and delivery of the collaboration with our agency, while a new future corporate client (cannot disclose the brand at this moment) decided to buy two full days of in-house search marketing and social media marketing training for their brand marketing team BEFORE meeting to discuss the proposal – so they will know exactly what we’ll be planning and discussing with the agency. This was really surprising, but I have to say that it also demonstrates professionalism.
Chapeau. I love to have clients like this, by the way.

Search and social media marketing training is a big trend not only on the advertiser / client side, but also for agencies. This year started for me with a two-day training session to the team (marketing, creative, developing and sales/accounting) of one of the GSI’s partner agencies, Wooi and parent company EcohMedia, while last month I offered several training sessions to the editorial team of the Rome-based lifestyle portal GaiaxRoma, another recent partner of Global Search Interactive. I also delivered training to other agencies in Italy and Europe who ask me for confidentiality, but I have to say that I see the internet marketing agencies more and more strategically focused on the training to their resources – definitely more than I am used to see in the online marketing industry since the early ’90s.

There was more search and social media marketing training across Europe for me over the last months, since I have been invited to give a workshop in Spain at the Internet Meeting Point of Gijon, Asturias (the slides of the presentation, in Spanish, are available on Slideshare). The Spanish workshop has been closely followed by a Master Class I gave for the DigitalMarkedsFørung 2010 in Holstebro, Denmark – the training slides in English are also available on Slideshare, but let me embed them here for your convenience! =)

I’m also committed to teaching at several Master in Social Media Marketing, such as the Spanish Master en Redes Sociales (Master in Social Networks) organized in Bilbao, Euskadi (Basque Country) by the prestigious Universidad de Deusto. The master, already announced, will kick-off soon. I will also be teaching at the Master in Community Management organized in Bilbao by Comma, the Spanish Community Managers Associations in partnership with EITB, the public Basque TV broadcaster. The program of the Comma Master is very complete and interesting, teaching to from marketing to psychology to technology, communication and project management, not forgetting all the geeky stuff of the profession, like the topics of Social Media Optimization that I will be covering. Other university Masters where I am involved on the teaching side are the ones just launched by the University of Sassari, in Sardinia, Italy (focusing on art, culture, environment and sustainable growth), or the one organized at UNISOB, one of the Universities of Naples, by the Italian food leader authority Gambero Rosso, who launched a Master in Gourmet Food Marketing last year.

The teaching / training format for the classes I gave at UNISOB is pretty new and very hands-on. I came out with it after realizing that people needs to fully understand the practical aspects of social media, as well as the strategic ones. My two classes at Naple’s UNISOB, divided in two full day of class training and interaction, were focused on “how to create a WordPress blog“. During the first class, after a couple of hours of review of search marketing, social media marketing and blogging topics, I asked each of the students to propose a blogging theme. then we drafted one and I went from scratch through all steps of the blogging process, from strategy and keyword/competitive analysis to tech implementation, optimization and publishing. The result has been the blog Cucina Sensuale (sensual cuisine), that I created live by using a free template, free widgets/plugins and no customized CSS. Of course it is possible to work a bit more on the blog, but the idea was to show that everybody can set up a performing blog in just few hours of work.

…..

The students at UNISOB had a month before we met again to create their own blogs on the topics they proposed – the second full day class at the master was a site clinic session where I dedicated half an hour to each of the students, analyzing their blogging efforts. The students loved the format, and now they all have a blog each, rather than just a bunch of slides and the head full of notions. Here below is the step-by-step presentation that I prepared after the class and embedded also on a blog page named “training blog” – but will I also embedded here above for your convenience.

The conference + training workshop formula has today been adopted by the major and most advanced industry events, such as Search Engine Strategies (SES), Search Marketing Advanced (SMX) or Web Congress. Among the other training commitments, I also offered a social media marketing workshop at the recent Web Congress Barcelona, which I will replicate at the forthcoming Web Congress Valencia next month. Did I mentioned that I will be also deliver social media marketing training workshops during the month of June in Nairobi (Kenya) at the forthcoming AfriTech Summit Kenya?

So many training opportunities to skill up yourself and your team in all the latest strategic and operational topics of search and social media marketing – which one is the right one for you? Just get in touch and let’s talk about your training needs!

The content of my presentations at the different events changes according the time I have for my presentation, but the core of the research, methodology and messaging about the creation and release of a corporate social media policy for employees is pretty much the same as the one you can find in the presentation here below from International Search Summit London 2010, hosted at my Slideshare account. This is also the most complete presentation I did on the social media policy topic to date, spinning the topic off a Facebook Marketing session.

Since I had a full half hour for my presentation at ISS London, I could have talked in details about social media policies, including the following scenarios:

• understanding the risks of brand exposure and reputation on social media networks
• all the reasons why you can get banned on Facebook and get your account revoked
• what if your company gets a social media corporate account banned or revoked?
• why companies need a social media policy
• where the social media policy should apply and to whom
• classic corporate social media policies
• benchmark on the best corporate social media policies
• how to build a social media policy
• inspirations for social media policies: bloggers’ code of conduct and blogosphere ethics
• social media networks rules of engagement
• social media don’ts and best practices for Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, Digg and FriendFeed
• final case history from the Italian firm Telepass, one of the latest clients at Global Search Interactive: Telepass’ social media policy + company guidelines for employees’ engagement in online conversations.

Have you company already issued a social media policy? What is your experience on the topic? Please share your comments.

Add a line up of top speakers for the conference on day one, a series of workshops on day two, a great participative audience, amazing networking opportunities and, as always, a stunning event location (the brand new Palacio de Ferias y Congresos de Málaga), and Web Congress Málaga easily turn into the best online marketing conference I moderated this year.

The conference day at Web Congress Málaga was packed with great content and interesting presentations from Google, Yahoo! and YouTube, but also Red.es, W3C España, Havas Digital, CamerPyme, among others. Very interesting the local Andalusian focus with presentations from Club de Marketing de Málaga, Club Málaga Valley, Andalucia Lab and Andalucia Web Solutions, as well as the social media presentation by blogger and social media expert Keka Sanchez and the interesting business/finance presentation by René de Jong of Internet Advantage on “How to plan a budget for internet marketing campaigns“. Being the SEO geek that I am, I also really enjoyed the SEO panel with three among the most influential SEO in Spain: Sico de Andres, Señor Muñoz and Tomas Rufino.

But also, being the social media geek that I am, I couldn’t be amazed by the presentation of Juan Luis Polo of Territorio Creativo on “The Future of Social Media“. Being also a Spanish Twitter hero, Juan Luis delivered a very powerful presentation all based on #hashtags, titled #todobajocontrol (#everythingundercontrol). During the presentation Juan Luis Polo also explored the state of social media in Spain, with data and insight from the latest social media research produced by Territorio Creativo. Very interesting data, download it and check it out if you speak Spanish or are interested on the Spanish social media market.

Juan Luis Polo got my attention immediately as he reminded that online conversations are not big news, and the Cluetrain Manifesto was already saying back in 1999 that “markets are conversations“.
The Cluetrain Manifesto also predicted more than 10 years ago “hot social media topics” such as the fact that user powered web produces buzz with impact on brand reputation. Juan Luis quoted several highlights from the classic marketing book, including the classic “In just a few more years, the current homogenized voice of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court“, “Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone“, “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.” and “Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die“.

Other grest insight came from other slides were Juan Luis showed a vision of social media marketing with a nice infographic mandala (I love social media infographic mandalas, such as the conversation prism) you can see in one of the images here below. Other highlights from Juan Luis Polo were the three pillars for social media marketing campaigns (strategy, creativity and community management), a methodology with strategic focus and even more focus on the internal organization and 2.0 culture within the company, beside of a true web 2.0 identity.
And the future of social media according to Juan Luis Polo? The seamless integration of organization, identity and social CRM! Check out some of the slides here below.

Great presentation, definitely the most interesting social media marketing presentation at WebCongress Málaga, well done Juan Luis! The presentation is not online yet, but you can browse other Juan Luis’ presentations on Slideshare or get in touch with him through Twitter at @juanluispolo.

I also did a presentation at WebCongress Málaga, beside of moderating the event, but it was not as powerful as the one delivered by Juan Luis.
Note: my presentation on “Facebook Marketing – Killer Tactics (that gets you killed)” was actually a version in Spanish of a presentation I did two days earlier in Sweden at SMX Stockholm 2010, in English. I further refined the presentation and integrated other social media ethics content for a final, full version presented at the recent keynote I held at the DigitalMarketingFørung 2010 in Holstebro, Denmark. I will post the final version of the presentation (in English) at this blog soon, and of course it will also be on my Slideshare account. Follow me!

My presentation and moderation at WebCongress Málaga was well appreciated from the local Andalusian and Spanish audience, with many posts from bloggers (here, here, here and here, all in Spanish) and an article by Málaga’s main newspaper, Diario Sur. Thanks to all, and thanks also to the WebCongress Málaga audience, always very active, participative and open to share experiences and to contribute to the conversation.

Last words for this post go to the great organization of WebCongress Málaga, all curated by Ouali Benziamane and his Dowbleyou team. You are treating the Spanish online marketing industry to a new standard in event organization that is really hard to beat! All thumbs up for you guys! Do you want to take part to further WebCongress events? Just check out the event website, as WebCongress will be coming back soon to Barcelona (WebCongress + SearchCongress together) next March 11, 2011. And there are even more events planned worldwide and coming soon! I can’t wait Search Congress to hit Italy next year!

The first conference of the season I have been invited to happened right on September 23, the autumn equinox day, the same day we changed the template to the Global Search Interactive blog. I participated to a round table in Rome on Contemporary Direct Marketing organized by Business International, where I contributed to the interesting discussion wearing my SEMPO Board of Directors hat and talking about search engine marketing as “online direct marketing on demand” – but also giving good tips on how, rather than cannibalizing direct marketing, search and social media marketing can represent a huge opportunity for direct marketers when integrated in direct marketing practices, from targeting to conversion.

While I am writing this post from Stockholm, I am getting ready for my second conference of the season, the now classic Scandinavian appointment with advanced search marketing, SMX Stockholm. The Swedish conference, part of the international circuit of events organized by Search Engine Land (home to search gurus Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman), will bring to Stockholm the top Scandinavian and European search marketing experts for two days of interesting presentations, discussions and networking. I am proud to be involved more than ever at SMX Stockholm not only with two presentations (one on Digital Media Optimization, the other the hot topic of “Facebook tricks that get you killed” and lose your account), but also as moderator of one of the two conferences tracks for the entire first day of the conference. I will share my new presentations soon on Slideshare and on this blog, stay tuned!

Yes, the autumn is pretty advanced here in Sweden, and the temperatures are definitely lower than in Rome. But I will revert the trend and will get back to summer later on this week, when I will fly from Stockholm to Malaga, Spain, to participate as speaker and moderator to the new internet marketing Spanish event WebCongress. An outspring of the successful series of search marketing events Search Congress, with which I have been involved since day one back in January 2009, WebCongress Malaga starts a new series of events where internet marketing is explored not only via search marketing, social media marketing and web analytics, but also with a close look at the key topics in web design, programming and hosting. This “bundle” is pretty unique in the landscape of internet marketing conferences, and WebCongress is ready to take over 2011 with several events scheduled across Spain and other countries in Europe (including Italy!).

October is still a busy month on my agenda for European conferences. After WebCongress Malaga, I’m expected to deliver a workshop on search and social media marketing topic in Oviedo (Asturias, Spain) for the Fundación CTIC / Parque Científico y Tecnológico de Gijón. I really love Asturias, and I always like to get involved with the local professional circuits, as I already did a few times this year speaking at Foro Ecommerce, Internet Meeting Point and also delivering a keynote for Iniciador Asturias, the Spanish entrepreneurs’ network.

Immediately after the workshop in Asturias, I am expected in London as a speaker for International Search Summit London (ISS London), another great conference and networking event for search marketers, focusing on multi-language and multi-countries search marketing campaigns. I spoke at ISS London last year, and also at ISS Berlin last June, where I have been awarded a Medallion Speaker Award by the public of the conference – another reason that ties me to the International Search Summit, beside of the long term friendship with the guys from WebCertain, who are behind the organization of the international search conference.

At the end of October, immediately after ISS London, I will be in charge as Chairman and moderator of another conference organized by Business International in Milan, Italy, on the topic of Viral and Buzz Marketing. Cannot give other info now, but be sure that I will blog about it soon. November doesn’t seems so busy on my conference agenda, but I really look forward to participate as keynote speaker at the Digital Marketing Forum 2010 (Digital Markedsføring 2010) in Holstebro, Denmark. Beside of the keynote, I will be presenting a workshop on social media marketing the day after the conference, and I am expected to deliver an “inspirational speech” the night before the conference at a private dinner for the speakers of the conference – I will be definitely talking about Burning Man! =)

Also December it’s not so busy – I’m trying to keep November and December available for my clients, as of course we will have to support them closely to define all the initiatives and the budgets for 2011. Nevertheless, I cannot miss the second appointment with WebCongress, that after Andalucia will hit Catalunya with WebCongress Barcelona in December (dates yet to be announced). In January and February I will be back to the United States for a SEMPO Board of Directors meeting in New York and a speaking commitment in Santa Monica, California, for DomainFest Global 2011, whose organizers actually invited me also for their October 2010 event in Prague, but I had to decline as it was in conflict with other previous commitments.

But this is already the winter agenda, when autumn will be just a memory and also the Global Search Interactive blog will lose the red leaves to change again its template and reflect the more snowy colors of the winter (just wait for the winter solstice on December 21).

I will blog about the next conferences, as we get more closer to all these events. Follow this blog as I will be also publishing all my presentations, and possibly video interviews to some of the international search and social media marketing experts that I will have the pleasure to share some conference panels with. Also, remember that I will be tweeting live from the conferences but not from my regular Twitter account @massimoburgio – follow @massimolive instead for live conference coverage.

That’s all folks! Enjoy the autumn! =)