Whether people are shopping for corn flakes, concert tickets or a honeymoon in Paris, the Internet has changed how we decide what to buy. Today, we’re all digital explorers seeking out online ratings, peer reviews, videos, and in-depth product details as we move down the path to purchase. That’s the premise of the new ebook titled Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) by Jim Lecinski, Managing Director at Google.

The zero moment of truth is the activity of a search on Google or someone reaching out to their social networks to get answers about brands, products or services. For example, will it work? What else do I need to know? Or, is this the best choice for me?

Lecinski acknowledges that ZMOT is still a fairly new concept and provides these seven keys to taking better advantage of the ZMOT for your brand:

ZMOT #1 – Someone should be in charge of the zero moment of truth.
Identify an employee in your company who gets the concept and is close to the customer (maybe someone in customer service already) and have them take on responsibility for how your brand is planning for and capitalizing on ZMOT.

ZMOT #2 – Find zero moments in your category.
You can use the Google autofill search function on Google.com to put in your brand name or category and see what the suggested search autofills are. The results should begin to help you understand how people are searching for your brand or category. Be sure to log out of Google before you do this so your own history doesn’t skew the results.

ZMOT #3 – Provide answers to questions.
Once you understand how people search for you and your category in the ZMOT, make sure you show up in searches and provide answers to people’s queries during the ZMOT. The Google keyword tool will help you understand the volume of the searches that appear. Google has made changes in it search algorithm to rank reviews high, especially from within your social network high along with adding the +1 function to indicate worthwhile information.

ZMOT #4 – Optimize your ZMOT.
It’s important to know where the ZMOT is taking place. Lecinski states that less than 25% of B2B websites are optimized for mobile devices and mobile may be where the search is taking place.

ZMOT #5 – Be Quick.
Potential buyers will react to wildcard stimuli e.g. a mention on TV show or an online article which can trigger the ZMOT search. Even though a brand can’t often plan for these stimuli, you need to be ready when it happens so people find what they need. Lecinski advises calls-to-action in offline communications that point potential buyers to the ZMOT online.

ZMOT #6 – Video is crucial.
There is much data that shows the importance of video in buying decisions. A brand can provide answers to a whole variety of questions on YouTube and video placed on a brand website. Add real-life testimonials and case studies to the video mix.

ZMOT #7 – Jump In.
ZMOT is a new concept but there are best practices. The right strategies are still being defined and understood, but it’s critical to get started to give your brand a competitive edge.

Download the Zero Moment of Truth.

Google has just released a new version of their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. It’s starts with a little bit too-cute Googlebot (holding flowers) explaining how it will be your guide as you go through the process of making your website Google search and SEO friendly.

The guide will be a lot of help to the novice. If you care about searchbots’ ability to find and rank your website favorably, download it and then read it. And then alter your approach to SEO accordingly.

In 32 pages the guide covers:

• SEO Basics
• Improving Site Structure
• Optimizing Content
• Dealing with Crawlers
• SEO for Mobile Phones
• Promotions and Analysis.

Even if you plan to outsource your SEO you need to read this so you will have a clear understanding of what the work involves.

With your guide at hand, these are some useful questions to ask an SEO vendor:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

If you’ve been following what I have been preaching and actually implementing on a regular basis, you already know that once you add content to your website you must promote it. I have no problem tweeting about my new blog posts, or even writing other blog posts about my blog posts and adding links on other web sites to my blog posts. And, yes, this appears to be the first time that Google has come out and said that it may help your website if you effectively promote your own content.

So, when you add content to your website, don’t be afraid to tweet about it on Twitter. Or even add it to a few of your favorite social bookmarking websites. It might just help your search engine rankings and search engine optimization. Google says it’s okay!

Have you used the guide and did you find it helpful?

You just wrote a great new post for your business blog that has it all. It’s engaging, well written, concise, tightly edited and it’s got a fantastic accompanying picture to boot. You publish it to your corporate blog and marvel at its splendor. “What a great blog post” you say to yourself, “it has to be one of our best”.

Every 1-2 hours you stop what you’re doing to tweak it a little here and there. Cool! Now it’s perfect.

A day later you examine Google Analytics and see you’ve only had three readers. Not good. You and your team have put all this work into writing and editing the new post and no one has read it. It’s discouraging. It’s downright infuriating!

What can you do to get more readers?

There’s plenty you can do. Use some simple SEO techniques and social networking sites and you’ll potentially reach hundreds even thousands of new readers. Below I’ve listed websites and tools you can use to get that awesome new blog post out to your target audience.

Make sure you’ve got a list of about 10-12 relevant keywords peppered within in your blog post. Relevancy is important. Also, make sure people are using those keywords on search engines to find content like yours. You can use Google’s External Keyword Tool to do this. Important: You’ll also be using these same keywords as tags as you go through the process of submitting your blog post to many of the websites below.

Finally, if you haven’t already done so, add ‘Like’, ‘Tweet’, ‘Share’ (LinkedIn) and ‘+ 1’ (Google) buttons to your blog for easy sharing. Empower readers to share your blog post with their friends and colleagues. This is far more likely to happen if you’ve written an interesting or helpful post.

Blog Ping Services
These are services to notify different search engines that your blog has been updated or exists. Copy and paste your blog url into these sites. Some sites will also ask you to enter the specific blog post url.
blogsearch.google.com/ping
pingomatic.com/
www.pingmyblog.com/
feedshark.brainbliss.com/
pingates.com/

Bookmarking and News Aggregator Services
These sites are a very good way of sharing your blog posts within the top news aggregator websites like Digg.com and Reddit.com. You also want to save each blog post as a bookmark on sites like Diigo.com and Delicious.com. Stumbleupon is the darling of website sharing these days. Make sure to add appropriate tags (keywords) for each blog post you submit.

www.stumbleupon.com
digg.com/news
www.delicious.com
www.reddit.com
www.diigo.com
www.mixx.com/ (recently acquired)
www.newsvine.com
www.wikio.com

Use a freemium service like www.onlywire.com to submit your blog url to multiple bookmarking sites at one time.

LinkedIn Groups
Groups on LinkedIn can be a good way to reach your target audience and get more readers for your business blog. Try to be certain that the blog post will be something the group members will be interested in. If not, the community will potentially see you as a spammer and pay no attention to you and your posts in the future. Many discussions in groups are nothing better than people pitching their services. Rise above that and provide value to the group members in the form of informative posts.

Easily share a relevant news update as “Discussions” from one Group to all your Groups:

After you “share” your news as a Discussion in one Group, do the following:

1. Click on the link you submitted
2. The blog post you’re sharing will open within LinkedIn
3. Click on the ‘Share’ button at the top
4. Check the button ‘Post to Groups’
5. Start entering the names of all the groups you’re a member of
6. Click the blue ‘Share’ button in the pop up window

LinkedIn.com
There are some great ways to get more readers to your business blog within LinkedIn. I’ve listed some very effective ways below.

Connect your corporate blog to employee Profiles on LinkedIn. This will help your employees have a more “sticky” profile and it will help broaden your blog’s reach. You’ll use the Wordpress Application under the ‘More’ tab. For details click here.

• Ask each employee to add a short description of the blog post along with the url to the update area (“What’s on your mind?”) section of their Home page.
• Use the “Send a message” feature to send a short description of the blog post and url to key prospects, partners and customers. Ask them to use the Share button beneath the post to share it with others.

Your Facebook Fan Page
Be sure to add each blog post to your FB Fan page. Consider adding the posts on the weekend since many people can’t access Facebook at work. Research shows that more people log in to Facebook on Saturday and Sunday than any other days.

• You can add your blog as a tab to your Facebook Fan page using Blog RSS Feed Reader. Follow this link.
• An alternative to adding your blog as an RSS feed is to copy and paste each post into the Notes tab. Do this by simply adding Notes as a tab at the top of your Fan page.

bit.ly and Other Link Shorteners
Go to http://bit.ly and sign up for an account if you haven’t already done so. By having a dedicated account you’ll get accurate data to help you decide which content is being shared (retweeted) and gets the most clicks.

• Add your bitly API ( description here: http://bit.ly/pages/tools) to Tweetdeck, CoTweet and Hootsuite for accurate data.
• Once you add your bitly API, Tweetdeck and others will shorten your web links using your specific bit.ly account.

Twitter
Tweeting with a link to your blog post can be a very effective way to grow your readership. Add Twitter hashtags to your tweets for categorization. In other words, if your blog post and tweet is about cloud computing include #cloudcomputing to the tweet. That way, anyone searching for that hashtag will find your tweet. Also, people may have a “cloud computing” search column visible on HootSuite, Tweetdeck or Seesmic for tracking mentions of those keywords.

• Send a tweet once in the morning, once at lunchtime and again around 5pm. Why? Because not everyone is going to see your tweets because Twitter is real-time.
• Be sure to ask your followers to retweet your tweet. Leave 20 characters over so that people can easily retweet your tweet and not have to edit it.
• Research has shown that tweeting new blog posts can significantly increase your followers on Twitter.

Sharing Your Blog Post on Other Industry Blogs
Another way to reach a bigger audience is to post comments to big industry blogs and adding your blog url or specific post url. Caution: DO NOT SPAM these blogs. Only comment and add your post if it’s extremely relevant. Again, you’ll be seen as nothing more than a spammer by the blog’s author and readers. In fact, your comment won’t be approved for publishing.

Search for other industry-related blogs using sites like Stumbleupon,  Technorati.com and Google Blog Search and start to dialogue with other bloggers by commenting. Ask questions too. Include your blog url in comment and in the website field when signing in to the blog.

By the way, always ask your readers to comment at the end of your blog post. For example, ask people a question or for comment. This is after social media.

Do you have others ways you like to reach your target audience that I haven’t mentioned here?

Social media strategists at larger corporations can have a lot to deal with when planning and implementing social media initiatives. As the social media strategist for XO Communications, one of the the largest B2B telecom and communications companies in the U.S, I face many challenges on a daily basis.  However, one of the biggest factors that has helped me find my way through the social media labyrinth is by asking questions. I ask people questions all the time and for the most part get very helpful answers.

Marketers and business stakeholders frequently ask me questions about social media, which I try to answer as best as I can.  I began to wonder how other social media strategist would answer the most frequently asked questions. So I asked the top social media strategists at companies like Ford, Samsung, Network Solutions, Cisco and others what their number one social media tip would be for marketers and business stakeholders and these are their answers. Some of the answers are philosophical and some are very practical but I think you’ll find some really good nuggets of advice in these answers.

Please don’t forget to share all these social media tips by Liking and Tweeting.

Follow everyone below and get more tips by following my corporate social media strategist list on Twitter.

If you’d like to know more about them (and me) you can find us all on Jeremiah Owyang’s list of corporate social media strategists.

If you’re a social media strategist on Jeremiah Owyang’s list, please answer this question. I’ll upload your answer to this growing list of top social media tips.

Remember that this is social. Don’t approach it as an opportunity to sell, sell, sell. It’s about building relationships and trust – things that take time and come from reliable and repeatable actions. Treat social media just as you would a social function in real life.

Scott Monty
http://www.scottmonty.com
@scottmonty
scott [at] scottmonty [dot] com

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Stay flexible. The social media environment is fast-paced, presenting new opportunities on a regular basis. Use experiences to learn, adjust and prepare for future possibilities.

Change – Technology, community and customers will evolve and so will companies. From the Pony Express to Telegraph, radio, TV, email we have learnt to get skilled at and use communication tools. Social tools are the current and future communication tools and it is important to learn and watch their adoption and use. Test and measure till you succeed.

Shashi Bellamkonda
Director Social Media
Network Solutions
@shashib

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Use the friendship paradox to identify the social brokers at opaque target markets. Identifying people closer to the center of the social graph delivers higher ROI when evangelizing.

Eran Barak
SVP Community Strategy
Thomson Reuters

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Be customer-centric. That means you need to be responsive, act fast, think long-term, care about the people you engage with, represent your customers within your company, and consistently provide valuable content, information and service.

Esteban Contreras
Social Media Manager
Samsung USA
@SamsungEsteban
www.socialnerdia.com

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Social media marketing is about interaction, not broadcasting. Join the conversation. Get in a dialogue.

@MikeBoehmer57

http://mikeboehmer57.wordpress.com/

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You’ve asked for my #1 tip, but I’m going to give you my top 3: ENGAGE, ENGAGE, ENGAGE.

If you’ve read the book, “We Are Smarter Than Me” then you may remember this quote: “Historically, people have gathered in marketplaces to swap stories and goods.  This perspective got lost during the rise of mass production and mass communication.  The Web brings it back.  Today successful marketing depends not only on broadcast and reach, but also on word-of-mouth – the high-tech equivalent of the human conversations in a souk, bazaar or general store porch.”

The use of SoMe involves minimal financial investment  and is more than 50% less than the cost of traditional print, radio and television advertising.  You meet the target market on their “turf”, and speak, not TO them, but, rather, WITH them in a language in which they are comfortable and fluent.  You engage them in the places where they gather, leverage their influence in promoting the sale of your products and utilize the networks they have built to accomplish your goals.

Remember, if they’ve chosen to “friend” and “follow” you, that means they’ve INVITED you in!   Talk with them, get to know them, engage them in conversation just as if you were sitting with them on the front porch of the General Store.
I’m happy to to talk with you about your ideas and plans, so I encourage you to connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or the old-fashioned way, in real life.

Michael Palko
www.twitter.com/mpalko
www.linkedin/in/palko

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It’s a bit like trying to answer the question, “What’s your number one favorite movie?” Hard to whittle down, but I’ll stick to the letter of the question.

My number one tip is “Be Courageous.” Have the courage to create a refreshing social voice for your brand. Have the courage to hold your ground when questioned by the traditional marketers. Have the courage to be proactive in telling your organization why Social Media is important and that it is going to create value in time. Have the courage to plan and execute.

Social Media in it’s early days is not for the faint of heart. Couple that courage with confidence and you will see amazing progress.

Steve Furman
Discover Financial Servcies
@stevefurman

http://www.expedientmeans.com

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Decide on your objectives *before* choosing your channels. I hear too many times “I need a blog or I need to be on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube” without much thought behind choosing channels that will best meet communications or campaign objectives.

Steve Lunceford, Public Sector Strategic Communications
Deloitte
@dslunceford & @GovTwit

http://blog.govtwit.com

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Always start with your brand, product and/or service positioning, purpose and objectives.  Your social media marketing program should be an important part of your overall integrated marketing plan.  However, it is only one part of that plan.  Social media marketing works best when it is fully integrated with your digital and traditional marketing efforts.  Establish multiple touchpoints for your customers and consumers to engage with you that include social media, digital, in-store and traditional marketing allowing them to choose their preferred engagement path.  Finally, start slow with social media, build up your expertise and brand voice, then scale.

Bert DuMars
Vice President E-Business & Interactive Marketing
Newell Rubbermaid
@bwdumars

http://linkedin.com/in/dumars

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The old rules apply to New Media. You will still have to cut through the clutter, be memorable, provide something of value, ask for a response and close the transaction… Remember, you are selling to humans, not apps. And, people haven’t changed in 5,000 years.

Dan Chamberlain
Internet Strategy
Dominion Resources Services, Inc.
@danchamberlain
www.Dom.com

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Customers are organizing themselves socially regardless of how a company organizes internally.

Therefore, as social networking progresses further, tying cross-functional actions to real-time enterprise insights is the key to move from simply reacting as an “also ran” in social media to uniquely transforming your entire organization to stay nimble and relevant to your customer needs.

Charles E. Miller
Director, Digital Care and Social Media
DIRECTV
@chasmiller

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Social media is a conversation at the intersection of what you want to say and what your customers want to talk about.

Keith McArthur
Senior Director, Social Media
Rogers Communications
@keithmcarthur
@RogersKeith

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Be normal. I see many companies and individuals try too hard to project an image that doesn’t fit or doesn’t seem legitimate (or both). Be yourself. Be true to your or your company’s strengths, personality, voice and demeanor. If you push your luck being someone or something you’re not, you lose your credibility and soon enough, your clout and audience.

Mike Rivera
Senior New Media Strategist
University of Denver
@heavywinter

http://www.heavywinter.com

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Work hard to demystify social media within your organization. Obstacles happen when people are uncomfortable with or do not understand a topic. Success in adopting the medium will depend on your ability to deconstruct information being collected from these networks and provide the relevant context needed to demonstrate how social media activities can create business results and quantifiable outputs. The demystification will do more to promote your objectives than showing benchmarks, speaking an unidentifiable lingo or showing presentations with a bunch of social companies’ logos.

Matt Ceniceros
Director, Media Relations
Applied Materials
blog.amat.com
@mattceni | mattceni.com

————————————————————————————

Change – Technology, community and customers will evolve and so will companies. From the Pony Express to Telegraph, radio, TV, email we have learnt to get skilled at and use communication tools. Social tools are the current and future communication tools and it is important to learn and watch their adoption and use. Test and measure till you succeed.

Gayle Weisswasser
Vice-President, Social Media Communications
Discovery Communications
http://everydayiwritethebook.typepad.com/

————————————————————————————

Always, always remember that it’s about talking WITH the customer, not TO the customer. It has to be a 2-way ongoing conversation. Programs should be established with this at the core. It’s easy for marketers to quickly lose sight of the importance of “WITH” as they dive into using the social world to drive messages. Our customers are the ones defining the social world we play in and we need to be humble and cognizant of this with every interaction.

Natalie Malaszenko
Director, Worldwide Digital Marketing & Social Media

Hewlett-Packard
@nataliemalas

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Live in beta but be strategic. Social media is a real-time experience and therefore is never a completed engagement. It evolves and changes to meet the user needs. The key is to keep your strategic focus, which will allow you to align your (personal or organization) wants with your audience needs, and ultimately, deliver value.

Jamey Shiels
Director of Social Media & Digital Communications at Aurora Health Care
@jameyshiels
www.linkedin.com/in/jameyshiels

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Start with listening. By listening first you can see what conversations are (and are not) happening around your brand, where they are happening, and who the key players are in those conversations. These are all key factors that will help you build a strong and effective social media strategy.

LaSandra Brill
@LaSandraBrill
Sr. Manager, Social Media Marketing
Cisco

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When I discuss social media with colleagues, marketers, individuals or any one else exploring its use as a marketing or communications channel, I always speak about building a SOCIAL EXPERIENCE.

Your blog becomes a social experience if you connect with your audience — otherwise your content is just words on a page. Your tweets are a social experience if you share, retweet and communicate with your followers — otherwise your tweets become lost in the Twitter chatter. Your Facebook page is a social experience if you use it to humanize who you are, provide incentive for your audience to return, and solicit interaction — otherwise your page eventually becomes Facebook wallpaper.

When you create an experience — whether it be for external or internal audiences — you are providing value by establishing context, giving incentive, encouraging response, building engagement, and making a brand or person more approachable and real.

Elizabeth Lupfer
Senior Manager, Employee Experience & Web Technology
Verizon Communications
@socialworkplace
http://www.thesocialworkplace.com

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There are no shortcuts to excellence:

> You navigate with measurable goals and insights

> You create ideas that matter

> You make ideas easy to find, share, discuss and grow

> Along the way you build relationships, and learn more about what drives value

Bill Strawderman
Executive Director, Digital Marketing
AT&T Business Services
@brainseason

http://www.marketingbard.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/billstrawderman

————————————————————————————

This may sound like social media (or customer service for that matter) 101, but it never ceases to amaze me how many companies or organizations still DON’T respond to a query or comment on the company social media site. So my tip is: Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or whatever, check the conversation and answer people! Especially if you’re marketing a product, chances are pretty good that people will look for information on your social media sites. It doesn’t take too long to review and it makes the difference between good marketing and PR and bad practices.

Paul F. Bove
Social Media Manager
U.S. Office of Personnel Management
@paulfbove

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Think long term when deciding how you will engage with fans online. Your company will always have a new widget or gizmo to promote and many will ask you to “post this on Facebook to get the word out.” As a social media manager, it is up to you to maintain the overarching narrative that keeps your fans engaged throughout your company’s various marketing windows. Don’t sacrifice your long-term brand identity for a short term promotion.

Dan Anderson
Emerging Media Manager
T-Mobile USA
daniel.anderson68 [at] t-mobile.com
@dananderson

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Brands tend to get focused on trying to be fun and conversational and forget to stay true to the brand. Know your brand and stay true in your social interactions. Otherwise, folks will see right through that and you will lose credibility.

Trish Nettleship
B2B Social Media Lead
AT&T
@trishnet

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Keep customers at the center of your engagement strategy. Partner with customer service teams and define a plan for handling customer complaints. Responding to customer concerns helps brands establish trust and advocacy with online audiences – which is important when a crisis hits and brands need audiences to pay attention to company news. If you overlook customer service needs and focus instead on self-promotion, you’ll run the risk of attracting skepticism and indifference.

Debbie Curtis-Magley
UPS Public Relations Manager
@DebCM
@UPS
www.blog.ups.com
www.facebook.com/ups

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My one recommendation would be to make social media efforts a natural piece of your day to day work for your brand. Ensure that the activities are as in synch with your brand, as everything else you might do offline. Approach it as an engagement opportunity and not a selling opportunity, and use it to also learn from your community. Use the tools that are available to your advantage, as well as other resources within your enterprise, and it will be much easier, engaging and with great potential.

Diana Plazas
Director, DoubleTree by Hilton Online Marketing
Hilton Worldwide
@dianap

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Here’s a tip that I often give people. The key to starting and understanding social media success is by doing. Pick two tools like Twitter and LinkedIn (each are quite different from the other) and spend 15-20 minutes per day using them. Also, use the tools with an objective in mind. The objective could be as simple as wanting to connect with more people in your industry. After some time you’ll “connect the dots” and the aha moment will happen. Nothing of value comes easy so stick to the plan of using the tools for 2-3 months. Read lots of blogs and articles about marketing and connecting with people on social networks and you should “get it” even sooner. The difference between a casual user of Facebook for example, and a social media pro is that the pro can make a planned objective happen. Of course, there are tiers of objectives with successful outcomes. Once you achieve your first simple objective it’s time to move to the nextmore sophisticated one.

Ronan Keane
Social Media Marketing Manager
XO Communications
@ronankeane

In Jeremiah Owyang’s new post titled Strategy: Five Steps to Achieve ‘Escape Velocity’ –and Finally Stay out of the Social Media ‘Help Desk’, he talks about how the corporate social media strategist can’t scale, and describes five steps we need to take to avoid becoming a “help desk”. I don’t completely agree with him because you can scale within the context of social media marketing using tools like Sprinklr and Spredfast. But you can’t for example, within the context of a community manager. That requires one-on-one interaction.

The gist of his blog post is about how to stay out in front of corporate business needs. You do this by planning, enabling, educating and building. In my experience working as a social media strategist at a large corporation, it’s about doing what he describes to be successful. But looking at it another way, it’s also very much about prioritizing.

I prioritize everything I do like I do in my life. I’m sure you do the same. My wife’s a flight attendant and travels 3-out-of 7 days a week. My kids are active in sports and other activities. Managing and planning my activities and others around me is crucial or else I’d drive myself nuts. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. My point is that planning is essential to good execution and prioritizing is the key element.

In corporate social media just like in life, there are three classifications for how I operate  as a corporate social media strategist. They are ‘Essentials’, ‘Nice-to-Haves’ and ‘Luxuries’. It’s a daily juggle between all three. Part of the skill of a social media strategist is to know when and how to put everything you deal with and come up against into ‘Essentials, ‘Nice-to-Haves’ and ‘Luxuries’.

Let’s take a quick look at the three categories.

Essentials
Let’s say Jane Smith, VP of Inside Sales in the San Diego office calls you and says “I want to start a LinkedIn group and need your help ASAP!” How do you respond? You don’t want Jane to off and start a group on LinkedIn by herself  then come to you and require that you manage the group. It’s this kind of example that Owyang is talking about. But how do you avoid situations like this?

The primary social media essential is having a strategy and developing a plan with goals and measurable objectives. This is key. By helping Jane understand that each social media initiative needs planning with objectives aligned to metrics will help you. You need to refuse to move forward with Business Units (BUs) and departments unless goals, objectives and plans exist. If you can’t measure then what’s the point doing it?

Here are some other important ‘Essentials’:

• Support from the c-suite. Forget it if you don’t have a c-level person in your corner. It’s vital to have someone in the c-suite champion your cause.
• Alignment of social media initiatives to business financials and how you’re going to measure and report.
• Develop a social media policy, guidelines for social media activity and engagement.
• Create training in the form of videos, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, internal blogs and online forums. Make yourself very available and communicate often.
• Connections with senior people across the enterprise. If you don’t know senior people in Legal, IT, Customer Care, Product and Sales, for example then get to know them quickly.
• Belief in your company and passion for helping meet its goals.
• Speak business language. Spend time with the CFO or at least understand what’s important to him. Ask the CFO to lunch and ask him lots of questions.
• Be social. Yes, meet with and talk to as many senior people as possible within your company and make sure they know who you are and what you’re doing.
• Program and project management skills. Social media is a series of programs and projects and demands good management. It can be like herding cats. If you don’t have these skills acquire them fast.

This is a lot of bullets. Thought I’d give you a break…ok, continue

• Start a Social Media Committee with senior level and c-suite people as members. Use it for updates on initiatives. Have the committee help you accomplish tasks too.
• Build an internal social media team and empower them. Create different profiles like ‘Listening Analyst’ and ‘Engagement Agent’ and assign people to those roles. Find people who are passionate about social media and your company. Start there first.
• Tools: Radian6 for monitoring and engagement; Spredfast for content distribution and management; Google Analytics for web metrics. If you can’t afford an enterprise solution start with SocialMention and Trackur.
• Writing and editing skills. If you manage a corporate blog you’re going to need these. Most technical and product people can’t and won’t write how you want them to.
• Be a trusted subject matter expert. Emphasis on “trusted”. Make this happen by giving presentations, writing internal blogs and frequent communication.
• Meet with and talk to other social media strategists. I bug people at Cisco and Intel all the time. And what’s best? They always take time out to talk to me. Make sure you’ve got good questions lined up first.
• Finally, execute, execute, execute.

Nice-to-Haves

• Planning future social media initiatives like Social CRM. Think about how to integrate social media with Saleforce.com and how sales can use SCRM effectively.
• The ability to follow a daily social media schedule of specific tasks like 30 minutes reviewing my Google Reader account.
• Another nice-to-have is time eating lunch while reading tweets from Twitter lists you’ve set up. I enjoy doing this but it doesn’t happen frequently.
• Time to keep up with social media trends and tools via blogs, whitepapers and tweets.
• Interns. If you can get help from interns, great. Another person helping with editing photos and videos, proofing blog posts and tweeting is a nice-to-have. However, with all due respect to hardworking and conscientious interns, they cannot be your social media strategist.
• Updating your primary social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I regard this as an important ‘Nice-to-Have’ because perception is reality and you need to appear like you’re up-to-the-minute on social media. I don’t mean to sound cynical it’s just the way it is.

Luxuries

You have no luxuries if you’re a corporate social media strategist. I’ve listed two that I hardly get to do but would love more time do it.

• Tweeting from your own personal Twitter account.
• Writing a blog post.

My strategy for social media success is simple. Small wins. Prioritizing is key to helping me achieve small wins. Valuable tweets for example, helped me grow XO Communications Twitter followers from 340 to 650. Many of the followers are industry analysts, reporters and bloggers. This is one example of a small win that plays it part in the larger context of social media success. Prioritizing and planning helped me accomplish this. Ask yourself what’s essential and keep it as simple as you can. Get small wins but make sure they play a part in the larger social media initiative.

What else would you put into Essentials, Nice-to-Haves and Luxuries? I’m sure there are some things I left out.

Please tweet this to your followers (just copy and paste the following into your Twitter bar): Twitter is Essential to Your Company’s New Product Launch http://bit.ly/TwitterLaunch

If your company is planning a new product launch, social media should be part of your go-to-market plan. Within your social media plan, Twitter should play a large part. Your potential reach on Twitter can be massive. You may connect with people you never anticipated. The power of Twitter is quite incredible. If you meet with skepticism about the effectiveness of Twitter within your organization follow my advice and ignore it.

Your main priority with Twitter should be to find “influencers” within your industry. Influencers are people who have a lot of clout and whose opinions carry a lot of weight. In most cases they’re reporters, analysts and bloggers but they also include people in online forums. Because the former are very active on Twitter, you’ll want to connect with them and get to know those people before your new product launch.

Top 3 Tools to Find Analysts, Bloggers and Reporters.

Finding influencers doesn’t have to be difficult. I’ve used the following tools to successfully identify my influencers.

1. WeFollow.com – Enter a term (tag) and get two lists. One list has the top Twitter influencers and the other has the most Twitter followers. This is useful tool.

2. Klout.com – This is very useful tool in more ways than one. Not only will it show you your own influence in the Twittersphere, but it will show you other metrics like the number of original retweets for a person.

3. Twellow.com – Often referred to as the Twitter Yellow Pages. It’s useful for finding people in geographic locations and specific industries.

Use these tools to compile your final list of influencers in your spreadsheet. Include their Twitter bios and add a note as a reminder about why you added them. Don’t limit your search to these tools, ask others in your department or company to provide names of people and search for their Twitter handles on Google e.g. “[first name] [last name] twitter”. This last method is a little hit or miss. But in my experience it’s mostly hit. Also, search blogs for “follow me on Twitter” icons.

Top 10 Twitter To-do List Before Your New Product Launch

First of all, you’ll need some organization. Create a spreadsheet to track all of your activities. This is good practice because I promise you’re going to forget half of what you’ve done over and I speak from experience. Follow these 10 steps 8 weeks before your product launch and you’ll see good results.

1. Create a Twitter account. Include your name and interests in the bio. Also include a photo of yourself. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to use a photo of yourself then stop here and turn back. Social media isn’t for you.
2. Next, create a spreadsheet to include analysts, reporters, bloggers, thought leaders, SMEs etc.
3. In the spreadsheet, include names, title, function, Twitter handle and blog address.
4. If you’ve got more than 10 influencers prioritize your list.
5. Start following your list of people on Twitter and retweet their good tweets once a week.
6. Let them know you appreciate the information they share by including their Twitter handles in your tweets.
7. Visit each influencer’s blog and add a comment or ask a smart question.
8. Leverage #FollowFriday by tweeting each person on the list. Tip: Don’t tweet “#FollowFriday with [list of] Twitter handles”. Send a tweet for each person stating why people should follow them.
9. If your influencers have blogs add intelligent comments to their posts to build a relationship.
10. You should devote an hour a day to connecting; retweet, start communicating with people using @[name] and add comments to their blogs.

This is a very important point to remember, please be transparent. Be open and honest with each person you connect with on Twitter. Spamming or shilling is not accepted and will get you blocked and reported.

Begin this Twitter strategy 6-8 weeks prior to the launch of your product. Then, about a week before your official launch date send a DM to your influencers asking them if they want a sneak peak.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear from you with other ideas.

Follow me @ronankeane

Please tweet this to your followers (just copy and paste the following into your Twitter bar): Twitter is Essential to Your Company’s New Product Launch Plan http://bit.ly/TwitterLaunch

For seventy years consumers sat in front of TVs and radios or sat reading newspapers and magazines. They consumed content and messages created by large media companies and marketers. It was a monologue i.e. one way. Media fed consumers information and messages while they sat back and consumed. The media and marketing messages were pushed out at the cost of millions of dollars by big media conglomerates, thereby eliminating the chance of an individual business or group competing and having the same reach. The only means of marketing to audiences was through advertising on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. This was the prevailing model from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Then in early 2000s along comes Social Media networks and Web 2.0 technology. These networks and their technology have given marketers and business stakeholders an unprecedented opportunity to cost-effectively and efficiently broadcast and distribute their message in an extremely targeted way to thousands of people across the Web. According to International Data Corporation, people are spending about 20 hours on average per week watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. But they’re spending 33 hours per week and growing on the Internet. People leaning forward interacting with a website is a completely different paradigm to people sitting back watching TV. As Marketers we need to stop or curb one-way push advertising and start publishing content our target markets want and are extremely willing to interact with on the Web.

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff released an update in January of this year to the popular Social Technographics ladder to visualize and categorize the current state of how people participate in the Social Web.

As you can see, the percentage of people involved in the social Web has moved massively upwards since 2007. The number of Creators of content has increased, while the number of Joiners has jumped significantly. Small businesses and corporate brands are missing out on the massive amount of time people are now spending on the social Web. Marketers and business stakeholders need to take advantage of the reach now available to them. For example, instead of your online brand being a “static” website containing technical spec sheets and formatted press releases, why not produce a video with your internal subject-matter experts elaborating on timely topics, and providing guidance and advice? One easy and effective way to create new content at an extremely low cost and distribute it across the Web is through a blog.

Your blog can be an effective marketing tool. Here are 10 reasons why:

1. Unlike “static” websites, they can be integrated into social media networks for mass distribution.
2. Blogs allow you to showcase internal talent and their knowledge-base.
3. They give you a means to easily publish on a corporate “static” website.
4. You can have two-way conversations through “comments.”
5. You give your corporate brand a human “voice”.
6. You can easily integrate other social media tools like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube into your blog.
7. They are more frequently indexed and more likely to appear in Google search results.
8. They are extremely cost-effective and ROI can be significant.
9. They can be useful for data mining. Partnered with Google Analytics, your blog can tell you much more about your prospects than a “static” website.
10. Publishing on your blog can be a lot of fun. (I didn’t just throw this in, it’s true).

Blogs are an effective first step in Social Web. Coupled with a broader content and social network distribution strategy it can significantly shorten your sales cycle and generate a greater number of qualified prospective clients. Blogs are a great first step but your Social Media strategy shouldn’t end with a blog. There a many other Social Media tactics that you can integrate into your blog. I recently published a 6 week Social Media program titled “Social Media Marketing for Your Business Success” that includes a 20 page guide, a slide deck and a 60+ minute video. Download it to find out more.

Placed within the context of your prospects’ buy cycle, publishing content on your blog can be a more valuable strategy to move prospects further along the conversion funnel and ultimately to the sale. Advertising generates awareness but it doesn’t create trust, and in longer sales cycles there’s not enough trust to warrant a phone call or contact. Within a more complex buy cycle, your prospects will want to learn more about your company, the value you provide and the reputation you’ve earned. Levick Communications, a crisis communications agency in Washington, DC use their blog called the Bulletproof Blog very effectively. Senior management at Levick regularly blog about topics that concern their prospects and clients. They use a content strategy that shortens their clients’ buy cycle by producing content that’s relevant, timely and informative. As the value of advertising diminishes rapidly especially on the Web, a blog can fill the void and more. Given the numbers above by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research, it’s imperative the marketers and business stakeholders realign resources and shift budgets, and look more closely at publishing as a new marketing paradigm.

Our role as marketers is profoundly changing. We’re no longer manufacturers of an advertising message and “push” merchants. We need to be publishers and the facilitators of conversations and Social Media can help us do just that.

What are your thoughts and experiences? How has your blog helped your business?

Do you need help with your Social Media plan or help with tactical execution? Give me a call at (703) 489-7886 or shoot an email to ronankeane1 [at] gmail [.com].

Please subscribe to my RSS feed or enter your email address to be sure to get my next post.

I’ve spent many hours doing and learning Social Media Marketing. Of my 14 years doing corporate and consumer marketing, it has been by far the most cost-effective way to promote my business services.

I’ve put together a practical step-by-step 6 week program called Social Media Marketing for Your Business Success. I’ve created a slideshow and a 20 page worksheet so that you can learn why and how to use Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

I’d appreciate your comments, questions and feedback. If I’ve missed something please let me know by adding a comment below.

Oh..and please don’t forget to “share this” and “retweet”. Thanks!

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Download and print the 20 page PDF guide as you watch the video or slide presentation below.

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Social Media Road Map For Your Business Success

I’m partnering with SCORE to conduct four Social Media webinars each Thursday in March. The first one is this Thursday, March 4. Unlike most other Social Media presentations, this webinar titled “Social Media Road Map for Your Business Success” is a practical guide and will show you how to start and maintain successful social media accounts with Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. It will also cover the importance of establishing a blog for publishing content and how to distribute your content so that it reaches hundreds and even thousands of people. The benefits of which can also include getting your content on page one ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Join me for “Social Media Road Map for Your Business Success this Thursday at 12pm EST. If you’re confused about Social Media you won’t be after this presentation.

Sign up here for the FREE webinar: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/dn9wjfq7xzfa

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