Dealing with the negative can be a pretty scary proposition for any company stepping into social media marketing, let alone having to manage it with a community.  Some industries have a propensity for attracting negative opinions,  conversations and experiences for their audience.  Most of the time when people are sharing their negative experiences they are doing so because they were disappointed by the company in some way, shape or form.  Most likely it was not intentional, your customers can sometimes have very high expectations and when your company cannot meet those expectations the disappointment ensues.

Upset Customer or Constant Complainer?

These situations are opportunities for companies to step up and resolve the negative issues at hand.  If the person is sharing their experience in a somewhat rational manner, you can pretty well conclude that you have a disappointed customer on your hands.  How you respond and react to this situation is critical, you’ll either turn them into a raving fan or leave them even more disappointed and spreading their negative experience to all of their network.

But what about those “other people”, you know, the ones that will never be happy?  The ones that time and time again keep coming back at you telling you how horrible your company is?  What do you do with these type of people in social media communities?

Will They Ever Be Happy?

There’s a term for these types of people, when you’ve been in and out of many different communities you can easily spot them as well, a lot of communities refer to these types of members as “Trolls”.  Communities are smart, you can talk to that administrators and ask them “who are the trolls” and most likely they can readily point them out.  These people are the constant complainers or every other day there’s some injustice done to them.  Most of all no matter what anyone does or says, they are never happy – or the happiness is fleeting until the next day when some new unjust situation arises.

How do you know the difference between these “Trolls” and the “Disappointed Customer”?  There’s some tall tale signs that once you do your research into your social media communities you’ll be able to tell rather easily who are the people that tend to be legitimate & valuable contributors to the community and those who are just there to constantly complain.  More than likely those “trolls” aren’t just on one community spouting their story either, they are on several because at the end of the day their satisfaction is gained by the attention they receive by complaining.

Publicly Offer to Take the Conversation Out of the Community to Be Resolved

The best approach in dealing with these types of community members is to first acknowledge and then apologize for their negative experience.  Once you do that, then offer to speak to them about how you can amend the situation offline, give them the opportunity to contact you privately through the community’s messaging system.  This does two things, it stops the “troll” from saying “no one’s listening to me” or “they won’t do a damn thing”, then it also shows the rest of the community that you are serious about engaging with them and resolving even negative situations.  If you do this in a calm and professional manner, you’ll earn respect from the community members.

If the troll comes back and complains then that your resolution to the situation isn’t sufficient for them and they’ve displayed this pattern in the past, the influential community members tend to ignore or even step up for the company that offered to resolve the situation, putting the troll in their place.  Just resist the temptation to come back and “flame” the troll, this is what they want.  Sometimes silence or a controlled response is the best response.  The community has already seen you attempted to resolve the situation, and they most likely know this person is a constant complainer.  At the end of the day if you are true & transparent in your efforts with the community, your efforts won’t be ignored, but the troll’s constant complaining will be.

I’ve got a saying I like to share with companies dealing with situations like these:  “Don’t feed the Troll your baby goats, just pass by silently“

Dealing With Trolls in Social Media is a post from: Social Conversations

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Whether you are just beginning to build a social media community, trying to revive one, managing a thriving one or wanting to become part of one, one thing is certain; none of those tasks can be accomplished unless you’ve built strong, solid relationships with the members of the community, both direct members and peripheral members, meaning the general community at large not specifically a niche community.

It takes time to build solid relationships that will help you manage a community.  Those relationships, those bonds of friendship that form, are built on a lot of trust and that just doesn’t happen overnight.  It happens by continually being of value to the other individual.  That value can take many forms, as we discussed in the Four Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, such as giving people content they find valuable, answering their questions, providing special incentive, being consistent with your words & actions and most of all, always saying thank you and you appreciate the other person’s time and contributions.

You can’t build solid relationships with community members by looking at them as another place to put your press release to test market your product or service.  If that’s all you’re into social media for, you might want to rethink your strategy and incorporate these 5 very important steps.

• Be Transparent

  The first thing any marketer needs to do when they are first stepping into any social media environment, whether its YouTube or a niche forum, is be transparent about who you are and why you are there.  If you aren’t honest about your intentions from the get go, you won’t be able to build any relationships, let alone solid ones.  The community is smart, they can smell a fake a mile away and when they uncover your true intentions, there’s no repairing those relationships that have been destroyed.

• Be Consistent with Your Words & Actions

  Everyone on your team and your company needs to be consistent with your messaging.  You can’t have the email team saying one thing and your social media team promoting something totally opposite.  You also can’t have one team offering something and another team saying that offer expired.  That does nothing for your creditability with the communities at large and makes members think your company has no clue what’s going on behind its own doors, and that does little to build the trust you need to build those solid relationships.

• Don’t Blatantly Market to Them

  Resist the temptation to just start pushing your products or services as soon as you step foot in a social media community.  To build solid relationships with key members of social media communities you have to realize that they are there to, first and foremost, share their own experiences.  Second on the list is to gain or acquire knowledge that they might not have had before.  They really don’t want to be marketed to.

• Appreciate Their Time & Contributions

  It takes time to share what people are experiencing.  Whether they write a blog post about it, shoot a video, or take pictures, that is still time the community member could have taken to do something else rather than share their experience with your product or service.  Even if it’s not the experience your company wants to hear about (no one really likes “Bad News”), you still need to be very cognizant of the time they took out of their day to contribute their experience.  They wouldn’t be doing it unless they really cared at some point in time.

• Always Say Thank You

  There’s something to be said for taking the time to say “Thank You”.  There’s even more to be said about taking the time to write one – more on that later next week when we talk about Rewarding a Community.  It takes only a few seconds to post a comment on a picture on a fan page, that a fan uploaded for you to say “Thanks for contributing”, or “really awesome picture, so thankful you share it with us”.  Making sure you thank the community and its members is a very important factor in building a solid relationship with them, not only does it show you appreciate them, it shows you aren’t taking advantage of them either.

Without solid relationships being built within your own community you’ll find it extremely difficult to manage and promote it all on your own.  There is definitely that aspect of “Being Social” to have a successful social media community that is needed.

5 Steps to Building Solid Relationships is a post from: Social Conversations

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We’ve covered some pretty basic concepts that companies and marketers need to consider when they are starting to build a community in social media and I’d like to round out this weeks topic with the importance of Learning the Rules of the Road.  Communities have them for a reason, and if you don’t pay attention to them, you can really find yourself either in a heap of trouble with community members or out in the cold and having no friends or allies to build a community with.

Read the Written Rules

When a community posts its rules for everyone to see and read, they mean it.  You may get lucky if your break one of their written rules once by exclaiming “you didn’t know there were rules”, but if it’s a rule that was put in place because it angers community members and they know you are a marketer, claiming that you “didn’t know” might not be something that saves you.

Over the years admins of communities have been hammered by spammers, and abused by marketers.  For these reasons, a lot of times, this is why the rules are posted.  You might not be allowed to drop a link, you might not be allowed to be promotional, you might not be allowed to use your company’s logo as an icon, you won’t know unless you read the rules first.  The rules can be your friend, they can help guide you through the ins and outs of the community as well as give you subtle queues and hints into the reasons why the rules are there in the first place.  The last thing you want is for your actions to be a reason another rule is written, so read them and use them wisely.

Learn the Unwritten Rules

The unwritten rules, or norms, are a bit trickier to navigate in the beginning.  These rules aren’t written anywhere and the only way you really get to know them is to first, observe and then engage.  The first layer of norms you’ll be able to see when you watch how the community interacts.  Perhaps the community is a bit relaxed and a small bit of vulgarity is acceptable, or it can be a completely professional and conservative community where if you use any remotely vulgar language in your engagement, you’ll find yourself shunned.  That takes observation to figure out.

The second layer of norms that you may encounter isn’t until you actually start engaging.  The way you interact with people can have a whole other set of norms you won’t uncover until you start making friends in the community.  Maybe there are back conversations going on behind what’s posted publicly.  You won’t find that out just by lurking.  Once you start building the relationships you’ll find that the members might converse off the site via IM, or email or the private message system the community offers.  These unwritten norms can be tough to learn and slow going, but in the end are well worth learning to move your efforts forward.

When you learn the rules and use them as a guide, whether they are posted for all to see or you have to figure them out, you’ll be much better off than if you just jumped into the community with both barrels blazing and pissing community members off because you didn’t take the time to respect them or their community rules.

Learning the Rules of the Road is a post from: Social Conversations

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Transparency can have many levels and if you are a company that is planing to send your marketers into social media communities, making sure your companies actions are transparent on all levels is a very important part of building a community.    Building solid relationships built on trust is what makes your efforts continuously success in social media, it’s also what will bolster you up when firestorms hit.

Be Transparent About Who You Are

Let’s face it, in any community, the members are smart.  They are in there day in and day out, conversing, sharing, and experiencing.  They form relationships and can queue in instantly to anything that remotely smells of a fake.  The worst thing any company can do is go into a community and “disguise” themselves as a customer or fan.  The moment you start interjecting that your brand is great, your brand would be a solution, or just automatically start talking about your products, services or company, without establishing yourself first, trust me, the jig is up.

Community member protect their own, whether it’s other members or the integrity of the community itself.  The moment they smell an impostor, they are hot on the trail to dig up who that person is.  In today’s day and age, you might think you are anonymous, but admins in these communities can see your IP address.  An email to the technical team of any social networking site about suspicious activity will send that IT person on a trail to hunt down who you really are.  When that become public – and trust me it will, you won’t ever have another shot with your community again.

This is why its important for the very start off in your community building efforts with being transparent about exactly who you are and don’t try and hide it in covert ways.

Be Transparent About Your Intentions

Right up there with being honest about who you are when you engage with different social media communities is to make sure you are very transparent about your intentions for joining the community.  If you are there to gain a better understanding about what people think about your company, say so.  If you are there to just listen, engage and share, say so.  If you’re there just to hand out coupon codes, make sure you are very upfront about it.

A huge misstep would be to say “hey we’re just here to listen and learn” and then the next week start posting links to your weekly or daily promotions.  That’s one way to piss off a lot of community members really fast.  It’s also the quickest way to a cold shoulder from community members.  Stating your intentions and sticking to them is a very foundational concept that marketers miss a lot of times with all the excitement of implementing their social media tactics.  Once they dig in and see all the possibilities, this totally miss the opportunity to make sure they are transparent about their new intentions and then soon find themselves out in the cold of the community they just joined.

Be Transparent About Changes Within Your Company

When ever change comes to your company and your team knows about it, make sure you are transparent about that too.  The last thing you need is your social media marketing team hung out to dry with a community because they were made to look like they lied about some change that happened within your company that was beyond their control.  When changes happen, your social media team should be one of the first teams to know what’s going on.  Word travels in social media communities faster than you can imagine.   If your team is up front and honest with your chosen social media communities that the changes are coming to your product, services, company or even your employees your foundation of trust grows and your community feels more connected to you.

If they have to find out from another news source, it could look like you are hiding something from them, or worse you lied to them.  Neither of which bode well for you to keep building a solid community.

At the end of the day, trying to trick any social media community or keep information from them is a bad move.  When the truth comes out, you’ll have a worse firestorm on your hands.  At least if you’ve been transparent about who you are, your intentions and anything going on within your company you’ll have more of a fighting chance a building a solid community, one that may actually stand by you when those firestorms hit.

How Transparent Are You? is a post from: Social Conversations

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This week starts our brand new series of thoughts on social media marketing in the area of Community Building.  Over the next three weeks, we’re going to feature pieces on:

• Building a Community
• Managing a Community
• Rewarding a Community

Keep in mind a community isn’t merely a forum or a message board, a community can be a fan page in Facebook, a tweetchat on Twitter, a photo group in Flick or your subscriber base in YouTube.  A community in social media can be anywhere, on any site and take many forms.

So lets jump right into it with looking at whether you should build your own social media community or just join an existing one.

There’s a lot of agencies and companies out there that sell a slick list of “things we can do for you” without even knowing what it is your company actually does, who your audience is or where they are currently interacting.  They’ve built really cool, whiz-bang tools that create super connected communities that are going to be the next, latest, greatest thing in social media … and you should sign up now!

Hold your horses there partner, you just might be putting that cart before the proverbial horse.

In the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, we talked about research in social media as well as human analysis in research.  This is something you definitely have to invest in before you even consider starting your own social media community just because an agency approached you with the idea.  There’s a lot of unanswered questions if you just throw up a “community” and expect people to automatically start participating.

Is There a Need?

You need to dig into your research and see if there is really a need to be filled.  Are people scattered in their conversations, or is there already some sort of established community out there.  Is there some sort of gap the existing communities are missing that you could possibly fill and build your own community with?  The reason you need to identify if there is a need for a new community is because it’s very difficult to get members to move out of a community they’ve already formed relationships with.  They come to trust and become very comfortable with their existing community, it can be a pretty tall task to just start a community and expect the existing one to move over to your platform, just because you built it.

What’s The Right Platform?

Along with your research you’re going to find out just how people are engaging and sharing in social media communities.  Just because there’s this new whiz bang platform some company is touting, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the platform your audience will want to use to communicate, engage and share.  If they are primarily on Twitter, it’s going to be pretty tough to move a community over to a forum more message board type of community.  If they are use to uploading photos and talking in groups, it’d going to be a tall order to move them over to your Facebook page.  Understanding if its the right platform is another key element to success or failure here.

How Will You Build the Community?

One of the other pieces you have to consider about building or joining a community is how will you build the community?  How will you promote it to get new members, how will you bring in the influentials?  What do you have to offer that’s special?  Will you rely on other forms of marketing and communications to drive interest in the community or will you rely solely on the one on one engagement and invitations to become an exclusive member?  What kind of community do you want to grow, one that’s private, one that’s semi-private or one that’s wide open?  How you build the community can be just as important as the need and the platform because it brings a lot of different personalities together to share and engage.

Just keep in mind, just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come to your social media marketing “field of dreams”.

Do You Build or Do You Join a Social Media Community? is a post from: Social Conversations

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Today’s post wraps up our series on the Four Pillars of Social Media here on Social Conversations.  In this series we covered how to research, plan a strategy, engage your audience and use measuring techniques in your social media marketing efforts for your company.  Whether it’s a small business, a B2C or a B2B business, these fundamental concepts are what will support your social media marketing strategy, make it strong and successful.

I wanted to round out the series with a piece that reminds marketers, directors, senior management and the c-suite that social media marketing is unlike any other online marketing strategy you may implement.  Since the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) have become such a prominent force in the online marketing world because they can be measured through analytics by seeing the Click to Conversion ratios, companies have become very focused on this to decide whether a program is successful or it failed.

Unfortunately these types of measures don’t work the same way for your efforts in Social Media Marketing.  It’s a lot more complex because engagement in social media communities very rarely leads to a person clicking on your link and then purchasing your product or service.  You also have to factor into the whole scheme of measuring your actions online whether its SEO, PPC or media buying, was that “Click” affected by something you did in Social Media.

Take for example engagement in forums.  Say you have a team from your engineering department out in a Ruby on Rails forum discussing the latest things they’ve implemented using RoR.  Someone who’s been lurking and watching your team share it’s knowledge posts a reply in the thread saying “hey thanks, you guys really seem to know your stuff, this helped me a lot”.  The next thing that person does is looks at one of your team’s bios.  They then look at their profile on LinkedIn, then look at your company’s profile on LinkedIn.  From their they click over to your blog and read a few of your thought leadership posts.  After they read those posts, they forward one on to their managing direct with a note that says “these guys seem to really know their stuff, can we utilize them to help us XYZ project?”.

The managing director was looking at other companies to help and had never heard of your company until his engineer suggested your blog post.  Now he’s looking at your company’s profile on LinkedIn, not only that he’s checking out who recommended you and those companies to see if they are like his company.  He then clicks on a link to your latest presentation on Slideshare, he passes that on to the CTO, saying “this company is really impressive, I think we should use them with XYZ project”.

Now the CTO is checking your company out, he’s reading your blog too, but he’s checking out the comments from other companies on your blog and your interaction.  He clicks on a link to your tweet stream and sees you’re interacting and sharing your knowledge with the community about relevant topics, not what you sang in the shower.  Now, he too is impressed, he emals back to the managing director “please contact them and set up a meeting, you’re right they really seem to understand our industry very well”.

The managing director now types into Google your company name, first he clicks on a PPC ad you have (by mistake), then backs up and clicks on the first result, which leads him to your homepage.  He finds the link to fill out the contact form, and now you have a lead.

So who gets the credit?  If you were just looking at analytics, some may say PPC, some may say SEO – never did any of the people click into your site first.  Their first encounter was in a forum about Ruby on Rails, their next was LinkedIn, then your blog, then SlideShare, then Twitter.  The last steps were search and then the click into your site to fill out the contact form.

Sometimes it is pretty easy, you can see a click to a product from a link on Facebook, Twitter or a blog post and can see the results.  However, more often than not, the above scenario that I just outlined for you happens hundreds, if not thousands of times a day online.  Marketers just aren’t aware of all the steps customers are taking to get to the “conversion”.  So how are you measuring that?  Are you accounting for this type of scenario in your ROI or bottom line of your entire marketing plan?

Just because social media marketing doesn’t lead to that instant “Click Conversion” doesn’t mean it isn’t working, it means you have to work a little harder to measure its success.

Social Media Doesn’t Always Lead to Instant Click Conversions is a post from: Social Conversations

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Finding where relevant conversations around your brand or company are taking place can be an arduous task.  In order to succeed at finding the conversations when they are still fresh, a mixture of free and paid tools are typically utilized.  While many of these tools are still in their infancy, they generally do a fairly good job at finding conversations that are specific to keywords that you believe are relevant to your brand or company.

There is an additional tool, however, that you already have in place that you’re likely not using to help find relevant conversations.  That tool is your web analytics package.

What Advantages can a Web Analytics Package Provide?

Your web analytics package will obviously function differently than your free or paid social media monitoring tools yet it will still provide valuable information that will allow you to quickly engage in relevant conversations.

One key advantage deals with the type of data your web analytics package reports on.  Rather than looking for keywords that are used on social media sites, your web analytics package will be reporting on visitors being referred from social media sites to your site.

Another advantage of your web analytics package is that it likely is reporting the data in near real time.  That means you can immediately know when a conversation is taking place that’s referring visitors to you site.  With social media monitoring tools, you can look more broadly with the use of keywords, but the freshness of the data that’s returned is reliant on how quickly or slowly the tool finds the conversations.  In some cases it could be hours and in others in could be days or weeks, so augmenting the data from social media monitoring tools with your web analytics data can potentially decrease your response time to relevant conversations.

How can You Find the Relevant Data in Your Web Analytics Package?

In your web analytics package there is an enormous amount of data relating to your sites visitors.  Knowing how to sift through that data to key in on what’s relevant to your needs is a vital step to finding additional relevant conversations in the social media space.

For this post I’ll use Google Analytics as an example, but you could get similar data from any of the leading web analytics providers.

It’s essentially a two step process to get setup correctly.  The first will be creating a custom report and the second will be creating an advanced segment.

Creating the Custom Report

Basically, with a custom report you want to setup a way to find social media sources that are driving visitors to your site and then determine the actual referring path from each of the sources.  This is done by creating a custom report in Google Analytics.

As the dimension you’ll want to use Source and then Referral Path as a sub dimension.  In the metrics area you’ll want to at least add Visits, but you can also add additional metrics that can give you more insights into the visitors being referred.

Once you’ve saved the custom report, it will allow you to spot social media sites that are driving visitors to your site.  You can then click on any of the sources and see URL(s) within the social media site that’s referring the visitors.

As the report currently stands, all sources will be present when looking at the report.  To help you sift through all the sources you’ll complete the second step in the set up process.

Creating the Advanced Segment

Creating the required advanced segment can be done in two ways.  You can create an advanced segment that keys in solely on a defined group of social media sites or you can create an advanced segment that excludes your top non social media referring sites.  I prefer the later since it doesn’t limit the number of social media sites that are included in your advanced segment.

To create the advance segment, simply generate a list of your top referring sources.  Create a new advanced segment and add “Source” as the dimension.  For the condition you want to select “Does not match exactly” and then simply add in the first non social media source as the value.

Continue adding additional sources until you feel enough sources have been excluded to allow you to easily go through what remains and pick out the social media sources.  The result should look similar to below, but likely with additional sources added.

This can also be done using regular expressions in the value field, but for visual sake I’ve broken each source out in a separate OR statement.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to combine them.  To do that, drill in to the custom report you created and then select only the new advanced segment.  You’ll now be able to spot the top social media sites that are driving visitors to your site.  Click on any of the sources and you’ll be able to see the actual page they were referred from.

You can then go directly to the page and determine if it’s appropriate to engage in the conversation that’s taking place.

Remember that this is in no way a replacement for a social media monitoring tool, but it can be used to augment what you get from such tools as well as potentially decrease your response time in certain cases.

Using Analytics to Help Find Opportunities in Social Media is a post from: Social Conversations

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At the beginning of the week I wrote a piece about Letting Go of Your Ego. Not always the most popular of topics, that I admit. It’s a pretty tough pill to swallow for any C-Suite or senior level management to realize that in Social Media, it’s not all about their company or themselves. That being said, another tough pill to swallow is understanding that the next big idea about your company, it’s products, its services or even how it markets itself might not come from inside your company’s walls. It may very well come from your engagement within social media, that is if you are open to it.

Being Open to Your Audience

When you truly engage with your audience, interact with them, listen to them, ask them questions, the rewards can be plenty.  From ideas for product upgrades, to additions to your services that will make your customers buy more, listening and engaging can lead to so much more.  It can even lead to some really great ideas, even for marketing tactics that appeal to the audience that is really purchasing your products.

Some companies close themselves off to their customers, thinking that the next innovations have to come from their own brain trust.  They think that the people they hired for their marketing efforts will be the best people to know how to speak to the consumer.  While on many levels this still holds true, sometimes its the collaborative efforts of combining the best of your internal teams with those really engaged social community members that can lead to some of the best ways to propel your company forward.

Look At Dell

Dell could be the poster child for understanding that they just might not always have the best ideas, but they didn’t start out that way, it was a process over time.  From their blog where they posted about “Dell Hell” and the exploding batteries, to the Idea Storm community, Dell engages with it’s audience of very engaged consumers. This just isn’t just on their blog, and not just on Idea Storm, but in just about every social media channel they are active in.  By having people like @StefanieatDell engaging in Twitter and not just letting it be a constant RSS stream of their products, they added $6.5 million dollars to their bottom line last year.  Dell’s let go of their ego, Dell is open to listening and engaging with it’s audience and look at the rewards it reaps.

LOFT Listens Too

I can’t take credit for finding this wonderful example of listening, and understanding your community, it totally goes to Mashable, via Cindy Krum (@Suzzicks).  The marketing team at LOFT* really loves their new silk cargo pants.  They posted so on their Facebook Fanpage to all of their over 55k fans.  The problem though came when those photos of the pants they showed were of a rail thin model, who really didn’t look like she’d be the average person who’d shop at an LOFT store.

Thanks to platforms like Facebook, the consumer now has a voice.  Boy, did LOFT fans use it!  The women who were commenting on the new posting were not impressed, in fact many asked LOFT’s staff to actually show those pants on “real women”.  They were not at all convinced that these pants would look right on all women, whether they were tall, short, pear shaped or curvy.

Guess what happened?

LOFT was open enough to its audience it listened and engaged.  It commented back and then they got to work.  They got women of all shapes and sizes from 2 to 12, from sizes 5’3″ to 5’10″ to wear the pants and show the different styles and looks.  When they posted their employees wearing the cargo pants – real women, not models, they got a resounding feedback of “thank you”s and “you’re great”s.  Talk about understanding that sometimes your audience has the better idea!

At the end of the day, being open to new ideas, new concepts is great.  What’s even more valuable in social media and marketing in these communities is being open to the possibility that those ideas come from within the social media communities and not just your company’s four walls.

*Ann Taylor LOFT has changed their name to just LOFT, thanks to Julie from LOFT for stopping by and letting us know about that!

You Don’t Always Have the Best Ideas is a post from: Social Conversations

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One of the major advantages of social media is that it can allow free and instant access to pre-built audiences in a wide variety of channels.  The real question is: how do you convert these audiences into brand loyal enthusiasts that will consume your products and services for years to come?

The answer is a 1-2 punch of active participation and opportunity for landing.

Reaching Out Through Participation

The concept of “joining the conversation” is one that’s well-worn in the social media landscape.  In order to become an industry thought leader, it’s important to engage in relevant forums, tweet ups, LinkedIn conversations, and influential blogs.

The Gift of Content

If the conversation is the honey, consider online content the flypaper.  Authoritative content is the gateway to your site.  Don’t feel shy about pointing the link to your content so long as:

1. It is extremely relevant to the conversation and
2. It will be of great service to the audience.

Otherwise, you run the risk of looking too self-serving which will severely hamper your ability to create a following.

Here just a few ways you can build a social media following through valuable content:

• Guest Contributions
  Reach out to well-respected bloggers and key influencers.  Tell them how much you admire their content and offer up your services to write a post or two—even feel free to pitch a couple ideas.  Not only will this allow you the opportunity to receive visibility from your target audience, but also the chance to drive the occasional incoming link or two (remember, rich anchor text and deep within the site).
• Multimedia
  Remember, content is so much more than just articles.  Don’t forget to post optimized video and image content on websites such as YouTube and Flickr.  It’s a great way to introduce your brand in a helpful and informative way.
• Press Releases
  Writing a press release is one of the most powerful ways to utilize offsite content.  A creative and headline grabbing press release is one of the quickest and most effective ways to stir social media interest around your brand.

Don’t Forget: Convert the Traffic!

You’re so close to actually converting social media visits into sales!  The final phase is the conversion—the call-to-action in which you allow the user to take the plunge from casual fan into paying customer.  Make sure your content has attractive offers that don’t impede the quality of the content. Also, be sure to offer at least two conversion points per page.  Additionally, experiment with both soft and hard conversions.  An example of a soft conversion might be “sign up for our free report” whereas a hard conversion is typically more along the lines of a sale.  Varying your conversion points will allow you to accommodate consumers along varying stages of the buy cycle.

Using Content To Extend Your Reach Through Social Media is a post from: Social Conversations

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According to the Business.com Social Media Benchmarking Study in businesses who are implementing social media marketing strategies, in over 66% of these businesses it the marketing department driving the initiatives.  Most likely there’s been some word handed down from on high to the marketing department saying “we need this social media stuff” or “we need to be talking about ourselves out in social media, now!“  If it were only that simple right?

Of course companies want to talk about themselves, their brands, their services.  They want to push their very carefully crafted messages out to the social media communities because they think that’s what’s going to win them kudos in these communities that are talking about them that they’ve found through buzz monitoring tools.  Here’s the thing that marketers most of the time completely miss the mark on:

It’s Not About You.

Really, honestly, I’m not lying here – it’s not about you, your brand, your company’s product or services.  It’s about them.  It’s about the community member’s experience.  It’s about what the community member is sharing.  At the time they could be experiencing something with you or sharing something about you, but at the end of the day, it is purely about the experience the community member has had.  That’s why marketers need to check their egos at the proverbial door when they enter into the world of social media marketing.

That’s a pretty tall order to do, as marketers we want to promote our company, brand, product or service.  We want people to listen to us, we want people to “want us”.  That’s why we’re in social media marketing, that’s why we’re here, right?

Wrong.

Social media is about sharing and engaging.  Sharing experiences, engaging in conversations, giving knowledge, tips, information and items of value.  Value isn’t determined by the company or the marketer putting the information out there.  It’s determined by the person in the community who’s consume that content.  As much as you think there’s value in some piece of content that’s put out there on your blog or in your video channel, if the audience doesn’t find value in it, it really doesn’t matter what you (as the marketer) think.  That can bruise even the more sturdy egos out there.

Determining what a community is going to find of value requires engagement.  It also requires companies to let go of preconceived notions of what they think people view their products or services as.  Having an open mind and letting go of that death grip of control over your brand can help you immensely when you are engaging in social media.  By opening the doors to your customers to define value, you can open the doors to a much more successful social media marketing strategy.

Letting Go Of Your Ego is a post from: Social Conversations

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