If you are one of the many businesses or brands excited about integrating social media into your marketing mix but are still unsure of exactly how or where to start in using social media effectively my suggestion would be to answer why, as in why does my brand wish to use social media marketing?

This is a highly critical step that will not only form the foundation for creating your social media strategy but will also aid you in determining the metrics to be used in tracking and measuring ROI. If your are unable or unwilling to answer why it is you want to use social media before actually using social media, you may find initial success elusive.

The Wrong Type Of Why

Far too often companies answer the question of why they want to use social media with the all too familiar answer of “because everyone else is” this type of lemming behavior will eventually lead you and your brand towards failure because in failing to answer why, you will have failed to successfully identify how your brand can most benefit from the use of social media.

The Right Types Of Why

So if the wrong answer to why is because others are doing it, then what are some of the reasons why your business should be using social media as a marketing platform?

1. Increase Brand Recognition
2. Increased Sales
3. Increased Site Traffic
4. Improve Customer Relations
5. Improved Customer Support
6. Building New Business Partnerships

There are as many reasons for businesses to use social media as there are businesses actually using it, some want to drive traffic, others want to capture brand recognition and still others are looking to use it as a help center for existing customers but what needs to be remembered is that in order to stand a better chance at capturing success you need to answer why it is you want to use social media.

Will My Answer To Why Change Over Time?

There will come a point when the why you want to use social media will change, maybe you initially began using social media to increase brand recognition and know you feel this has been successful and now you wish to concentrate on increasing sales or increasing site traffic you can easily revisit your social media strategy and re-align your goals and objectives to better focus on answering the question of why you want to use social media.

Final Thoughts

While entirely possible to be successful in social media without answering the question of “Why does our brand want to use social media?” the benefits gained by going through and answering the question far outweigh any perceived negatives. In knowing why your brand wants to use social media you stand a greater chance of achieving success by knowing why you are here, where you want to be and how you are going to get there but your initial social media strategy starts with knowing why.

Has your business answered the question “Why do we want to use social media?” yet?

Flickr Photo why? by SarahWynne

YouTube is a massive community of passionate video enthusiasts who create, distribute and share a incredible amount of content daily, but do you really know how much content they share? Some of the facts and stats on the largest online video community may surprise you?

A social media strategy need only be as complex as required to help your company see a positive return in it’s social media investment at minimum I feel your strategy should include the following elements:

Determine The Why – Why does your brand want to use social media as a marketing tool? If your answer is “because everyone else is” be prepared for failure. Instead the Why should be for reasons such as:

• Creating brand awareness
• Delivering more sales
• Creating a positive customer service experience
• Building anticipation for a new product launch
• Driving more traffic to your site
• Creating brand loyalists to spread your message

Determining the reason Why your brand is using social media is a fundamental step as it will form the basis for creating your Goals, Objectives and Strategies.

Goals, Objectives And Supporting Strategies – In order to track anything in life you first need something identifiable to measure against and creating your goals, objectives and supporting strategies can help you to achieve this.

Your goal is the broadest possible definition of what your overall strategy should accomplish and should only include one item for completion (more site traffic and not more site traffic plus an increased newsletter subscription), the objective narrows the focus of the goal and specifically lays out what is to be accomplished and when (each goal can have multiple objectives) and finally your supporting strategies are the specific methods you will use to complete your objectives and thus achieve your goal (for each objective you can have multiple supporting strategies).

Your goals, objectives and strategies should support the reason Why you want to enter into social media as previously determined. For example if you wanted to create further brand awareness you may look at the doing the following:

• Increase the number of subscribers to our newsletter (Goal)
  • Increase our newsletter subscription from XX to XXX by Day, Month, Year (Objective)
    • Move our subscribe to our newsletter button above the fold on our website (Strategy)

Jason Falls and his talk at Social Media Summit 2010 has greatly influenced my thinking on Goals and Objectives.

Social Network Research – Simply throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks is not a good strategy and is bound to fail eventually all while creating burnout for the individual in charge of managing all those social network profiles. Instead a tactical approach should be taken to find which social networks your current clients are using and then you can focus your efforts on those networks before expanding. Jay Baer of Convince and Convert wrote the excellent article 4 Detective Tricks To Find Your Customers In Social Media that deals with this issue in great detail.

Create Your Profiles – Now that you have determined where your existing clients are it’s time to create your profiles on these social networks. Try and maintain a consistent look across all the different networks by using your official logo, slogan and even the colour scheme of your website to help your fans quickly identify your social media presence as official.

Create A Schedule – With your social networks identified and profiles created it’s now time to begin using the social networks effectively to achieve your stated goals and objectives and in order to be successful you will have to post regularly to your social media channels and you can accomplish this by creating a posting frequency schedule.
The schedule you create for yourself can be as simple or as complex as you make it; it can be created on a spreadsheet or entered into your calendar of choice or added to your to-do list. Your schedule should include basic information such as which days you’ll post to which social network and what type of content to be posted. Your schedule can also help you to determine content that can be repurposed for distribution to different networks, for example you may shoot a video for YouTube on Monday which would allow you to repurpose the video into a blog post on Tuesday.

Determine Measurements – The only way to know if your efforts in social media have been successful is by measuring whatever metrics you can and since I don’t believe there is a holy grail as of yet when it comes to measuring social media ROI what I currently do is create a simple spreadsheet and then manually track the metrics determined to be important as outlined by the goals, objectives and supporting strategies.
If one of your goals was to increase website traffic you could do this by looking at the data gathered by your analytics program of choice and by looking at your overall traffic from day to day, week to week or month to month and recording the visitors, you would then look at your referring traffic sources to see which social networks sent you traffic over the same amount of time. If traffic levels have increased and your main increase in traffic is seen coming from your social networks that would be a positive ROI as determined by your goals, if your traffic has increased but not because of social networks that would be a negative ROI and you would have to determine why traffic hasn’t increased from your social media efforts.

Does your company have a social media strategy in place? What elements do you typically include in your strategy? Leave a comment below with your thoughts about creating a social media strategy and what methods you use to create one.

Flickr Photo “Strategy” By Waponi

In her article 4 Facebook Marketing Myths And How To Overcome Them author Chrisine Gallagher writes a really good article on four of the more well known Facebook marketing myths that have been floating around and then effectively debunks those myths while offering solutions to overcome your Facebook marketing obstacles.

While the article itself is of the highest of quality (as one would expect coming from a Social Media Examiner post), one particular paragraph in Christine’s article slightly bothered me. In myth number 1 she states:

Plus, compare the low to no cost of using Facebook—essentially just your Internet connection—to other marketing and advertising methods such as the Yellow Pages, the newspaper, TV and radio, and you’ve got a pretty convincing case for why you should be building a presence on Facebook.

A Quick Analogy

Most people would agree that going out to a nice restaurant for a meal is not free and you’ll find yourself paying the bill at the end. There are fixed costs for the restaurant including purchasing the ingredients, paying the chef to prepare the meal, paying the staff to bring your meal to you and upon leaving the restaurant you would leave the customary tip.

Now contrast this with dining in at home would you claim that cooking your own meal at home is free? I would contend that although you are preparing your meal at home; the meal is far from free and at minimum, someone had to go to the grocery store to purchase the food that will be prepared.

There are countless other analogies and comparisons I could have chosen to make but I believe they would all come to the same conclusion, doing something yourself doesn’t necessarily make it free.

Why Social Media Marketing Isn’t Free

What is it about social media marketing that gives it the no cost stigma? Is it because there is no exchange of money between individuals when you yourself are the one doing the marketing work? Has a false impression been created simply because social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn are free to use? Is it because many of the tools we use on a daily basis are also free to use?

I don’t know the answer as to why many feel that social media is free but what many individuals fail to take into account is that there are real-world costs associated with social media marketing, costs such as:

1. Time – As most of us have heard repeatedly throughout life time is money and in order for your brand to be successful in social media you are going to have to spend the hours cultivating the relationships necessary and engaging with fans and creating content. If you only spend one hour per day dedicated towards your social media marketing efforts by the end of the month you would have spent around 30 hours. Almost an entire work week spent just on your marketing efforts. That’s not taking into account the hours spent on content creation. When you add up the hours spent crafting blog posts, shooting video and sending out tweets the simple act of creating new content will add an additional untold amount of hours to your efforts.
   If you are self managing your social media efforts is your time worth something or because money doesn’t exchange hands you think of this as volunteer work? What if you were to pay an employee to manage your social media efforts? Would you still think the cost involved was zero?
2. Outsourcing – If you are a busy entrepreneur (and give me the name of one who isn’t) you probably have very few hours in your day set aside purely for marketing purposes or maybe you have the time but want a custom Facebook landing tab but just don’t possess the necessary skills to create one or maybe you just don’t feel like learning social media marketing but want your business involved.
   Whatever the case may be if you want to be involved in social media but don’t’ want to do it yourself you’re going to have to resort either paying an employee to do this for you or hiring an agency to manage your social networking efforts for you.
3. Analytics And Monitoring – Nobody is able to get one past the goalie with every shot and that is the main reason why you should be monitoring and tracking your social media efforts at even the most basic of levels. There are many free and very goodsocial media monitoring and brand analysis tools available (Klout, Social Mention and Facebook Insights just to name a few) for use but once again you will have to put the hours in to analyzing the data to see what is working, what isn’t working and where you could improve your efforts. If you wanted to go even further into monitoring and analysis you may have to turn to a paid solution such as Radian6 or ScoutLabs.

Ask Them As I’m Sure They’ll Agree

For those companies with small marketing budgets social media marketing looks like the proverbial white knight as the armor glistens with claims of free but in reality social media is nothing but a lower cost alternative to traditional forms of advertising such as television, print and radio.

I for one am willing to bet that if you talked to companies such as Dell and the NHL who have successfully deployed social media marketing they would agree with me that there was a cost associated with their social marketing campaigns and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if those costs were actually quite high; just not as high as the more traditional forms of advertising and marketing.

Flickr Photo $5700 By AMagill

Negative opinion on a product can do more harm to a brand more quickly than all the good will they have put forth in the past. Take for instance the case of Nestle who after accusations by Greenpeace about palm oil and orangutans faced an onslaught of angry consumers who took to the social networks to voice their concerns.

Instead of listening to the concerns of their customers and addressing the complaints in a reasonable and timely manner Nestle appeared to try and cover up the issue, censor its Facebook page and generally ignore the genuine complaints brought forth by its customers.

Nestle to their benefit did have a place where their customers could visit and sing the praises or shout the failures and certainly they heard all of this but where the problems happened is that Nestle didn’t care enough to actually listen to any of it.

Is your brand listening to what those around are saying or does it merely hear what is being said? And before you say listening and hearing are one and them same let me explain what it is I mean.
For me the act of hearing is to perceive the traditional and digital noise taking place all around and allowing it fall away without taking action.

While, the act of listening is to hear the entire amount of traditional and digital noise taking place and then take appropriate action based upon what has been heard.

Social media is a powerful tool that can allow a brand to monitor noise and when appropriate or needed jump in and engage the customers complaint before it turns into a full blown public relations nightmare or engage with the customers to simply say thanks for the compliment.

The simple act of listening to a consumer and taking action based off the noise heard is what can make or break a brand in the eyes of every current and potential customer. Social media is word of mouth for the digital age, and word of mouth is no longer local it has gone global where any wired individual can hear both the good and the bad about your brand.
Maybe it’s time you now pose the question to yourself, your company or your brand; Are we listening to all that is being said about us or do we just hear what is being said?

Nestle Fail:

• Another Nestle social media fail
• Fail: Nestle’s Social Media PR Blunder
• Nestle fails at social media
• Nestle mess shows sticky side of Facebook pages

Brand Monitoring:

• 9 Free Social Media Monitoring And Analysis Tools

Flickr photo “Talk, I’m Listening…” by Dude Crush

For even more Facebook stats

Is your business or brand currently using Facebook as part of your social media efforts? Why or Why Not? What brands do you think use Facebook the best? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

1. Google Alerts is a free service provided by Google that allows you to enter a keyword or set of keywords for tracking purposes. After deciding on which keywords you want to monitor you then decide the frequency at which you want to be alerted to a match on the keywords. At minimum you should be using Google Alerts to be tracking your brand name.
2. Postrank is the service you want to use if you are looking to monitor and track how your content is performing in the social web. Using their Topics tool you can measure the impact your content has had based on a variety of metrics that they track, including: site comments, tweets, Facebook posts, shares on Google Reader and other real-time web metrics. You can use their Topics tool for free but the Analytics tool is limited in its free state but they have plans starting from $9 per month that allow you access to even more of the data.
3. Klout.com is primarily a Twitter tracking service but they have recently launched a Facebok monitoring tool. They break your data down into a Klout score which is a measure of your influence, your ability to generate retweets, and you and your audiences engagement levels. Using their Content Analysis tools you can determine your most retweeted content as well the most popular links you have shared.
4. Twitalyzer is another Twitter influence tracking service that offers data related to where you rank within Twitter. They measure data points such as how many times you have been retweeted, your follower count, your impact and your engagement level. You can break this data down into days of the week and even hours of the day to help you determine when your tweeted content is best received.
5. Socialmention works a lot like Google Alerts but geared more towards social media. After performing your search the data returned includes measurements related to the sentiment surrounding your search, the top keywords, the passion at which others are talking about your search, the strength or likelihood that someone is talking about your brand as well as your reach.
6. Twitter Search is another free tool your brand should be using to monitor what is being said about you on Twitter. You can also use the advanced search features to monitor for any negative or positive sentiment being associated with your brand so you can deal with the negative appropriately and fix the issues or just say thanks to someone for mentioning your brand positively. After performing a search and to continue monitoring you can subscribe to the RSS Feed for that query to continually monitor your search.
7. Trackur is a simple to use monitoring tool that works by gathering together all mentions of your keyword search from around the social web. You can then save your searches and subscribe to the feed or have the results emailed to you. With the free version you are limited to a single saved search.
8. Google Analytics is a free analytics service that most brands use to track traffic to the site, referrals and bounce rates and other metrics used to determine the popularity of your site. Take advantage of the custom reports features to monitor which social networks and bookmarking sites are sending the most amount of traffic to your site so you can craft content appropriate for each of those networks.
9. A URL Shortening Service is a must when posting to Twitter to ensure that your message and link fit within the 140 character limit. Make sure you select a service such as bit.ly or ow.ly that allows for analytics and then stick to the service so you can track and monitor your contents performance.

What tools are you currently using to monitor and measure your brands social media impact?
Are there any free tools missing from this list that you swear by? What has your experience been using paid tools such as Radian6? Let me know in the comments below.

Flickr photo “The Detective” by paurian

Twitter’s user base has grown exponentially since it first launched in 2007 and despite some of it’s flaws and the occasional fail whale it has become a force to reckon with in the realm of social media, breaking news and communication. Watch the video above and then leave your thoughts on Twitter in the comments below.

• 2nd largest search engine in the world (Only their parent company Google receives more searches per month)
• 2 billion videos per day are watched
• Every minute 24 hours of video are uploaded
• 51% of users visit YouTube weekly or more often
• Average person spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube
• There is more HD content on YouTube than on any other online video service

With stats like these it’s no wonder that most businesses and individuals rely on YouTube as their sole video distribution partner; but as these numbers also suggest the competition to get your video noticed and viewed on YouTube can be incredibly fierce.

If you are one of the brands who rely solely on YouTube for your video strategy maybe it’s time to look at expanding your strategy to include additional and complimentary distribution channels to get your videos in front of as many viewers as possible.

You may be surprised to learn that with their over 400 million users worldwide and known primarily for social networking and Farmville recent comScore data suggests that Facebook is a video platform to watch out for.

According to recent article found at AllFacebook.com the social networking giant Facebook has recently surpassed 2 billion monthly video views and according to TechCrunch the site has tripled its viewership in a only a year which places Facebook firmly in position five behind Yahoo, Fox and Vevo while attracting a larger viewing audience than Hulu, Viacom and Microsoft.

While there may be a few flaws with Facebook video such as no dedicated search results to display just video results and the embed function only appears to be enabled if you are the owner of the video these are small flaws that Facebook may be working on overcoming if they wish to become a serious competitor to Google and YouTube in the video market.

If your brand is currently using Facebook as part of its social media strategy and have already created an official page to give your fans a place to engage with the brand, incorporating Facebook video into the overall online video strategy as a compliment to your YouTube strategies may be a quick way to get your content in front of many more eyes with very little additional work.

Are you a business or brand that currently uploads video to Facebook and to YouTube? What has your success been when using Facebook video compared to YouTube? What other video sharing services do you use? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Disclaimer 2: I am not a book reviewer and will do my best not to fumble this review up to badly.

An Overview

If you follow the world of social media at all chances are you’ve heard of Zappos (the online shoe retailer) as the company is constantly referenced as a case study for how a business should be participating and engaging in social media or maybe you’ve heard of Zappos because of their (in their words) recent marriage to Amazon in a deal worth just over 1 billion dollars.

The CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh has recently authored a book “Delivering Happiness – A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose” and while Tony is the CEO of Zappos this book isn’t about business, nor is it solely about Zappos. No, instead this book is more about the ups and downs, the highs and lows and the struggles that each and every one of us deal with in life.

Now, in saying that Delivering Happiness could still be considered a business book in the loosest sense of the term as the life lessons that Tony shares with the reader could be used to not only make oneself happier but could also translate into helping a business become more successful.

So if Delivering Happiness isn’t a business book, what type of book is it?

• Is it a motivational book? Sometimes
• Is it a self-help book? If you apply some of the lessons that Tony learned it could help you.
• Is it an inspirational book? Sometimes but not always
• Is it a spiritual book? It shares some qualities
• Is it a biography? To some degree

So if it doesn’t fit into any of the categories above but has elements of all contained within the writings what type of book is this?

I would classify this book as a life journal of a very fascinating individual who’s continued mission in life is to spread happiness to those directly around him and to others he has no relation with.

I found Delivering Happiness to be divided into three different but related parts which are:

• Childhood learning’s – This part deals with Tony as he grows up in childhood, how his parents helped shape his character and the lighting of his entrepreneurial flame.
• Life lessons – Deals with Tony at college, getting a job after graduation and realizing he needs to do something more than punch the clock. His first successful company is launched and later sold and he learns some important lessons that he carries through to Zappos.
• Zappos – A lot of people will only be interested in this part of the book but I found the stories leading up to this part of this book more compelling. This section of the book deals of course with Zappos and how much blood, sweat and equity Tony poured into it in the beginning simply because he believed in it. He admits that many mistakes were made but through everything lessons were learned and ultimately Zappos became the success we all know it as today.

The Review

Delivering Happiness is a book I would gladly recommend to anybody interested in not only entrepreneurship but also looking for inspiration, determination, motivation and stories of overcoming failure to become successful and believing enough in yourself and your team to finish what was started.

I found myself not being able to put this book down and because Tony and not a ghost writer authored Delivering Happiness you can really feel and hear his words coming through the pages as what he is saying feels extremely authentic and genuine.

Hearing Tony recount his stories and his struggles had be hanging off each and every page and even though I knew the outcome of the book I still found myself hoping that on the next page he would find the success he was driven to achieve. Tony honestly seems like one of the few people who genuinely cares about those around him and his stories about his own life are fascinating. He is the type of individual who I would love to sit down in a pub with, have a few beers and listen to the stories of his life and just absorb the knowledge contained within them.

There are plenty of lessons contained within the pages of Delivering Happiness that can be learned, taken and then applied to your life or your business but one of the most important lessons that I believe I have learned was that nice guys don’t have to finish last. Running a successful company based on core values and principles is possible and that helping others be happy is a successful business plan.

Before reading this book I never would have thought about ordering a pair of shoes online and I know this wasn’t a goal of the book but after reading about the Zappos story and more importantly the Tony Hsieh story this is a company I would want to do business with simply based on their business practices.

I believe that even though authoring a book was just one of Tony’s bucket list items the Zappos brand has just been elevated to the next level because of this book.

The Verdict

Whether you purchase this book Amazon (not an affiliate link) or from your local bookstore you just need to purchase this book. There are far to many good stories about being successful in life and in business for this not to added to your summer reading schedule.