I recently had a discussion with a colleague about social marketing consultants and she said something that was very interesting.

“The social marketing consultants I know charge hourly to train people to do their own social marketing.”

I’ve had enough experience with trainers to know that theory and practice are very different. The theory of social marketing goes right out the window when you send out your first tweet. People are indifferent to your new Twitter and Facebook page. There’s very little reason why they should pay any attention to your efforts to engage them in a conversation about your products and service. No one cares!

The only way visitors will find any value in your social accounts is by providing them with valuable content. Forcing an employee to become blogger on behalf of your company is akin to handing your grandmother the DVR remote and asking her to set it up.

Anyone can blog, but it takes someone special to create interesting content.

The truth is it takes several dedicated hours a day to manage a business’s social network. One must:

1. Constantly watch for comments, replies, or reviews directed at your company.
2. Write engaging blog posts about your products, services, and industry.
3. Organize each blog post in way that is easy to read quickly and with lots of pictures.
4. Distribute new blog posts to social bookmarking sites and minor social networks.
5. Regularly watch for updates from people looking for services or even your competitors.
6. Supervise blogs, forums, video sites, and review sites for mentions about your business.

There’s a lot of details to constructing a social marketing campaign, but it is something that can be learned through experience. However, don’t believe that it can be taught on an hourly basis. Those social marketing snobs are just too proud to get their hands dirty with real work.

Online reputation management is a part of the social marketing services that I offer my clients. Basically online reputation management helps keep tabs on customer activity (both good and bad) discussing your product, service, or company name. In this post I’m focusing on the bad reviews because that’s what most business owners are worried about, but keep in mind that online reputation management is not just about monitoring the negative reviews, it’s also about finding and encouraging great reviews.

Decision making on the internet has become a business model. Sites like Yelp, Epinions, GetSatisfaction, and Urbanspoon have developed communities based on recommendations for any industry. Retailers and restaurants are among the most popular places to review, but each industry has its place in at least one social review network.

Search engines now index and display these reviews right on the business listing and a low rating could be the deciding factor between you and your competition. Happy customers are are often willing to post their praises, but the most active user is typically the critic.

With a social consultant on your side you’ll know as soon as a customer is unhappy and has started posting negative reviews on social networks. Using social monitoring tools we are able to take direct action and typically correct the problem that caused the customer to post a rank on a social network.

Take a look at our Retailers package or one of our full service social marketing packages to start an online reputation management program of your own.

By using automated tools to manage your social media marketing you’re actually hurting your business’s image.

You aren’t fooling anyone.
Don’t forget that all those followers are real people. Interactive marketing means that you are speaking with individuals and creating relationships that continue to grow and change. People are smart and they can tell if there is a real person behind that business’s Twitter account.

Automated responses are SPAM.
As a business, if you are using automated direct messages you should question your purpose for being on Twitter in the first place. You’re dealing with real people and they can tell that your direct message is simply a pre-written marketing message. If you aren’t taking the time to put a personal effort into each one of your messages your audience will know it.

You can’t streamline personality.
Each business’s culture is different and it takes time to develop that personality through social networking. Engaging with your customers through Twitter is not a push button program. It takes time to develop a campaign and standards for social media marketing.

If you don’t have the in-house manpower to manage a social media campaign you have two options. You can seek an outside social marketing professional to help you develop a plan and execute that plan or you can stay out of the game until you are ready to take the plunge.

Don’t make the mistake of automating your social media campaign. Social media is a popular form of marketing because it’s based around real people making personal connections. If you’re thinking about using an online social tool, ask yourself these basic questions first:

1. Does it encourage a personal connection with others?
2. Is it beneficial or can it provide someone with information they actually want?
3. Would it be awkward to say or do something like that in real life?

If it doesn’t pass all of those three basic principals don’t do it.

Disagree? Let me know about it in the comments.

The internet has always been a social environment. The term “social marketing” isn’t a new idea, it’s another method of the ageless process of grassroots campaigns to advertise a product. What makes social marketing on the internet different is because those social platforms are now extremely popular. A massive number of people of all demographics are using these social networks to communicate with friends, family, and even businesses! Social marketing is important because users take social networks seriously.

A business will benefit from a social marketing campaign for the following reasons:

1. Your business’s homepage is Google.com
   Pass your business card around or come up with a catchy jingle; no matter what you do the majority of your visitors will come directly from Google or some other search engine. Your website represents one entry in the billions of search results. Using social marketing you can grab more search rankings for each maintained social channel. Your business name won’t just be the first result, it could rule the entire page!
2. Two way communication
   Social networks offer visitors an opportunity to comment and ask questions about a business’s product. Contact forms have a much lower conversion rate than a comment box, however a comment box requires the same amount of information (name, email, ect) that a contact form would request. Social marketing harvest more feedback than a traditional website.
3. Familiar platforms = more visitors
   Social networks are familiar, nonthreathing platforms. Content is more likely to be shared, recommended, retweeted, liked, and rebroadcast when it is on a social network. Social activity from your visitors will lead to more people coming in contact with your content.

Let me prove it to you. Leave me a comment or contact me and I can show you how social marketing can provide great results.

1. Fresh
   News is old before the print dries on the paper. Your visitors want to know how your product fits into their changing environment. A blog can communicate the dynamic aspects of your products and how your company stays on top of the latest changes in a constantly changing market.
2. Bite Size
   Each blog post is a condensed packet of information that communicates valuable information to your visitors in a medium meant for fast consumption. Blogs publish topics and news on a daily basis, thereby limiting the volume of content needed to communicate discussion topic.
3. Social
   A blog is a platform built onto a social engine. Each blog post is designed to be shared, searched, emailed, and bookmarked. Interesting and valuable blog posts generate new visitors simply because they provide fresh, bite size content on a regular basis.
4. Creative
   A website focused on sales is limited in its creativity because its purpose is not to insight a conversation, but to deliver a sales pitch to its readers. Blogs encourage creativity in many forms of media, allowing the company to distribute fresh, creative content without cluttering up their homepage.

Check out our full service social marketing packages that include blogging services.

Let’s start by noting the difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page.

Facebook Profile:

• Strictly for people (not a business or product) to interact with friends and family
• Any individual can create a profile, just not a commercial business or product
• A business that opens a profile page is in direct violation of the Facebook Terms of Service and will be disabled
• Other users become FRIENDS of a Facebook Profile
• A Facebook Profile can upload pictures, videos, status updates, and can invite people to become friends

Facebook Pages:

• Designed for businesses, brands, companies, products, and celebrities
• Other users become FANS of a Facebook Page
• Can upload pictures, videos, status updates, host a discussion board, display wall posts, and other features
• Can track metrics like fans, page views, interactions, gender, age, location, language, and more
• Can not invite other members to become a fan

Example of Facebook Page metrics:

The reason for keeping companies and individuals separate on Facebook is to reduce the amount of spam. If a business was able to invite you become a fan of their page, users would be flooded with businesses looking to inflate their number of fans.

The purpose is to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible. Sites like MySpace and Twitter do not have such strict boundaries between individuals and companies. This unrestricted access has contributed to the ongoing decrease in MySpace’s traffic and could lead to the death of Twitter if stricter rules are not put into place.

This points back to the first three rules of social media marketing:

1. Content
2. Content
3. Content

If you don’t provide interesting content with a positive experience for your readers and fans you will never achieve success in developing a strong online following. It wouldn’t be good business practice to cut corners in your trade, so it’s equally unprofessional to break social networking etiquette.

As a business that is participating in social networking, you MUST strongly avoid pitching your product. If pitch marketing is a hammer, then social media marketing is a magnet. Draw people to you by providing quality content about your industry. There’s nothing wrong with a small blurb about who you are and what you do, but don’t forget that the meat of social media marketing is about the content.

Don’t be lured into automating your social media campaign.

You aren’t fooling anyone.
Don’t forget that all those followers are real people. Interactive marketing means that you are speaking with individuals and creating relationships that continue to grow and change. People are smart and they can tell if there is a real person behind that business’s Twitter account.

Automated responses are SPAM.
As a business, if you are using automated direct messages you should question your purpose for being on Twitter in the first place. You’re dealing with real people and they can tell that your direct message is simply a prewritten marketing message. If you aren’t taking the time to put a personal effort into each one of your messages your audience will know it.

You can’t streamline personality.
Each business’s culture is different and it takes time to develop that personality through social networking. Engaging with your customers through Twitter is not a push button program. It takes time to develop a campaign and standards for social media marketing.

Your business doesn’t engage in underhanded schemes to provide its product and services, so why should your marketing campaign creep around in the shadows. Customers like transparency.