By now, most of us know the definition of a social media campaign like the back of our hands but have we got our social media strategies ironed out? Are we integrating techniques that best represent our product or do we focus on advertising across all social media channels? What works best for you?

I could chart out a step-by-step guide to an effective social media campaign, complete with goal-setting and platforms to use, but I’d rather use 5 top-notch campaigns of the decade as an example instead. Although their success in terms increasing company revenue may be debatable, one cannot argue that they branded their product by implementing strategies that were both innovative and engaging.

A few things that set these campaigns apart:

• They presented an opportunity to talk to the ‘big shot’. Larger companies made themselves accessible to their target market via social media channels, i.e, engaging in consumer experience.
• They set a defined goal. Their social media activity was focused on achieving that goal as opposed to just ‘getting their name out there’.
• They researched the channels their target market visited the most, and implemented a strategy that complimented their daily routine.

Check it out:

1. “Friendship is Strong. But the Whopper is Stronger.”

A challenge set by Burger King, this campaign was based on a Facebook application that would give a user a free Whopper for every 10 friends he or she deleted. End result?   Nearly 200,000 friends deleted in a little over a week.  A short-lived campaign (due to Facebook’s request for discontinuation), Burger King’s Whopper proved to be an American favorite.

More About the Campaign…

2. “What Makes the Soda Fly Out of the Bottle?”

This wasn’t even a collaboration between The Coca Cola Company and Mentos, but a video of two men in lab coats, creating a Diet Coke Fantasia, were able to turn this    concept into a viral phenomenon. Also displaying  a ‘how-to-create-your-own-experiment’ section on their website, this was probably a marketing tactic neither Diet Coke or Mentos were expecting.

Check out the Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment…

3. “The Best Job in the World.”

A personal favorite, Tourism Queensland came up with a non cookie-cutter approach to an international campaign involving print and online media. On a limited budget, the company had to develop a strategy to bring awareness to the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. The solution? Global classifieds ads, advertising a job opportunity to work in a tropical paradise, with a large salary and no rent.

Check Out More Hype on the Campaign…

4. “Yes We Can.”

Obama’s run may be a controversial topic, but one has to admire his social media approach during the elections. By his consistent interaction with his voters via social media, email, website and viral videos, Obama picked up new trends to discuss his run for office.

More on Obama’s Social Media Campaign…

5. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”

Need we say more? From complete re-branding of the product that created a social media/Twitter buzz, and then to respond to that buzz via viral videos, this campaign was set to develop a new hype around the Old Spice Brand. I sure the phrase ‘I’m on a horse.’ will still crack many a smile in the future.

Watch Old Spice in Youtube Action…

You can do it too! A few ‘how-to’s’ on emulating social media success:

• Key note from the campaigns listed above – accessibility. A company is only as good as their customer service, so use social media platforms to encourage your customers to speak with you, leave testimonials, or make recommendations for improvement. Make sure that you touch base with your prospects on a regular basis – chart out a schedule if you have to.
• Use social media channels that best reflect your product. Does your product gear towards a ‘demonstration’? In that case, it’s best to invest in a video marketing campaign. Maybe your product is more ‘hands-on’-try out a Facebook application that will encourage your prospects to engage with the product on a different level.
• Keep your social media goals focused to your target market. If they don’t go on Twitter, furnish your strategies towards platforms they do use, such as Facebook or Youtube.

I”m sure there are a lot of pointers out there on social media marketing-feel free to leave your mark in the comments section. Don’t forget to share your favorite social marketing campaign, especially if you don’t see it on here!

Now as you’ve all probably heard by now Google has released another update. For those that haven’t the other day, Thursday, November 3^rd Google released the Google Freshness Update. Now before you all get worried about your search results this is not as big as the Google Panda update (also known as the Google Farmer because of its effect on content farms). While they say it’s going to affect around 35% of search queries, and Panda only affected 11%, a lot of sites are not feeling it like they did with the Panda update. That’s probably because most of us are not trying to rank for terms in niches that are constantly changing or maybe it’s because you’re keeping your blogs and websites current and fresh.

What is the Google Freshness Update?

The Google Freshness update is The Big G’s way of making sure you (the searcher) has access to the “Freshest” content available. With today’s world and the way we are using the internet these days it seems that everyone wants to stay up on the top topics that are going on in the world. Things like current events, celebrity gossip, what their friends are talking about and also experts in the areas that they are searching for. Let me give you a few examples.

Say someone types in “great gift ideas for Christmas” they don’t want to know what was popular 10 years ago. They want to know the best gifts to give this year. Trust me, you go and get your kid a toy for Christmas that was big 10 years ago they’re going to be something upset. But now with the Google Freshness Update You can just type in the search query above, without a time stamp (2011) Google is going to know that you want information for this Christmas coming up and therefore saving you from getting your kid a Power Ranger and therefore saving Christmas.

The Google Freshness update is also going to make sure you are given the most up to date, up to the minute news and current events from around the world. Now when someone searches for a term about one of today’s top news stories Google is going to give you the freshest stories according to when they were posted. Take a close look at your results and you will see that the time stamps on the results will go back according to time and date. While the first result might say 18 minutes the last one may say 18 hours or even 2 days before the date of the search depending on the popularity of the search query.

If you would like a more detailed explanation on the methods Google is using for the Google Freshness update Justin Briggs does a great job of explaining it in his post; Methods for Evaluating Freshness. In this article he goes into deep analysis of how Google looks at the inception date of a document and does a great job at describing how the Google Freshness update uses social media and information from microblogs to make sure the user always has access to the freshest and current results.

How is the Google Freshness Update Going to Affect Us?

Now what does the Google Freshness update mean to you and your fellow marketers? Depending on the search terms you want to rank for it could mean nothing at all but if your websites search queries are targeting terms that are regularly changing then this could be a problem. I don’t see it as being a problem at all; I think this is a great improvement for everyone that’s using the search engine for finding current information. And for those of us that work online whether it be in SEO or Internet marketing in general, as long as you keep up with maintaining your blog or website with current information you should be fine.

But those that think they can put up a post or two and hope to rank and stay on top of the search engines are going to feel this update the most. With the Google Freshness update, if you’re not keeping your website or blog current and up to date with the freshest content possible, don’t expect to keep your rankings or rank at all.

Choosing Relevant Keywords and Keyword Phrases

The first step in an effective SEO strategy is choosing keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your niche. Targeting keywords that deal with health won’t help if you’re selling automotive products.

Also, you don’t want keywords which are too general or broad in their scope. Although “automobiles” may be a high ranking keyword, it won’t do much good for your automotive product business because such a search will result in too vast a selection of sites for customers to draw from. You can localize your keyword list even further by using phrases such as “automotive parts in St. Louis” for example. Choosing keywords and phrases which deal specifically with your product or service and your target area are what you’re after.

In order to create a list of viable keywords, sit down and do some serious thinking about what you would use to search for your specific products or services. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and determine what questions they might ask and how you might solve their problems. Draw similar advice from family and friends, and visit competitors’ sites and see what keywords they are using.

Utilizing Free Online Tools

Once you have your keyword list, turn to one or more of the free online tools available. Google provides some of the best, but others such as Word Tracker are good as well. There are also various software products which you can purchase to help with choosing keywords. However, it’s advisable to avoid them as the rules and criteria change frequently and these tools can quickly become outdated and provide misleading information.

Since Google is the most popular search engine, we’ll use their keyword tool for this example. Go down your list of keywords and plug each one into the Google keyword tool. A list of keywords will be generated which show both “Local Search Volume” and “Global Search Volume”. Export these lists into a spreadsheet and eliminate all keywords which are not relevant. When you’ve weeded out your list, you can begin the process of determining the best keywords to use. The idea is to keep the keywords which are both relevant and popular yet have a low competition factor.

Determining Keyword Value

A keyword’s competitive factor is achieved by determining its value compared to other sites. To do this, run each keyword through a Google search to bring up its results. For instance, a search for “automotive parts” produces “About 64,700,000 results”.  Even though this is a large number, it refers to all pages on which “automotive products” appears. To reduce this number, we simply need to transform our original keyword into a title using the operator “allintitle: automotive parts”. A new search now reveals 216,000 sites which have that verbiage in the title. Since titles are strong strategic elements in SEO ranking, this number will help determine the keyword’s value.

Add this value to another column on your spreadsheet and continue with this process until you have created a value for all keywords listed. You will then want to keep all keywords which have both a low “allintitle” value and a high “Global Search Volume”.

Although there is much more to an effective SEO strategy, this will give you a strong jump on the competition. By building these keywords and keyword phrases into good content on your site, you will grab a larger portion of those customers looking for your product or service.

This guest post has been provided by the Local SEO experts at http://localseo.org/.