Ten social media problems that drive marketers nuts

“Use social media marketing to build your business.” Sure, these are captivating buzzwords, but few understand how difficult marketing through social sites can be until they try it!  I’m learning this from experience.  The truth is that social media marketing is difficult work.  To help minimize the impact of this frustration on the beginning marketer, here are my Top 10 annoyances as I try to market through the social web and a few comments on how I’m dealing with them:

1. Marketing for producing votes – Users of sites like Digg and Reddit rate links, allowing some to soar and others to languish in obscurity. When I found myself trying to write to secure votes and work the system, I decided to re-focus on simply creating quality content in spite of the kind ratings I get.

2. Converting followers – I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of followers: Now what? Followers are not the same as sales leads are they?   I’ve learned to think differently about expectations and conversion rates. Over time, buyers will come, but you need to be patient and accept a low conversion rate as you focus on building relationships, not quick sales. 

Read more...

Marketers and Social Media: Cutting Through the Noise

Marketers of all kinds have been lured by the promise of social networking, and the ease with which they can set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for their companies and even their individual brands. But does any of that have a tangible effect on what they are trying to accomplish? According to a new report from Forrester Research, it often does not, primarily because Generation Y users are overwhelmed with Facebook friends, Twitter and MySpace accounts already, and it’s hard for marketing messages to cut through the clutter. Forrester’s advice? Make your content more interesting.

The research firm says its surveys show that the average Facebook user has 135 friends on the network, 107 friends on MySpace, and follows about 77 people on Twitter — but the younger Generation Y demographic that many marketers want to reach is even more overloaded: the average younger user has 220 friends on Facebook, 147 friends on MySpace and follows 86 people on Twitter (interestingly enough, Generation X users tend to follow more people on Twitter than Generation Y users, according to Forrester’s research). On an anecdotal note, I have spoken to several friends in the Gen Y category who have well over 500 friends on Facebook. Read more: Original Article.  

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Companies Struggle to Keep Social Media Content On-Message

Nearly three-quarters of blog posts don’t reflect corporate messaging

Marketers and other corporate communications professionals may sometimes feel they have a thankless task: carefully craft messages about their company’s thought leadership, social responsibility efforts and new product or service launches, only to find those messages distorted as they’re disseminated through the media.

PR and communications firm Burson-Marsteller analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies in the Financial Times Global 100 list of firms and discovered a large gap between the messages that went out and how they were covered on blogs. Read more...

Small Businesses Change Social Media Expectations

About a quarter of small businesses now marketing via social media

After climbing steeply, according to research fromNetwork Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, small-business adoption of social media marketing has plateaued at 24%.

The study of US small business found that those that do market via social media primarily use Facebook (82%), and that the most common activities are maintaining a company page on a social network and posting status updates or links to interesting content. About half of businesses that used social media also monitored brand chatter on social networks.

As small businesses have gained experience with social media, some have realized their expectations for the channel did not line up with the reality of the social web. As the wider marketing world begins to look at social as more of a loyalty channel than one for acquisition, small businesses are also finding that their hopes for spreading brand awareness and attracting new customers have not been fully met. By contrast, somewhat fewer small businesses had expected to use social media as an engagement channel, but nearly two-thirds have had success in that area. Read Full Report.  

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B2B and Social Media: How to Design Social Media Strategy and Plan for a B2B company- eMarketing Insight

Today the focus of this post is: Designing Social Media Strategy and Plane for a B2B company. Before we start designing it, we need to understand following 8 vital concepts:

1. How B2B business is different from B2C in eMarketing?
2. Understanding the Buying process.
3. How can social media influence the buying behavior in B2B?
4. What are the different alternatives available to us in social media which we can apply in a B2B scenario?
5. How to integrate our marketing efforts with social media efforts?
6. What are the parameters in which we can evaluate the ROI of these social media efforts?

Social Media Can Change The Corporate Culture

By MITCH JOEL

Most corporate cultures are what they are. Some have been around for decades. Others have had the same corporate culture for a century (or longer). Change is never easy, but change does happen.

There's this old trucker saying that goes: "if you can't change people, you change people." The truth is that not every competent individual is right for every company, and there are also some serious nincompoops who manage to stick with a company longer than anyone can fathom. Beneath the many layers of individuals, personal politics, power shifting and HR is a corporate culture. The brand's raison d'être. It is not something that changes easily, but it does change. Mark W. Schaefer over at the Grow Blog doesn't seem to think it's possible. In his Blog post, Can social media change your company's culture? I doubt it (September 22nd, 2010), he calls me out for saying that Social Media is changing corporate culture during our recent Podcast debate on Ghost Blogging (more on that here: SPOS #214 - The Ghost Blogging Debate With Mark W. Schaefer).

Social Media can't change a corporate culture...

And, here's why Mark thinks this way: "The idea that you could transform a company culture just because it needs to create a Twitter account or YouTubechannel is probably fanciful. I believe the companies who are succeeding on the social web are doing so because they already have a company culture that would enable and reward that success. A well-managed, market-oriented company with a legacy of customer-centricity is going to do well with social media -- and any other marketing innovation that comes down the line.  If you look at a list of the most successful companies on the social web, there really aren't any surprises are there?  Their cultures are pre-wired to succeed." Read More...

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5 Steps to Winning at Business with Social Media

By Namish Dave 

If you haven’t already decided to leverage social media, you probably shouldn’t read this article. I wouldn’t want to hog any more bandwidth detailing the importance of social media and why if you are not on it, you are not anywhere – period. Let’s look at what you should do to continue what you have been doing : Winning at Business with Social Media.

This post is also not about getting you started on social media – frankly that doesn’t take much. You know the top social media sites, and your newest trainee (they are actually the best bet!) can setup your accounts. But then what? The biggest mistake you can possibly make in to create a static presence on social media.

Social media affects every part of your organisation and you need a comprehensive response to it. Ensuring 5 Steps can jump start your ability to leverage social media. Lets look at each step briefly.

1.Listen! : A seemingly simple task, but challenging to implement. It involves monitoring, reading and comprehending the conversations online. There are conversations happening everywhere, and you need to setup mechanisms to monitor the buzz. Beyond this, you of course need to setup the channels of communication so that the stakeholders can directly speak to you. The Kryptonite lock example is cited as a major failure to listen the right cues. The quality of listening is also important – one basic principle is that this has to be non-intrusive.  Read More...  

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Social Media 101: A Required Course

Posted by eMarketinginsight

Whether you like it or not, social media has become a part of our daily lives. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp – these social media platforms have changed the way we think, the way we communicate and interact, the way we build relationships, the way we make decisions, and the way we shop. Why then are so many businesses so reluctant to use social media?

The biggest barrier to entry into the social media world is education. It’s difficult to “teach an old dog new tricks” especially when social media and the internet in general, are always changing. There’s so much to learn and understand – What is it? Why do I need it? How do I get started? Who has time for this? How do I prioritize? How does this benefit my business?

My advice is to just try it – start small, make mistakes and learn from them.

So, while the “old dogs” are learning, taking it slow and giving it a chance, how can we help the “new dogs” or the next generation of entrepreneurs and business owners get onboard with social media? We need to give them a leg up and better prepare and educate them through courses and curriculums designed around social media.

Melissa Cohen, PR Manager at Metis Communications, recently wrote an article called “The Spirit of the Real-Time Web” in which she reflects on a panel discussion from the 140 Characters Conference among two principals and a high school science teacher who all “expressed the need to educate school districts – everyone from teachers, parents, students and the board about the importance of social media for education.”

Teachers are very much like many business owners in that they continue to rely on traditional methods and technologies to reach their target audience of students or parents or customers. They aren’t thinking about the way their audience gets information today – through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. They aren’t thinking about new ways to interact and engage through the internet. The world is shifting from being static and tangible to being instantaneous and changeable. We need to adapt on all levels if we want to create successful students, future business owners and businesses.

As Cohen says, “We welcome and challenge school districts and every entrepreneur out there to commit to social media. You might actually learn something…or…increase your customer base, raise awareness of your brand, recommend brands to others and obtain market feedback.”

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

In The Future, All Ads Will Be Social

Since SocialMedia.com was founded in 2007, Seth Goldstein (Co-Founder & Chairman) has been predicting that “In the future, all ads will be social.” Seth isn’t alone anymore. Last week in a keynote presentation at OMMA Global, Neal Mohan (VP, Product Management at Google) listed several themes describing the future of advertising online, including  “every display campaign must be social.”Mohan pointed out the problem of banner blindness: “consumers have really learned to ignore all the banner ads they see on the Internet each day.”  Read more...

Trust, But Verify: Being Responsible with Social Media

"A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants." Mark Twain said this when news moved at the speed of the telegraph, imagine what he'd clock a lie at now. This weekend a rumor asserting that Apple would require all software to be signed in order to run on Mac OS X 10.7 made its way through Identi.ca and Twitter with astonishing speed. Few bothered to notice that the source of the rumor did not cite any evidence for the assertion. Read more...