Highly Recommended Because…

This playbook walks you through setting up a social media strategy from A to Z. It’s an important read for anyone considering building an effective and comprehensive social media presence for their business.

Below is a screenshot from the discussion on mapping a blueprint for your brand’s “online footprint” in Section 2:

Checklists

My absolute favorite part of this e-book (aside from the fact that it’s free) is the overviews, insight summaries and checklists they provide for setting up your brand on any of the major social media platforms. From YouTube to Twitter, they cover it all!

Below is a screenshot of the Facebook checklist:

It’s Free!

Best of all it’s free, so why wouldn’t you give it a try?

This was also posted on my Discovering New Media blog and my BCM/D Media in Ministry blog

Here is the link for the pack that I choose to use.

Social Media Icon Pack

A lot of people wonder how they can use social media to make their brand and their business more recognizable. Skittles is a company that has taken this to the extreme by making their entire site a mashup of all their social media sites.  What to chat about Skittles. Click that Chatter tab on their site and it takes you to Twitter. Click their Media tab and you are taken to their Youtube page.

I am not suggesting you redo your website it this same way. I just think they serve as a great example of the power of social media and how you can invest in it to help build your business and your brand.

To be honest, most people know how to use Facebook Pages because they’re already USING facebook for themselves. If you have a profile on facebook (that you maintain), then you can easily learn how to maintain your organization’s public profile (that’s another term they use for Facebook Pages, just to confuse you) because their up-keep is the same, basically.

How to Create a Facebook Page for Your Organization

From your facebook profile click this little icon…

Then hit the “Create Page” Button

Fill out the required information about your business/organization/band/celebrity. Sign your electronic signature and viola! You’ve set up a profile page just for your business. Update away just as you would on your own profile.

Why is this Facebook Page So Great?

People on Facebook can become fans and all of your organization’s status updates, events, videos, blog posts, pictures, links will show up in their feeds. You know, that thing they check constantly throughout the day at work, and in the evening in front of the tv, and on their cell phone while they’re out. Yeah, one might say that’s a pretty big opportunity.

Gravatar

Seriously, why don’t you have one?

Stop leaving your thought-provoking comments on blogs all over the Internet without your beloved profile picture! It’s heinous (no, really, it is). Part of Social Media is branding yourself. Put a picture with the reputation so it’s easier for people to remember you. Enter Gravatar.com! (Don’t get me wrong, a brand is far more than a profile picture. You’ve got to have the content to back up the brand.)

The image is attached to our email address. And it’s not just one email address or image. Add as many images and email addresses as you want to your account. What I love about this, is that there are so many options! Assign one image to one email address and another image to a different email address, or just assign one image to all of your email addresses.

Now, whenever you leave a comment on a blog or sign up for certain services, using any of the email addresses you entered in to Gravatar.com and the assigned image will automatically appear as that cute little profile picture icon thingy that appears next to your name so everyone can bask in the glory of your beautiful gravatar as they read all your comments.

How to Use Hashtags

We use hashtags in Twitter to provide context (aka metadata) for our tweets. For example, say you’re attending, oh I don’t know, an awesome social media conference hosted by the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce. As you learn great new and innovative strategies you want to tweet them. Give it context by adding the hashtag FCCC assigned #fredsmc at the end of each tweet from today’s conference. Later in the day you can look through what other people learned who attended the same conference but maybe sat in different classes throughout the day. You can also easily look-up that great resource you found, but you just can’t remember the name of, by searching your tweets for #fredsmc!

See how great hashtags are? Almost as good as hashbrowns (actually better if you’re a vegan like me

How to Set Up Hashtags

It’s actually as simple as following @hashtags. Then start using #hashtags in your tweets.

Where to Search Hashtags

Go to Hashtags.org. See how easy that was?

For waaaaay more info and how to search hashtags…check out the Twitter Fan Wiki entry on Hashtags.

Social Media 204 – Strategic marketing ideas:

Innovative marketing ideas – How to use social media to augment your traditional marketing and make your brand more recognizable.

The beauty of social media is that it has the ability to take your brand and the things you are doing viral. Meaning that if what you share online is good enough or interesting enough it can spread across the internet in ways you’ve never imagined.

Recently, KFC partnered with Oprah to do an online promotion where they used Social Media and the web to promote their new Grilled Chicken. They posted a link to a coupon which would get you two pieces of grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit. The promotion went viral and millions of the coupons were downloaded. There was so much traffic to download the coupon that the site shut down for a while because the servers were overloaded.

So our goal is to help you get the most out of your social media and using it to market your business. The first thing we want to talk to you about is the three ways to use Twitter.

Be Successful on Twitter

1. Break News –

Twitter is the most viral way to get the word out about what your business is doing. In order to break news in a way that the Twitter community will embrace, however, you have step outside the comfort zone of press releases and news articles. Of course you can use sites like Twitterfeed to automatically update your Twitter account with the latest press releases, news articles, and blog posts from your website, but if that’s all you’re doing no one will pay attention to you.

You can’t just make your Twitter feed all about you and what you are doing. You need to show your clients that you care about them and that you want to engage them. Some of the ways you do this are by following their Twitter feeds, listening to their suggestions, replying to their comments, thanking them for retweeting your posts, and posting things on your feed that you think they may find interesting or helpful or better yet, funny.

It is also important that you post regularly. If you don’t it will appear to your audience that Twitter was just a fad that you tried to further your own agenda but didn’t quite get it and then gave up.

2. Make News -

Innovation and creative social media strategy make news. When what you’re doing on Twitter makes the news, you make the news. Here are just a few pretty amazing examples:

Comcast - Comcast is trying to reshape public opinion about their brand, and they’re using the ComcastCares Twitter account to do just that. Their Twitter behavior is being talked about everywhere, including the New York Times. A recent USAToday article chronicled their efforts by saying…

Frank Eliason, a customer service manager for Comcast, spends his day communicating with Twitterers about the company — hoping to resolve issues. Comcast isn’t on Twitter to turn around the firm’s customer service perception issues but simply to “build better relationships with our customers,” he says.

Zappos.com – Zappos is simply the most recognizable brand on Twitter. They are revolutionary, forward-thinking, responsive, and genuinely interested in interacting with their customer community. Their efforts are rewarded by a plethora of mainstream media attention, including the USAToday and NYTimes pieces mentioned above. Zappos has positioned themselves as the case study for how a business should use Twitter. (Check out their CEO’s Twitter feed)

Trietsch Memorial United Methodist Church - Treitsch UMC in Dallas, Texas just fininshed a teaching series called “The Theology of Twitter“. because of the current popularity of Twitter and social media, the local news station did a segment on the news on their church and the series. This got the attention of the major news networks, like CNN and Fox News, who also did stories on the church and their series.

So as you can see, lots of good stuff can happen to get your recognized by traditional news outlets because of what you do with Twitter and social media.

3. Change News The idea is simple and obvious; make transformation through change and do it openly and publicly. For your business it’s embracing two simple and complex notions: 1. people want to buy things in a myriad of ways and helping them get what they want where they want it is tantamount, and 2. people also want to talk to, hear from, and engage with other real people, which means your use of social media needs to be intentional. Social media, and Twitter especially, provide a recognizable brand the opportunity to be human, reply to questions, and ultimately create community. If you can act on the following steps, you can increase your chances of really making a difference in your marketing.

Step 1: Get on Twitter, talk about being on Twitter, and use Twitter everyday to merge the personal and professional. What your eating for lunch matters just as much as the next big thing your business is going to do because it shows depth, makes you human, dynamic, and easy to relate to.

Step 2: Don’t be over concerned about turning out polished online content. This includes blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter), vlogging (video blogging), and mo-blogging (mobile blogging). Someone with a recognizable personal brand is missing a huge opportunity if they’re not using their brand as a means to create and build community. Don’t just be a face, be a person (with flaws), a trusted resource, and an acquittance.

Step 3: Take whatever cool experiences you may have in the course of your daily work activities and broadcast them using all those mediums I mentioned in step 2. Are you interviewing someone really high profile? Are you taking a road trip to a interesting locale? Twitter what your doing (via SMS shortcode 40404), take pictures with your phone (try Twitpic for sending images to Twitter), create short videos with your camera phone or laptop cam (try Qik, 12seconds.tv or Seesmic), and do it all in a digitally savvy way so that anyone following you on Twitter can be there with you, in the moment, sharing the experience with you.

Step 4: Engage, engage, engage. If someone follows you, follow them back (as long as they’re a real person). If someone replies (via the @), reply back. If someone direct messages you (DM), direct message them back.

Step 5: Take everything that you’re doing in steps 1 – 4 and use your traditional marketing and PR efforts to talk about what you’re doing. You’ve got a website, a newsletter, press releases etc, take advantage of those mainstream means of communicating all this change.

Create a strategy for your Social Media Marketing.

Figure out Where to Go: Learn how to detect and distinguish organizationally relevant social networks/services for more effective results.

• Go Deep not Wide: Engage deeply—don’t spread yourself too thin by joining every network out there. The key is in deciding how many networks to join. The rule of thumb according to Chris Brogan, Social Media Advisor, is to be involved with up to only three social networking sites.
• Fish where the Fish are—Why spend your time on a particular network if no one is listening? Here are some very useful, free tools to identify your audience and compare social networks:
  • Blog Search: Monitor blogs and find out what people are saying about you.
  • Compete.com: to compare social networks (Facebook vs. Myspace)
  • Google Alerts: helps you identify networks creating new relevant content.
  • Google Trends: to find keywords your audience is searching for by location
  • PRMetrics: the best way to quickly view and compare the latest mentions of your targeted keywords on the most popular social networks
• Focus on the “Sneezers.” Marketing expert, Seth Godin says, cater to customers who are your advocates so they want to tell your story. He calls them “sneezers” because they will spread your message virally like someone infected with a cold. You can target your audience by identifying keywords with essential tools:
  • Google Trends
  • Twitter search

Automate, automate, automate!

When you use social media one of the best things you can do is figure out how to automate your workflow. Some of the best ways to do that are to incorporate some of the following tools:

• To add a video, share a link, write a blog post and see it everywhere…
  • Feedburner.com
  • Ping.fm
  • Facebook apps
    (30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook)

• To get notified when relevant content is posted about your business anywhere on the internet…
  • Google.com/alerts

Make Your Content Dynamic: Use innovative strategies that reinforce your brand and encourage customers to participate.

• Be Helpful
  • Use the search tools to answer questions you find in blog posts,
  • Offer resources relevant to your business.
  • Own a landscaping business? Write a blog post: 10 ways customers can improve their irrigation.
• Make it Interactive
  • Use contests, and free giveaways as a way to keep customers coming back.
  • Own a hotel? Hold a video contest among customers. The customer who develops the best video promoting your hotel and it’s services wins a two-night stay at your hotel. Feature the top entries each month on your website
• Offer Exciting Extras
  • Include slideshows and Animoto videos on your website. Tell customers about it on your print promotions. Always push them to your website and its content.
  • Own a photography business? Win a free animoto video of your wedding if you find your photographer through Twitter.
  • ***Animoto for a Cause is free to non-profits***