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Cydney O'Sullivan Social Marketing Superstars - Video

If you can remember the days before Facebook and Twitter, you probably recall a time when social media marketing meant using MySpace, Delicious, commenting on the posts of bloggers dedicated to your niche, making yourself known in forums, and so forth. Nowadays, just trying to keep up with the different categories can make a marketer frantic.

Social media optimization and social media marketing really got their start in 2006, with a blog post by Rohit Bhargava. To some extent, it existed before that post, of course; it's worth noting that Facebook had been founded only two years before. Rohit codified rules, which others expanded on. He updated those rules several years later.

As you'd expect, since we're dealing with the online world, a lot has happened in the six years since Rohit wrote that post. And if you're trying to understand it all, it's downright scary. Business Insider posted an insane but painfully accurate infographic to get that point across. Even the graphic's creator missed something; Pinterest wasn't included, and really should have been.

The graphic separates services and websites important to social media marketing into no fewer than 28 different categories. Twenty-eight! And they're all legitimate, as near as I can tell. All of a sudden, I feel a certain sympathy with General Motors for removing its advertising from Facebook. Perhaps it was simply a matter of not being able to keep everything straight, and giving up on trying.

In this article (and the ones that follow) I'm going to explain these different social media categories. Hopefully, rather than contributing to the confusion, I'll help you get a handle on each of these areas. We'll take a look at what they are, what they do, some of the major players, and their marketing potential.

Facebook and Twitter are practically in a class by themselves; they've certainly spawned several separate categories. Twitter has its own third-party apps, while Facebook features Facebook apps, and Facebook gaming, which Business Insider's infographic treats as a separate category.

Twitter applications include such items as TwitPic, StockTwits, wefollow, tweetmeme, twitvid, Listorious, and more. These services vary in their specific goals, but in general, they try to enable their users to get more personalization, functionality, or efficiency out of the microblogging site. Or in other words, they make it easier for users to pursue their personal interests through Twitter.

For example, TwitPic helps users post pictures and videos on Twitter. StockTwits dubs itself a financial communications platform and tries to organize Twitter streams focused on that kind of information. It also seems to have its own, separate functionality, with members and bloggers and more; it offers a pro service, which is in beta. Twitvid bills itself as a social network that connects you with the latest and greatest videos on topics and people you find interesting, presumably collecting them from Twitter. Listorious lets you find people on Twitter by topic, region or profession, and interview them by asking questions through their interface. You can add yourself to Listorious.

You can take a couple of different approaches with Twitter apps if you want to promote your company. You can do a search for Twitter apps and find some to use that work with your marketing plan. For instance, wefollow offers a list of Twitter users organized by interest, which should be pretty valuable to just about any marketer.

Or, if you're ambitious, you can think of Twitter as a fire hose of information and work with someone to create a specific Twitter app that would fit the theme of your company or your goals. For example no surprise StockTwits was founded in 2008 by long-time investor Howard Lindzon. Maybe you can come up with a Twitter app that would appeal to your potential customers or target audience, and then promote it; every time a user consults it, they'll be reminded of your company. If you choose this approach, you should still do a search for Twitter apps that are similar. You don't want to reinvent the wheel; at the very least, you want to make it better.

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Social Media Marketing: It`s Complicated

Social marketing develops buzz, creates loyalty, and engages customers. What's not to love? A winery with an upcoming wine-tasting, for example, might create a page about the event on its site and then link to it on social media sites, along with links to articles about the wines, recipes for foods that go well with the wines, and other related content.

Engaging the customer has always been fundamental to doing good business. It's just that now that engagement often starts in digital, social media realms.

The trick is to figure out how to make one's content as interesting as all the other content that shows up in the newsfeed, and this is where social media marketing companies come in.

Social Campaigns

As with other marketing, social media marketing works best when it's part of an overall campaign. This is the service provided by VerticalResponse and its recently acquired social media campaign platform, Roost.

(click image to enlarge)

With Roost, business owners can create an integrated social media campaign complete with Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Twitter, and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) updates and tracking. It also offers a continuously updated library of content related to a business or product, so owners can post links to interesting articles for their social media friends and fans.

"We built Roost to help busy owners and operators be effective," Alex Chang, VerticalResponse's VP of social platforms, told the E-Commerce Times. "[They can take] 20 minutes on a Sunday night and start a great social media campaign."

Using Roost, a business can create a campaign of a variety of types of posts that go out to social media sites over time, and it can then measure how well those posts do in terms of engaging fans by tracking comments, shares, click-throughs and retweets.

It can also tie the social media campaign to an email campaign, with links to specially created Web pages and other content.

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Seamless, Smart, Successful Social Marketing

Public release date: 31-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah McDonnell s_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In 2004, a trio of researchers at Columbia University began an online experiment in social-media marketing, creating nine versions of a music-download site that presented the same group of unknown songs in different ways. The goal of the experiment was to gauge the effect of early peer recommendations on the songs' success; the researchers found that different songs became hits on the different sites and that the variation was unpredictable.

"It's natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow 'better,'" one of the researchers wrote in The New York Times in 2007. "What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market 'wants' at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history."

But for music fans who would like to think that talent is ultimately rewarded, the situation may not be as dire as the Columbia study makes it seem. In a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE, researchers from the MIT Media Laboratory's Human Dynamics Lab revisit data from the original experiment and suggest that it contains a clear quantitative indicator of quality that's consistent across all the sites; moreover, they find that the unpredictability of the experimental results may have as much to do with the way the test sites were organized as with social influence.

Numbers game

In their analysis, Alex "Sandy" Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Science, his graduate students Coco Krumme first author on the new paper and Galen Pickard, and Manuel Cebrian, a former postdoc at the Media Lab, developed a mathematical model that, while simple, predicts the experimental results with high accuracy. They divide the decision to download a song into two stages: first, the decision to play a sample of the song, and second, the ensuing decision to download it or not. They found that, in fact, the percentage of customers who would download a given song after sampling it was consistent across sites. The difference in download totals was due entirely to the first stage, the decision to sample a song in the first place.

And that decision, the researchers concluded, had only an indirect relationship to the songs' popularity. In the original experiment, one of the sites was a control, while the other eight gave viewers information about the popularity of the songs, measured by total number of downloads. But on those eight sites, the number of downloads also determined the order in which the songs were displayed. The MIT researchers' analysis suggests that song ordering may have had as much to do with the unpredictability across sites as the popularity information.

"We've known forever that people are lazy, and they'll pick the songs on the top," Pentland says. "There's all this hype about new-age marketing and social-media marketing. Actually, it comes down to just the stuff that they did in 1904 in a country store: They put certain things up front so you'd see them."

Quality, not quantity

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For music, social-media marketing doesn't trump quality

Source: Facebook.com

Lost in the shuffle was a lesser-played story of two guys who own a small pizza joint in New Orleans. As part of the news story for NPR, they were paired with a Facebook ad expert who set up a campaign for them to see if Facebook

The pizza joint owners spent $240 on Facebook advertising and after asking every single customer how they heard about them, realized not one had come from the ads. Failure. Waste of money. End of story, right? Nope.

Heres the story that people missed. For small businesses which create over two-thirds of net new jobs, and employ more than half of all working Americans Facebook is less about advertising and more (much more) about engagement, which Ill explain below. The real story is that you, the small business owner, possess the engagement skill in spades and can use it to grow your business. I call it Engagement Marketing.

You know your customers

We all do business with small businesses. Think about those you frequent on a daily or weekly basis: your dry cleaner, Web designer, wine merchant, day care provider, barber, or deli, to name a few. The person who owns the business, or the employees, greet you by name, ask about your spouse or children, get you what you need, and wish you a great day. We leave feeling good.

This is such a common occurrence, we dont even think about how remarkable it is! This personal touch or creating a WOW! experience is the cornerstone of Engagement Marketing.

Customers look to you for answers

Engagement is talking with your customers versus marketing at them. If a customer comes into your nursery, for example, and asks about a plant and soil conditions, you give the answer. This is what you, as the small business owner, do naturally every day. Why? Because it keeps customers coming back.

Now, take this engagement and put it online. When customers connect with you through Facebook, follow you on Twitter or subscribe to your e-newsletter, you have the same opportunity to help them, and keep them connected to your business even when theyre not physically doing business with you.

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Social Marketing: Engagement Equals Endorsement