Commercial Noise

If you’re in the SEO/SEM world I can make two assumptions

1. You have told someone their company should be on social networks
2. You have received a blank stare and a dull sounding “why?” in return for that advice

I am a big fan of social media, for myself. I am a big fan of social media for business where their ready. Not all business owners or corporate structures are ready for sites like twitter or facebook. This doesn’t mean they won’t gain benefit from such sites, it’s just that in most cases when a company isn’t ready for social media it would be a better use of your time to slowly get them ready before dropping them in the deep end of the social media pool. Once the company is more ready for what social media has to offer then you can more easily move them into it, which will in the long run help with better internal adoption.

Hoops to jump through and hurtles to jump over

There are many hurtles you will have to make your way over, the smallest of which may be simply the ‘why?’ question. More difficult challenges will be explaining the difference between the media’s view of facebook being a place for pictures of drunken collage kids and the real world business value of the site, or how you can get a good marketing message in 140 characters. These can be difficult to overcome, and can take some amount of time.

The answer to the ‘why?’ question is the first one you have to get past, and simply saying ‘all the kewl kids are doing it’ won’t work in most cases. The short answer to why is the world, and in turn your user/customer, is different this week then last week and will be different next week and the week after that. As the world changes the way we communicate with our users has to change with it. This change wasn’t so fast in the past, but now that it’s at this pace I don’t see it backing off.  The current place to interact with your user base simply is online with social media.

In the current marketing world the big ‘point’ of marketing as a whole is to get the message out, you will hear the phrase “getting the eyeballs on the page”. With social media this way of thinking has to change if there is any chance of succeeding. In the book ‘free‘, by Chris Anderson, he talks about the currency of reputation. With social media your ROI can really only be measured in this currency, not in the currency you can directly deposit in the bank. In traditional marketing it’s about the message, it’s a monolog. In social media the monologue isn’t very social, so it doesn’t work. Social media is about the dialogue. For someone with a marketing background this isn’t always easy to fully grasp, they want to track ROI and total profit per campaign. In social media there isn’t a true campaign you can track, and those interactions don’t translate directly into sales in a one to one fashion. This isn’t to say they don’t translate into sales, in fact they can translate into higher per order sales and more return purchases.

If you’re in social media shouting your message with the others you will be drowned out in the crowd. People have been bombarded with monologues about products since people were selling products. Now people don’t just want to know about a company’s products and how much it costs they also want to know about the people that make the products, the company that sells the products and marry (the CS rep) and how here chocolate cookies came out Sunday afternoon. Customers want to feel like they are buying from a friend, so you have to be a good friend and listen a little sometimes.

Shut up and listen

At some point everyone has known the person that makes everything about them. Everything you share somehow relates to something in their life, every tragic event that happens to you is somehow overshadowed by something bad going on in their life. Every time they speak it’s about how they feel and how they are doing and what they want to tell you about. This is a monologue, and it’s very boring. There are many places for a monologue on your site and in your business persona. Product descriptions are all about the marketing spin, as is the obligatory ‘about us’ page. These are great place to be self absorbed and talk all about you. Twitter, facebook, social media these are not places to be self absorbed. These are places to give your users a voice and let them talk about themselves, so shut up and listen.

Listen to what’s being said to you and about you online. And after you listen you have to HEAR! After you have done both of those things then respond and open the dialogue.

In my mind the two biggest and easiest sites to use to get into social media are facebook.com and twitter.com, these are great places to get started. So go make accounts and get started, I will post small walk through for the fun of it in the next few days but it’s so easy even a cave man could do it.

Social Media, like life, is a journey not a destination

Just having the account isn’t the end of it. You have to use the account and both communicate out to your users en masse, and find those special connections with individual users. The main goal of social media isn’t to sell products. I will say it again it bold to make a point SOCIAL MEDIA ISNT TO SELL PRODUCTS, it’s to become a friend of your users and communicate with them. Use these mediums to talk about the personal side of your company and allow the feeling of corporate transparency to come out. If your twitter stream is a bunch of links to your site and talks about your current sale all the time, you will only be followed by bots and no one will care you’re there.

Find a voice, and use tools to get it out

The right tools can make all the difference in your ROI, the ROI of reputation. If I have to spend my whole day searching for what people are saying about the brand I’m working with then I’m not making the best use of my time. These are the free tools I use daily

Google alerts
This is a great way to find out what is being said about your brand or your keywords on blogs, press releases and anything thing else indexed by google news. I create an alert for all the top keywords I need to follow, this then comes into my inbox every day. I also use this for content ideas when writing facebook or blog posts.

Tweetdeck
There are about as many twitter clients as there are twitter users. I have played with many and have found for the PC desktop I like tweetdeck. It lets me have multiple accounts setup at once so I can tweet for any of the corporate accounts I maintain, as well as allowing me to follow as many different search words as I want. This is great for brand management. In general I only follow a few top terms and specific brand names but I can add as many as I want.

Google analytics
I am in google analytics every day, I work with several sites so I have to watch them all and I like to find new ways customers are coming to the site. Google analytics isn’t a replacement for going over your server logs but using the analytics account I only review the logs every few weeks to find problems.

It’s a whole new world

There are several other tools I use every few days and I will make a post describing most of them as times goes on but for the purpose of today’s article these are the main ones. Once you have started to interact with your users and have found the conversation around your brand you will find new loyalty in every interaction. You will find that your total life time valuation of your customers goes up significantly (use that term in a meeting and watch the marketing peoples jaws drop). Trading in the currency of cash for the currency of reputation will in the long run get you more of both currencies, but first you have to learn that dialogue is very very different then monologue.