50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.

2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.

3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.

4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.

5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.

6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.

7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.

8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).

9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.

10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.

11. Learn which bloggers might care about your customer. Learn how to measure their influence.

12. Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.

13. Try out a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content marketing and see how they draw.

14. Build conversation maps for your customers using Technorati.com , Google Blogsearch, Summize, and FriendFeed.

15. Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).

16. Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.

17. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.

18. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.

19. Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.

20. Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email me for a calendar).

21. Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.

22. Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.

23. Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.

24. Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.

25. Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.

26. Practice delivering quality content on your blogs, such that customers feel educated / equipped / informed.

27. Consider the value of hiring a community manager. Could this role improve customer service? Improve customer retention? Promote through word of mouth?

28. Turn your blog into a mobile blog site with Mofuse. Free.
Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.

29. Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.

30. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.

31. Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.

32. Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.

33. Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.

34. Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new.

35. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.

36. Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks.

37. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.

38. Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.

39. Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.

40. Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).

41. Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.

42. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.

43. Explore several viewpoints about social media marketing.
Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).

44. Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.

45. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.

46. People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.

47. Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.

48. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.

49. Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.

50. Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too.

5 Tips for Creating More Efficient Social Media Marketing

1. Utilize Your Existing Team

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“Leverage your front-line workers who already support customers in different mediums like live chat, phone, and in person,” says Owyang. “Use the support and customer service teams that already know your products and services and have been trained in customer relations. Take a page from Best Buy’s ‘Twelpforce‘ that empowered thousands of retail professionals to take to Twitter than just train a new social savvy workforce.”

Tread lightly when figuring out how to organize social media efforts, though. Walter says that too much time is spent “fighting over who owns what” when developing a social media strategy. “Different stakeholders (PR, web, legal, privacy, security, marketing, HR, etc.) need to partner on this and work closely together on the structure and processes that are beneficial to everyone,” she says.

Walter suggests against “putting [social media practitioners] into a box with too many guidelines,” and instead is all for “unleashing the employee potential and giving them some freedom to engage online.”

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2. Build a Plan That is Nimble

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While a triage system can be helpful for novice social media programs, make sure your communication process isn’t complicating problems. After all, social media is meant to make communications easier, not more tedious.

Walter says, “The biggest issue is the amount of time it takes to make a decision internally. It is a time of ‘now marketing,’ or what I call ‘agile marketing’ — we cannot afford to spend too much time making decisions or creating elaborate processes of approval. We need to act quickly and nimbly; otherwise, the opportunity is gone forever. This is the biggest hindrance to digital creativity.”

“Most companies like an effective triage system to pass information around the company directing who will respond and how,” says Owyang. “As a result, more than one business group may respond to customers — reducing efficiency and of course, potentially confusing customers.”

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3. Minimize Spend on Tools & Consultants

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From her experience, Walter points out two areas where businesses tend to spend too much money — social media tools and consultants. Here are her thoughts on both:

• Social Media Tools: “A variety of tools perform similar functions. If you utilize several key tools and establish the right infrastructure centrally, it will allow a number of business units and geographies to use the same tool across the company. This will accomplish a number of things: It will allow you to compare results apple-to-apple across various campaigns; negotiate global contracts centrally to achieve huge cost-savings across the company; and have central enablement in place where key training on the tool and its support will be provided in the right way.”
• Social Media Consultants: Stay away from “bringing expensive consultants in who only provide high-level information that is already known internally. Management needs to trust their employees internally to know the subject and provide the best strategy and direction.”

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4. Hire Qualified Talent

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After searching your ranks to find the right talent internally, don’t be afraid to hire experienced social media and community managers. Granted, you probably won’t need to hire a full social media team, but bringing on at least one strategist could save your organizations dollars in the long run.

“Most of the time we want to hire interns to do the work of experienced community managers, but then we complain that they didn’t handle something right,” says Walter. “I think the issue for most companies is that they don’t hire enough seasoned people to truly manage communities and online conversations on behalf of a brand. You need to have experienced people in place to manage communities, advocacy programs, etc. — these are the voices that know and represent your brand appropriately. And most of the time we are not willing to pay for people like that, citing lack of resources and then paying the price of damaged brand reputation or dead or inactive communities.”

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5. Learn From Others

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Equipping social media practitioners with the proper knowledge will save them lots of time, says Walter. This means building social media education programs, creating spaces where colleagues can discuss best practices and learning from other organizations.

Leading Intel’s social media strategy has enabled Walter to figure out the best ways for educating employees of social media processes and best practices. Here are her tips on how to effectively communicate new information about your company’s social media plans to those in the field:

• Implement social media training across the company, including face-to-face and online programs.
• Create playbooks around specific platforms — such as Twitter and Facebook — that will allow social media practitioners to learn about them.
• Create an internal best-practices forum and monthly calls that bring the company’s social media practitioners from around the world together to talk about particular internal case study and discuss learnings gleaned from them.
• Distribute a monthly newsletter to help social media practitioners keep up with the ever-changing world of social media.
• Become a member of organizations like Social Media Business Council or Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), where you can easily connect with other brands that have experience with any particular topic/project/vendor/platform and pick their brains on what worked and didn’t. Walter says, “This is huge. These types of connections and interactions saved me a ton of mistakes and headaches — it’s a huge value-add!”

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