Social Media Marketing for Beginners
Experts offer hints on how to take the plunge.
Experts offer hints on how to take the plunge.
Companies that ignore social media do so at their peril.
That theme was repeated during four panel discussions this week at SES San Jose, where experts in social media and search marketing offered practical advice about how businesses should approach this evolving channel.
“Five of the top 10 sites are social media. You need to go where the people are,” said Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, a social media marketing agency.
As confusing, challenging, or silly as “pokes” and “tweets” may sound, businesses that avoid social media were equated to those that thought the Internet was a fad back in 1998. After listening to people in the audience and chatting with others between sessions, though, I began to understand obstacles that must be overcome. At large companies, it’s not clear who is supposed to marshal resources from different divisions. At small companies, one person may already be wearing too many hats.
What’s a marketing executive to do?
Learn From Failure
Take EF Education, which operates language learning programs and educational tours. It built an application called Global Footprint for students to show on a digital map where they’ve traveled. Problem was, no one used it, said Erik Qualman, EF’s global vice president and a Search Engine Watch Expert. “It was a field of nightmares. We built it and no one came,” he said.
What went wrong with Global Footprint? “We were treating it like a direct response [vehicle],” he said. EF Education asked people for more information than they wanted to share before they could use the application.
In the meantime, not one — but two — other businesses developed Facebook applications to enable Facebook members to identify the places they’ve visited around the world. TripAdvisor’s Cities I’ve Visited has 1.5 million active users monthly, while Where I’ve Been has 1.3 million.
Despite its setback, EF Education didn’t give up on social media. It developed another application that enables people who’ve signed up for an EF program to find out who else is traveling to the same city — and connect with them beforehand.
Qualman said he should have learned from a past experience. In the late 1990s, he was at AT&T when it built a portal that included such information as weather and sport scores and gave people the ability to pay their bills. “We learned that all customers wanted was their phone bill,” he said.
The lesson? “Figure out what it is you offer, and go for that,” he said.
SEO in Social Media
When it comes to making things interesting, not everyone agreed on approaches.
For instance, Brent Csutoras, an online marketing consultant, advised businesses to get creative to encourage link building. A case he pointed to: publishing a headshot and name of a 28-year-old Singapore man.
What was the big deal? The fellow’s name is Batman Bin Suparman. In social media circles, Suparman was described as a “Singapore superhero” and “quite possibly the best name EVAR.” The offbeat campaign sent 8,000 inbound links to a Web site that Csutoras created for research and development. Inbound links can enhance a Web site’s position on a search engine results page.
Liana Evans, director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance, argued against courting inbound links aggressively in social media. “It’s like SEO [search engine optimization] pissing in a pool. You don’t want to pollute that,” she said. Instead, Evans said a brand’s focus should first be on encouraging a conversation with its customers. “Links are a byproduct of social media. Links will happen.”
Take Baby Steps
Businesses were advised to start out small in social media, taking some of these first steps:
Marketing Pilgrim’s Beal put it this way: “Like a kid in the candy store, pick your favorite piece of candy.”