If you’re still on the fence about social media marketing as an effective channel for your business, you may want to think again.  Take a look at this calculator that shows how quickly the medium is advancing:

When it comes to successfully marketing a business, the key is to be where your customers are, but your competitors aren’t.  Considering the hesitation some businesses have about jumping in to social media, there is a great opportunity to be one of the first out of the gate.  The reasons why your business should explore social media are endless, and so many articles explaining everything from 101-type starters to strategy models; just get out there and do it already!

I gave a workshop this week for the Sales & Marketing Society of the Mid-South as part of their new workshop series for their members.  We covered our 4-step program to using Twitter for marketing or promoting a business,  The PLET Method:

Post  |  Why, What, When, How

Listen  |  Real-time searches and Monitoring Tools

Engage  |  Rules of Engagement, Best Practices

Track |  Analytics, URLs, Phone numbers

Here is a copy of the presentation that we went through. Although none of the screen-capture movies are there, you can still get the main ideas behind the PLET method:

More and more businesses are recognizing the need to get involved in social media, which means that social media “experts” are popping up left and right.  Beware anyone who tells you they are social media expert.  Here’s a great example of why I say that:  Click here But beware, definitely some R-rated language (funny though).

Three of my favorite points from this workshop were my reasons why everyone should get involved in social media:

1. 3 out of 4 Americans are using social technology
2. Typical cost of a social media account is $0.00
3. Social media is like word of mouth on steroids

It’s exciting that so many of those in the workshop were totally new to Twitter and wanted to see if Twitter had potential for their marketing and communications. With so much buzz coming up, we’ll have another series of classes on social media very soon with our friends at Howell Marketing Strategies.  More details on that soon, but this time we’re planning on a 4-day workshop, focusing one day each on:  Strategy, Twitter, Facebook, & YouTube (but possibly SlideShare or LinkedIn as well).

I spoke today to the Memphis AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals) about integrating social media into their marketing efforts to engage supporters and donors, as well as to get people to help spread the word.

I think fundraisers and cause marketers are no different than the rest of us: in these trying economic times, everyone is clamoring for the same donation dollars.  The need for a more cost-effective strategy to spread the word is crucial. Communicating more effectively than your competition is the name of the game.

That’s why social media is perfect:

• Typical cost of a social networking account:  $0.00
• Audience: varies by platform, but some counts put social media users at well over 1/2 a billion (and continuing to grow quickly)

Here is a copy of the presentation:

We just finished up Day 4 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business that Howell Marketing is hosting with us.  We covered a lot of ground today – and I worked hard to make sure that the information was tailored to the questions that our crowd had yesterday in the Facebook 101 course.

The most pressing questions had to do with effective methods for using Facebook Fan Pages to market a business – a burning question in a lot of marketing minds right now.  I covered the Fan Page sales funnel that is a great method for drawing people to your Facebook presence, engaging them, and offering multiple ways for them to take action.

Here are the slides from today’s presentation:

Day 3 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business was an intro to using Facebook for marketing your business.  Since our surveys told us that most of the class already had accounts, we decided to skip the really elementary material and jump right into something really helpful: how you can separate your personal and professional life on Facebook.

Like all the other days of this seminar, we talked a great deal about strategy.  If someone doesn’t claim the saying “in all things, have strategy” then I’m going to!  Here are the slides from our class today:

Tomorrow we’re going to cover:

• Fan pages vs Groups
• Advertising
• How to grow your Page and add Fans
• Best practices for B-to-B organizations

LinkedIn recently announced a way to allow you to tie your Twitter status updates to your LinkedIn status.  That’s great news!  (Except for those of us who spent hours figuring out the best way to make that happen 6 months ago, of course).

With that capability from LinkedIn, you no longer have to use Ping.fm and a Ping-capable Twitter client (Twhirl ruled for this very reason, and Tweetie for iPhone did as well, but has recently dropped Ping.fm integration in their newest version).
Here is my thoughts on why you would not want to link your Twitter status to LinkedIn:

The audience and messaging is completely different!  The very conversational style of Twitter does not exactly trasnslate to the more static and less-interactive status updates on LinkedIn.  I personally struggled with this for a while before deciding to turn off the old system that I used to achieve this (using Ping.fm).   Many times I didn’t even think about it- but then I would login to LinkedIn and see that my last update was a picture at dinner or something from the previous night.  That wasn’t the kind of content that I wanted people to see on my profile, so I killed it.

This has a lot to do with our discussions in class this week on using Social Media for Business: the importance of maintaining your professionalism on social networks if your goal is to promote/use for your business.

One other thing we covered is the TweetDeck, which recently released an update that solves many of these issues for you.  The latest version (v0.32.0) eases these issues by allowing you to pick and choose which networks you would like to post to:  Multiple Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook (both personal profiles and pages you administer), and even MySpace.  Very cool – check it out!

Today’s class focused on more intermediate to advanced Twitter strategy.  We continued with the rest of our P.L.E.T. strategy for successfully using Twitter:  Listening, Engaging, and Tracking

We also talked about RSS and the power of giving people a ’stream’ of your content.  Here is a copy of our slides from today’s class:

Awesome first class in our Social Media Crash Course for Business series that we’re hosting with Howell Marketing Strategies! We covered the basics of social media:  why it’s important and why you should evaluate these tools and see if they are a fit for you organization.

The top 2 reasons were:

1. 3 out of 4 Americans are using Social technology
2. Social media marketing is like word of mouth…. on steroids

Here’s a copy of the slides that we presented to our 11/30 class:

Today I read this great article from Rob Clark called How to Engage Without Stalking and Converse Without Creepiness and it really rang true since I had an experience today that was so relevant:

Earlier, I had a brief conversation on Twitter with the Product Manager for Camtasia Studio, Troy Stein.  He sent me a message in response to something that I said on Twitter about his product.  So did I feel like it was creepy for Troy to reach out to me in the way that he did?  Let’s see…

First, let me start by saying that I’m a huge fan of TechSmith’s products, most notably Camtasia Studio. I have been waiting patiently for them to release a Mac version of their software for some time, but I understand why these things take time.  They released the Mac version early this month, and I’m thrilled to be able to use Camtasia without the need for a virtual machine running Windows XP.   I was, however, a little surprised that the product was reasonably different from what I was used to in the PC version.

Consider that I was having a [not at all] private conversation with @RafaelMarquez about our thoughts on the Mac version of Camtasia.  So obviously, Troy was using one of the many available tools to monitor for any mentions of his brand’s name.  When the alert popped that Rafael and I were talking about Camtasia, Troy interjected.  Now, you tell me:  is that creepy, or a misuse of social media tools?

I would say no. It is completely appropriate for Troy to jump into that conversation, especially considering the way that he went about it. He used readily available tools to monitor his brand mentions in the social space, which allowed him the opportunity to respond. When someone says that they prefer a different feature in your product or service, wouldn’t you like to be able to answer them?  Or at the very least, wouldn’t you like to be able to hear what they had to say? This lies at the core of what we’re advising our clients to do right now:  even if you don’t see that there is opportunity for your business in social media yet, you can’t afford not to be listening to what your customers, competitors, and anyone else is saying about you.

Rob makes some great points about the ways that one should or should not go about jumping into these conversations.  Troy was just curious what they could have done better in Camtasia for Mac, and what we didn’t like about it. By asking questions that made us feel like we had some input in a product we loved, he made us feel valued and important.  Every brand should endeavor to cultivate this kind of relationship with their customers.

Like I said, I was a huge fan of Camtasia before this happened.  Now?  I’m an evangelist, because I feel that the company values the opinion of its consumers.  This was a great example of how some simple, free tools can make a huge impact with a customer.

Now that you know how to create URLs that can be tracked and measured, let’s get into a little more about how you can use them, and ways to streamline the process.

I use Bit.ly links for every single thing that we post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and also in email newsletters.  The majority of this activity is posting on Twitter, so let’s start there.  That is, after all, why these shorteners became so popular in such a short amount of time.

Twitter has that glorious 140 character limit, so we need a way to post succinct links to blogs that have long, SEO friendly URLs (like the one you no doubt see in the address bar of your browser if you’re on this blog).  But wants to go back to the actual Bit.ly site?  That takes too long!  You need a Twitter client that has Bit.ly integration so that it will short the links for you, using your previously created Bit.ly account.

I personally use Twhirl as my desktop client since it has such great multi-account support, but there are other clients out there as well.  Bit.ly has a list of tools you can check out to find something that suites you.

The thing on that list that I want to point out is the Bit.ly Bookmarklet.  This might be really useful for you, since some say that the Web is still the most popular Twitter client.

Bookmarklets

According to the Wikipedia, a bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page.

That means you can add this to the toolbar in your browser, and create shortened, trackable URLs with no effort at all!

So now- I hope that sufficiently explains it.  I have been getting a TON of people asking about this!  We’ll get back to the more esoteric stuff in the next post =)