Building A Social Media Plan

Here's a really good article from Social Media Examiner on building a social media plan. It contains a lot of good commonsense advice and steps that every small business can take.

Just a couple of things that I would like to amplify (and I would feel a little guilty or lazy if I just blogged a link; it seems like an unbloggerly thing to do). One of the best points this article makes is about committing the effort to social media and I find that many clients are ill-prepared to do just that. Too many businesses don't post enough or when they do, it's self-promotional material that doesn't engage the audience. Contests and exclusive expert information go a lot further to building a following than doings at the business or "hi, we're really excited to be us."

Businesses also don't realize that this is a long-haul effort with results that are likely to be incremental and supplemental rather than monumental. This is sometimes an outgrowth of misguided expectations as social media proponents and the media have been pounding this for so long as the next big thing that people almost jump in as a reflex reaction. However, just because you won't get huge results doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, it just means that social should be one component of an overhaul marketing plan, with the amount of resources you put against it (including sweat equity) in line with the potential return on investment. (Another related point that the article also makes: pick your spots, find the social channel that makes the most sense for you to be in based on your customer profile. Trying to be in all the social spaces or to make a splash in the biggest of them may not be the best place to focus your efforts).

In any case, enjoy the article and by the way, helping you build and execute a social media plan is part of what I do, in conjunction with an overall marketing plan that includes things like advertising, promotions and even direct mail. But more on that in another post.

Upon Further Review of Google+ Local

In an earlier post I expressed excitement about Google's transition of Google Places to Google+ Local and opined that it would give businesses owners more room and flexibility to enhance their Places listing. For the present time, this does not appear to be the case and in fact the opposite might be true:

• For the time-being businesses still need to manage their listing through the existing Places interface
• Among other things, this means that you're still subject to the Places character limit in describing your business and that paragraph is all that appears in the Google+ Local About page
• Other sections populated in Google Places, such as the Additional Information sections, don't appear to carry over at all, at least right now
• Many businesses report that they've been having trouble getting their photos to show up in Google+ Local.

Still, there are some things business owners can do to make the transition easier and eventually realize  the full potential of Google+ Local:

• If you've already claimed and fully-optimized your Google Places listing, it's probably best not to make any further additions or changes right now until the smoke clears
• If you already have a Google+ Business Page (the equivalent of a Facebook Business Page or what used to be called a Facebook Fan Page) it's best that the Places and Google+ Business page both be under the same Google account email
• Even if you don't have a Google+ Business Page, it will probably be helpful to open a Google+ personal account under the same email you use to access your Google Places account.

These blog posts from Search Engine Journal and Poobah Marketing contain additional information and tips and the latter includes a video from Google that has some helpful tidbits, if you can get past the annoyingly sunny disposition of the two Googlers delivering it. 

What's Really Behind the Facebook Disappointment

At market's close today, Facebook's stock price stood at $30.97, significantly below the IPO price of $38. Talk continues to swirl around pending or potential shareholder lawsuits and even if the Facebook brass did not reveal to the general public what it did to private investors, trading at 100 times earnings should have had everybody's eyes wide open, or at least anyone old enough to remember the last dot com bubble.

What's really underlying the disappointment in Facebook I think, is a growing disillusionment with Facebook as an advertising and marketing vehicle -- a disillusionment that is at least partly the outgrowth of unreasonable expectations.  The dynamics of interactions on Facebook make it less than marketing or advertising friendly and recent Facebook format changes like the timeline make it even less so.

Based on my direct experience and other available data, display advertising on Facebook performs at par or at times below other properties on the Web, which is to say not all that well at all. The only truly consistent performer in online advertising, at least on a click-through-rate basis, is search advertising and as any search advertiser knows there's a big difference in performance on Google for ads based on search and ads displayed on Google's content network.

Now many Web properties, including Yahoo and AOL, have tried to compile the information they have on their users and combine it with their Web behavior to lift banner ad results, as in Yahoo's short-lived SmartAds program of a few years back. This has had limited effect and so far Facebook has refrained from using people's profile information (beyond location) to trigger ads, relying mostly on friend associations and Likes.

And then there's the social marketing aspect of it or as some would have it, the holy grail. All those millions of people are on Facebook, we should be able to sell them stuff right? As I used to say to my clients, constantly pitching what you have on Facebook is like going to a party on Saturday night and spending the entire evening talking about what you do and handing out your business card. You're unlikely to make many friends. The social space is great for starting conversations with clients and prospects, establishing relationships and getting direct and indirect endorsements via Likes. But it will never be a primary marketing driver and give you "free" results, any more than PR can replace paid efforts with "free" advertising.

What should be your primary marketing drivers then? A judicious mix (driven by your business goals) of on and off-line advertising, search, direct marketing, promotion, PR and yes, social. More on each of those in future posts.

Google+ is Now the Place

Google has just announced a major new change that affects millions of businesses -- the conversion of Google Places listings to Google+ (for the uninitiated, this is Google’s social network, akin to Facebook’s, but in some ways better). This of course follows the transition of Google Maps listings to Google Places and as some unwitting small business owners found out, listings on Google Maps and Google Places weren’t always in sync, especially if the business owner or owners unwittingly claimed listings on both Google properties using different Google accounts (if the preceding phrases weren’t confusing enough in and of themselves).

Google stated the transition of Google Places to Google+ Local took place on Thursday May 31st and a quick perusal of my clients’ Places listings verified that was indeed the case. And this transition is a good thing for local small businesses for the following reasons:

• Google+ gives you much more space to talk about your business and what you do for people 
• Google+ gives you more ways to keep your content fresh and interact with customers through posts (just like Facebook) 
• Partly because of all of the above, Google+ gives you more ways to affect high how you are placed in the search engine results.

Because of its search engine visibility potential I recommended that my clients establish a Google+ presence upon its broad introduction some months ago. Now that Google Places has been folded into it, Google + has become a must for small and larger businesses alike.

Comment on this post or email me if you have questions or need assistance in establishing a Google+ presence.

Is B2B Sociable?

As with the snack cracker whose name is similar to a word in this post's title (Sociables) social marketing should be served up in very specific business-to-business situations, when at all. There's a good article on the TargetMarketing.com website that deals with this issue head on.

I agree with the author that Facebook is fundamentally useless for a company whose target is primarily B2B. The exception would be the weekend get-together syndrome, as when someone as an individual mentions they need help with marketing their business and another individual says I know this cool guy Larry Bassani who provides affordable, effective marketing support and gives personalized service too (you can simply cut and past that phrase into your Facebook stream and thank you in advance). However, if your audience is primarily business and you're thinking of standing up a Facebook fan page you're pretty much wasting your time.

Now LinkedIn is a primarily a "professional" social space, but it's dominated by people who are looking for action and who want to burnish their reputations by linking or getting recommendations from other people looking for action. The exception would be recruiters, who are of course looking for people who are looking for action.

If you're a business who has tried to build a following on Twitter beyond the follows that come through your website, you know that most of the followers you get are like-minded people looking to sell you something. Of course, if you're a B2B company, that might not be such a bad thing.

The writer of the Target Marketing piece makes a lot of very good points on how to get people to interact with you on your primary website, instead of spinning your wheels with social. Also, I would say that YouTube and Google + are also good bets for search engine visibility, at least partially because they are owned and promoted by a search engine company.

And besides, if you have a really important potential client, you might want to serve something other than crackers.

Want Someone to Like You? Give Them a Reason

Too often, people put social links on their website or say like us on Facebook and follow us Twitter and then wonder why they don't get any likes or follows besides their friends and relatives. As I often say to my clients, just like in real life, if you want someone to like you give them a reason.

I recently got an email from Staples that dealt with this issue as directly as I've ever seen. The subject line? "Join us on Facebook and Twitter. Here's why."

The email goes on to talk about the exclusive offers, giveaways and special extras available to followers. And that's it in a nutshell. If you want likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter or if you want to get into people's circles on Google +, you have to give them something that can't get on your general website, whether that's deeper information, a chance to get questions answered, coupons, discounts, contests or special offers. Otherwise, there's no motivation for people to take action and getting people to take action is what marketing is all about.

You can view the Staples email here. By the way, the Like button at the top of this post is for illustration purposes only, but thanks for the thought!

Master of Your Own Domain

Recently, in the New York Times, there was an article published about an unfortunate small business owner who invested a large sum of money in a domain name (already taken) that was related to his business, only to see his site traffic drop off dramatically from the domain name he had been using.

I posted a response on the New York Times "You're the Boss" blog. Here's what I said:

As an online and offline marketing consultant, I advise my clients not to become too obsessed with their domain names. Far more important is how you build your brand and plug your website into your brand. And even when your website is your brand, there are always plenty of variations that will work just fine. Let’s face it, the only people who see intrinsic value in domains are re-sellers, squatters and those registrar companies that want you to snatch up those must-have .co’s “while they last.”

When it comes to organic search, what you do on and off page and how fresh you keep your content (blogging) probably carries a lot more way than the domain name (although I’ve seen an advantage for local search, so if he was trying to sell nuts in Newark, Newarknuts.com can have value). And besides, the search term (nuts) was already in the domain name, so that wasn’t even an issue.

Beyond organic search, using social, paid search and plugging into the so-called Web 2.0 dynamic are better places to focus your efforts and resources than going after the rare “four-letter domain name” which, with all due respect to the people quoted in the article, is pretty much nonsense.

All I can say is "buyer beware."