Social Media Strategy

• How to attract members to your niche online community
• How Facebook and Twitter are driving traffic to the site and building brand authority
• What social media tools make sense for the community
• Tools for measuring success and ROI
• The importance of an integrated social media strategy

Social media technology has made it very easy for people to share their opinions, rate favorite products, and communicate with others. This activity is happening every day, everywhere, and for practically every product that exists. No matter how big or small your company is, if you have customers, you can bet they're talking about your brand or product somewhere. So what are you doing to influence that conversation?

If you're a small business, you probably have limited budget and resources and you need to be sure any investment you make in social media is worthwhile. Does it make sense to pay for a branded online social networking site or can free public social sites deliver the same benefits? Where do you start? What do you need to know?

Before you start any social networking marketing, it’s important to identify your goals. Why should your business take part in social media? There are many reasons for small businesses to adopt a social networking marketing strategy, including:

• Increase brand awareness for your company
• Drive improved customer relationships and better corporate reputation
• Gain a better understanding of emerging issues and trends
• Enhance product development and improvement efforts
• Generate increased sales and incremental revenue

In addition to your budget, it’s also important to think about your internal resources for creating content and maintaining the site; what kind of content you want; how much control you want to have over the content on your site; and whether monetization is important to you. The answers to these questions will help you determine your level of investment and which strategy is best for you.

In our next two posts, we will explore how businesses can use free and branded online communities to their advantage, but we would love to hear and incorporate your thoughts.  Tell us, do you think it make sense to pay for a branded online community or can free public social sites, like Facebook and Twitter, deliver the same benefits?

• Use groups of images for targeted groups to add content.
• Mark your images with a non-intrusive personal stamp, like your URL - these images are then easily copied, thus ensuring higher overall exposure.
• Use large images, preferably of the same size when presented in group, and be sure to categorize them.
• Host your images on to a hosting service to prevent your server from being overburdened.
• Use breaking news photos and exclusive shots. (The Hudson plane landing is a good example of this.)
• Add a unique title, appropriate to the image. Use a keyword or two and stay on topic.
• Add a description for the photo or write an article to go with the image. Annotating images is critical.
• Always tag your images with keywords. Be specific, and add as many tags as appropriate, using optimal terms as phrases. Be reasonable with the number and accuracy of descriptive photo tags - don't over do it.
• Make photos publicly viewable. Consider loosely licensing your pictures; share your photos with the rest of the online community.
• If your photos are location-specific, such as store fronts or travel destinations, geo-tag the pictures.

• The Opus platform supports images, videos and audio and provides flexible ways to organize them, group them, categorize them, and share with others.
• The Opus platform can stamp media with your logo or other branding you'd like.
• The Opus platform can support the dimension and quality of media. Of course, the Opus platform follows the First law of Thermodynamics, "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms". (This is the only time you will see my geeky side, I promise...) If the original media is in a poor quality, Opus cannot enhance the quality. The Opus platform will change the format that is optimal for the web browsers and media players.
• Reality Digital hosts the site for you, so no burden on your side.
• You decide what content to be on your site - users can capture breaking news photos or videos in real time and upload them to the site from web or mobile devices, and you moderate the content as needed.
• The Opus platform allows to add title, description, tags, keywords, and categorize the media.
• The Opus platform is integrated with Google Maps.

My answer is yes. What do you need to know? Almost nothing really, unfortunately the first dip into the social networking arena stops most dead in their tracks. It’s new and shiny, and a must for any business today, whether it’s for a corporation or an artist spreading the word. 

Social Media is about people, interaction, discussion, community, and sharing — all using technology. Simply put, it’s about creating opportunities for the individual or the corporation. Simple, right?   Then why does panic ensues the second you are asked, “What’s your social media strategy? How are you marketing your message today?”

The resistance to change is typical.   I see savvy, seasoned business veterans freeze, do a 360 turn and instantly revert to what they did back in the days of static media—they call a meeting to discuss, forgetting that New Media is dynamic.    While Social Media isn’t actually new, but it’s only recently being adopted and included in marketing plans.   It’s understandable that there is some trepidation because there isn’t a one size fit’s all plan to follow. It’s early days yet, and while we’re all in the same boat and working on defining our social media strategy it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the noise. Despite the number of ‘how to books’ that are lining the shelves in book stores, and seminars on the art of social media filling hotel ballrooms, and the meetings taking place company boardrooms, the fact remains that none of us have mastered the art of social media or how to harness it’s power. Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. The industry is in the midst of one of its most dramatic and permanent shifts.

The good news is there is no denying that that whether you’re defining an online or offline communication strategy, the same rules apply. A solid story, customized for your target audiences that sends your message.   As the social media tools flourish, your communications strategies must adapt.   New media is dynamic, readily available and adaptable.

While you are pondering, remember the basics:

·         Who is your audience?

·         What are you Online Goals

·         How do you measure the results?

·         What is your corporate culture – if you don’t know, define it!

·         What is your pitch? Whatever it is, make sure it’s consistent.

Despite all that you hear about monetizing social media and networks, the only thing that matters is context. Context represents the relationship between the user and the content served to them and in the case of advertisers, the relationship the consumer has with what you sell. Weather that is digital media, blogs, chats or a toaster oven, the relationship between the media or product and the consumer is all that matters.

Consider YouTube, the provider of online video that has captured more than its fair share of the mind space of the average consumer. Though YouTube has captured a significantly large audience, they struggle with monetization due to the lack of a contextual relationship with their audience. The only context that YouTube seems to has with its consumer is “give me video and let me be entertained.” That is not enough to carry a monetized relationship. One of the internal struggles YouTube is trying to combat is user attrition. Attrition can be directly related to the lack of context between a consumer, YouTube and the User Generated Content (UGC) it provides.

It is very difficult to monetize UGC that has no real contextual relationship with those that consume it. It is here today and literally gone tomorrow, and creates a complex web of content that is hard to categorize and make sense of. As YouTube searches for models that work, they are seeking relationships with content and brands that consumers build their lives around. This will give the media that they serve much more relevance and in translation better stickiness. There is nothing sticky about a little boy doing a dance after you have seen him bust a move the third time.

As YouTube and others struggle to make money in spite of their vast popularity they have to foster a meaningful, contextual relationship with their consumer. YouTube would be served by segmenting their audience based on the types of entertainment specific segments desire. UGC by its very nature is not sticky; however UGC served around a social media community with a specific contextual relationship holds much more promise. The community aspects alone, can serve the need for greater context. This might help to resolve some of the issues with audience attrition. With this model, a context with the consumer is established. This should result in a more loyal following and greater participation by users, the very allusive stickiness we are all after.