Network Marketing Today

Social Media Marketing

How to market the social web

Time to add Social Media Marketing (SMM) to your marketing mix. The social web is changing online marketing fast, don't miss the train.

1. The internet is changing

Over the last couple of years the internet has grown from a marginal information platform, used by a handful of nutty professors to a worldwide, omnipresent way of connecting people.

No need to say the internet had to pass through some stages to grow into becoming what it is today. One major step has been taken over the last year and a half: the internet changed into a mature form, it makes sense now and you can use it in thousands useful ways.

In the past you could use the internet to send emails and visit websites, and that was about it. These days the internet is everywhere and people use it to participate in discussions, to ventilate their opinions, to make friends, to keep in touch, to influence, to learn, to share and participate.

And sharing and participating are what makes these turbulent times so exciting. It becomes necessary to change the way we think about the internet. This is often referred to as Web 2.0 or The Next Web:

"Web 2.0 is a state of mind."

It used to be like this: your company had a website; potential customers could visit the site and find the information your company was willing to share, and the visitors could talk about it with their friends.

At present, the situation is a little more complex: your company has a website; the visitors are expecting to find really useful information and are willing to provide you with active feedback. But that's not all, they also want to share their opinion about your products, services and values with others and even more, those others can (and will) discuss you products and services on other websites you don't control.

Recognizing this evolution is the first step towards company success on the present web. Unfortunately most companies don't realize the possibilities of the social web and when they do, they don't seem to understand the social web requires totally different ways of thinking and acting.

Exactly because you don't control all websites where your products or services are mentioned, there is no way of removing bad comments. So whenever you encounter bad comments about your company, think before you act en don't forget a simple blogger can have a lot of influence on how your company is perceived.

"Power to the consumer, wisdom of the crowds."

Conclusion: your company should be aware of the possibilities the social web has to offer and you should use these possibilities wisely.

2. The new online marketing mix

3. How important is the social web?

In less than one year, social websites have taken almost 15% of total internet traffic, whereas up until 2007, most traffic was generated through search engines like Yahoo!, Live Search and of course Google. Such an explosive growth in a medium that has experienced a massive growth itself, no need to say the social web is becoming increasingly important in a healthy (online) marketing mix.

Whether Metcalfe's Law is also applicable to the social internet as a manner of communication is a point of discussion, but trends seem to indicate it is.

Metcalfe's law states that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. In other words, the value of networked systems grows exponentially as the user population increases in a linear manner.

The social web is changing the way we communicate. Let's take a look at some of the theses of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a call-to-action for all businesses operating in the newly-connected marketplace that is the internet:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Markets are conversations.

Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

The internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

In other words, to be successful on the social web, companies need to rethink their ways of communicating. Although the internet looks like a mass medium, it is not. Think one to one communication and you will have a better idea what the social web is all about. Or as Aegis Media owner Frederick Marckini stated:

The deer now have guns: consumers fight back.

4. Why should your company Engage in Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

A modern online marketing mix isn't complete without social media awareness. Publishing a corporate website just isn't sufficient anymore. There are so many places online your company can and should take advantage of.

But why is that? What is the advantage in the long run? Social Media Marketing improves some really important website and internet factors:

Online visibility
Linkability
Findability

Online Visibility

Potential and existing customers can encounter your company online without actively searching your specific brand, products or services. Your company will be visible on websites that don't belong to your company.

Linkability

Maintaining a positive online image through social media, your website will more likely be linked to from other websites and your online visibility will improve.

Findability

The more people talk about your company, your services or products, the easier it will become for people who are interested in your services to find you.

5. Social Media Marketing opportunities

The most important opportunities of SMM:

It's a way to interact with existing or future customers.
It increases your online visibility.
The social web makes it possible to meet people online who are willing to provide you with active feedback which in turn helps you to improve your products or services.
Improve your online presence and change negativity into positivity.
SMM is a way of online reputation management.

So how do you change negative comments or reviews into something positive and what is the value for your company? First of all, you just need to know if something is wrong. If you fix the problem, it will help you gain credibility with the online audience because you show you care.

By taking care and listening to what is said about your products or services, you also actively keep an eye on your online reputation, which is increasingly becoming important. Allan Jenkins stated it well when he talked about online reputation management:

"Your brand is no stronger than your reputation - and will increasingly depend on what comes up when you are Googled."

So good things or good reactions had better show up when your company or your products are Googled. Social Media Marketing is a way to take control.

Social Media Marketing = Open Source Marketing

6. Social Media Marketing pitfalls and difficulties

Of course Social Media Marketing is not just a good news show:

SMM is an engagement, it takes time and effort. If you are not willing to spend the time needed, you might as well just not do it.
Your company needs an open mind: bad things will show up, live with it and act upon it.
SMM is not the easiest way to market your products or services.
There is an infinite number of possibilities to market your company online, the art is in finding the right channels/websites that will help you and improve your brand.

And remember, happy customers share their experience with an average of 8 people, unhappy customers with an average of 22; this is no different on the internet.

7. The Possibilities

As you can see on the image below, numerous possibilities are at hand when it comes to Social Media Marketing. You just have to find the websites or channels that will have the biggest impact on your services.

Some websites can be used in almost every vertical; others are narrowed down and serve certain niches. One way to find a good place to start on the social web is to Google your biggest online competitors and find out where they are active. But don't forget, it's not because your competitors aren't active on a certain website that it is a bad idea to give it a go.

8. Examples

Below we'll discuss some of the most important ways to use the social web to improve your company's online presence. This list is not exhaustive, but it should give you a good idea of what Social Media Marketing is all about and how you can implement it in your marketing mix.

Corporate Blogging

More and more companies are discovering corporate blogging as a means to communicate with (potential) customers over the internet. Basically, blogs are easy-to-manage websites that can be updated within minutes. Writing a blog post is almost as easy as writing an email. This ease-of-use makes blogging a fast and easy way to write down your ideas and share them with the online community. And on top of that, search engines like Google really like blogs. In other words, it's easy to spread your values and ideas and it's easy for people to run into them.

Those are the exact factors that make corporate blogging one of the first things any company should do when they decide to explore the marketing possibilities of the social web.

But be aware, blogging and participating in the blogosphere can be dangerous as well. The temptation to start a blog or to participate in discussions on other weblogs in another name than yours or your company's is sometimes irresistible. In the past some companies, even big ones like Sony, have lost a lot of their meticulously built online image by posing as someone else. This is why the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) started promoting best practices for the social web to ensure more effective online marketing.

WOMMA compiled a code for online behavior. A building block of that ethics code, which they believe is as relevant as ever to evolving social media, is what is known as the Honesty ROI.

This includes the following:

Honesty of Relationship: You say who you're speaking for.
Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe.
Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity.

This code had been implemented with great success in big companies like Microsoft. They even have come to the point where they encourage their individual employees to start a personal blog and write honestly about their work and their employer.

Now that we have outlined the benefits of corporate blogging and mentioned the dangers, only one question remains: why should a company start its own corporate blog, what are the key benefits?

Branding and building profile: corporate blogging might be the cheapest form of marketing and advertising. No other channel can guarantee you a ROI bigger than what a blog can return.
Generating business and thus revenue: a corporate blog improves your online visibility and findability. More visibility means more business means more revenue (if done well).
Revealing expertise in your market: when blogging, you give people a real insight into what your company is doing and what it is thinking. Imagine how many brochures you would need to match the value of a well written and maintained blog with a couple of hundred posts about your market.
Networking and meeting people: whether your readers are (existing or potential) customers, colleagues, competitors, students or potential employees, it doesn't matter. Fact is that your corporate blog will allow your company to communicate with all of them, building a strong network and maintaining professional relationships.

As mentioned before, don't start if you don't have the intention to continue. A well maintained blog is like a nice looking business card, an abandoned blog is like an ugly advertisement.

You can find some examples of successful corporate blogging on http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=Resources.CorporateBlogsList.

RSS-feeds

One of the keys to managing the current information overload are RSS-feeds:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays. (Source: Wikipedia)

In other words, RSS-feeds make it possible to publish your content and make it easier for people to share and (re)use your content. People can subscribe to your RSS-feeds using their browser, a feed reader, their mail client (e.g. Outlook) or an online reader (e.g. Google Reader). And even more, they can republish your content on their website or blog using your feeds.

RSS-feeds allow you to push your content: the user does not have to take any extra action to get the updated content. It shows up in their reader automatically. And that's what makes RSS such a strong channel to spread your content. And what's more, a tool like Feedburner (acquired by Google in 2007) makes it possible to keep an eye on when, where and how your feeds are used.

RSS-feeds have just started their way to the top, they are becoming increasingly important and luckily they are being used more. But most companies haven't yet recognized the strengths of RSS. Admittedly, most blog posts are collected in RSS-feeds, but the other possibilities are endless:

News
Press releases
Blogs
Interesting bookmarks
New products
Special offers
Contests
Jobs

We'll talk a little more about the last one to show the strength of RSS. Imagine you are looking for a job. There are a dozen of companies you would like to work for and during your lunch break at the company you are going to leave, you check the job section of all twelve corporate websites every day to see if there is a vacancy that suits your profile. No need to say it will take you half your lunch breaks every day. Now if those possible future companies had a jobs feed, you could subscribe to it and whenever each one of them posted a new vacancy you would automatically be notified. Just imagine what you could do with the time saved. Job Search 2.0.

Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing (aka Buzz Marketing and Word-of-mouth Marketing) is a real art. Many have tried, only a few have succeeded.

Viral Marketing uses existing social networks to increase the awareness of a brand or company or to enhance positive associations in a way that can be compared to a viral epidemic. With a successful viral campaign you can reach a large number of people quickly and cheaply. The ROI of a viral campaign can be enormous, but more than 90% of all seeded viral campaigns fail.

Viral Marketing is mostly used to reach more difficult segments and target groups. Most of the time a viral presents itself as funny or interesting information that people are willing to share with their friends, mostly funny or controversial movies or images, flash games or just plain text. This information is shared through email, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, forums, and so on.

The best Viral Marketing campaigns in the past were those where it wasn't clear there was a company behind it. Part of the strength of a viral lies in the discovery of the commercial message.

Unlike other advertising channels, once seeded a viral campaign cannot be stopped. The mechanism that makes Viral Marketing a strong communication channel is also its greatest weakness. A company has to let go its commercial message after the launch, so negative publicity can become a reality if the viral isn't received well.

One of the popular Viral Marketing creeds describes really well what it's all about:

"Viral Marketing doesn't work. Tell everyone you know!"

The Dutch website Marketingfacts.nl publishes a weekly top 10 of what is hot material in Viral Marketing: http://www.marketingfacts.nl/viralfriday/

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing takes it one step further than Viral Marketing. It sometimes uses the same techniques as Viral Marketing, but generally the WOMMA code mentioned above does not apply to Guerrilla Marketing, on the contrary.

The whole point of Guerrilla Marketing is to go undercover and explore the boundaries of what is acceptable to promote your services and share your opinion on the social web. This marketing technique is very controversial and really exploits the possibilities of social sites.

Since Guerrilla Marketing campaigns should stay off radar, the discovery that a company is behind certain content can be disastrous for your brand or company. But if you manage to hide your identity you can have great results.

A few possibilities:

Pay influential bloggers to write positive reviews.
Send product samples to bloggers and hope they will write about it.
Pay well-respected community members to influence online discussions.
Comment on existing blogs using fake names and identities.
Do and spread something controversial/original that cannot be traced to your own company but that influences the image of your brand.

One of the examples where it went wrong is the campaign Microsoft did to get reviews from influential bloggers on the new Windows Vista: http://marshallk.com/microsoft-wants-its-laptops-back. Thanks to this action, Vista got a really bad start in the worldwide blogosphere.

Professional Networking Websites

Professional Networking Websites have taken a real flight over the last months. With LinkedIn taking the lead, millions of professionals are creating profiles, connecting to business partners and getting introduced to new business partners.

But what's in it marketing wise for companies? Professional Networking Websites can increase your online marketing in a very cost-effective way:

Build a professional network around your company.
Meet (new) business partners.
Use it to promote your corporate site or blog (link building).
Show your expertise in the Q&A features of most Professional Networking Websites.
Promote your services and products.
Share your company values.
Start and maintain relations with (future) customers.
Create groups of people sharing the same interests.

Examples of Professional Networking Websites:

Fun Networking Websites

Fun Networking Websites like Facebook and Netlog reach out to a completely different audience: the social surfer in his free time. On Fun Networking Sites, people connect to friends and keep each other informed about what they are doing and what they are planning to do.

An Ofcom research report from 2008 stated that in the UK:

[] just over one fifth (22%) of adult internet users aged 16+ and almost half (49%) of children aged 8-17 who use the internet have set up their own profile on a social networking site. For adults, the likelihood of setting up a profile is highest among 16-24 year olds (54%) and decreases with age.

The report also discovered that the users of Fun Networking Sites are a really loyal and active audience. Let's take a look at the frequency of visiting social networking sites:

It's easy to understand that those social networking sites provide companies with a valuable channel to reach the young marketing segment.

As a company, these are your marketing possibilities on Fun Networking Websites:

Network with customers and fans of your products.
Get to know people that share interest in your market and products.
Link building; promote your corporate website and blogs.
Create groups; connect people around your company, products or services.
Post your companies' events, promote them and invite people to attend.
Advertise targeting certain age groups.
Share blog posts/links/sites/online discoveries.
Launch your own applications and get a lot of people to use your application.

Examples of Fun Networking Websites:

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/)
MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
Microsoft Live Spaces (http://spaces.live.com)
Bebo (http://www.bebo.com/)
Orkut (Google) (http://www.orkut.com/)
Netlog (EU) (http://www.netlog.com/)
Hyves (NL) (http://hyves.nl/)

Google Maps

With the increasing importance and use of online map applications and the evolution of those applications towards a social platform, your company presence on those websites becomes a real asset in your online real estate.

In short, you can use these applications to literally put your business on the map. Besides that, a company can promote its different offices, its website, products and services. But it's also possible for customers to review your services or comment on your products. Keeping an eye on those comments and acting upon them is necessary to improve your online reputation management.

With universal search, maps are also being shown in the SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages). So whenever someone is looking for your company it might be handy to not only having your own website show up, but also a map where your company can be found.

An example of a universal search result with Google Maps (searching for "Hotel Antwerp"):

An example of a local business item on Google Maps:

Microsoft has built a comparable service called Live Search Maps. It has some extra features compared to Google Maps, but it isn't that successful yet.

Video/Photo Sharing Websites

Video and Photo Sharing Websites offer the possibility to share and spread your company values, events, products and services through videos, photos, logos or commercials. Whether they are funny, serious or controversial, it doesn't even matter.

Besides offering all those things to the online community, Sharing Webites also make it easy to have others reuse your content and spread it through their own blogs, websites and social networking pages. So others can use and plug your content.

Another benefit of Sharing Websites is that you don't need to have the bandwidth and your system doesn't host the files. So technically there are only benefits and most importantly it's totally free, you just have to accept your content is on a website you don't control yourself.

Almost every Sharing Website also integrates the social aspect, users like to connect to each other and comment or reply on other people's content. In other words building a community around your company is a possibility.

So make sure pictures of your products, how-to-use videos and demonstrations of your products' benefits can be found on those sites. Maybe the view count won't reach the millions, but if a couple of thousand people saw every picture or video you shared, your presence is a success because those viewers are exactly your target audience.

A great example of a company that successfully used YouTube and other Social Sharing Websites to promote its product is Blendtec. Before its "Will It Blend" campaign Blendtec was a faceless company that manufactured blenders. The moment Blendtec started to post its extreme blending tests (golf sticks, iPods, a baseball) on YouTube the company gradually became a phenomenon and a worldwide well known brand in blenders. The cumulated number Blendtec video views has exceeded the 100 million. The Blendtec YouTube video channel can be found on http://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec and Blendtec has an astonishing number of more than 80.000 subscribers to their videos on YouTube alone.

Examples of Video Sharing Websites:

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/)
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/)
MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
GarageTV (Telenet) (http://www.garagetv.be/)
DailyMotion (http://www.dailymotion.com/)

Examples of Photo Sharing Websites:

Other Social Media Marketing Possibilities

The overview above is far from complete. A lot of other possibilities are at hand to market your company on the social web. A non-exhaustive list of other possibilities:

Funny or controversial online games.
Start a forum to service your customers.
Create microsites to support the launch of a new product and allow people to share their experiences.
Podcasting.
Offer free tools, software, widgets, e-books, and spread the word.
Link building: increase the number of incoming links to your website or blog.
Link baiting: create irresistible content that people want to link to.
Social bookmarking websites.
Online contests.

8. Tag Cloud

To finish, a tag cloud of this knol. Tag clouds are a typical Web 2.0 phenomenon. They allow you to get a quick overview of what a website or text is all about. The larger the words, the more important they are. The tag cloud below is based on the text of this knol:

9. Bibliography

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become.
O'Reilly Media, September 2005

Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.
Basic Books, January 2001

Ofcom, Office of Communications (UK), Social Networking, a quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use.
April 2008
(http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/socialnetworking/report.pdf)

10. Online resources