Last week I wrote a post about MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook which included eighteen lessons I learned from the report.

This is a true story. Yesterday morning I met a friend for coffee. She’s owned and operated a business in the design industry for many years where she’s worked with both B2B and B2C customers, and lately has grown more curious about social marketing.

My friend told me that she’s always been an early adopter of technology and has even been a little surprised that she hasn’t considered social marketing earlier. Like so many other business people, she hasn’t known where to begin.

It wasn’t until driving back to my office after the hour we spent together that I realized I had used the ROAD map as a way to walk her through the basics of social marketing. As a refresher, MarketingSherpa identified ROAD as Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

Here’s how we approached the topic together for her first time:

Research: My friend told me that she reads a number of blogs in the creative design industry and has for some time. There are blogs she’s come across which she thinks are excellent and others that in her opinion, don’t provide any value. This is a great first step and I suggested that she take it  further by trying to identify what she thinks are good about those blogs. What could she emulate in her own blog if she were to start one? What would be the topics and focus? What content would best demonstrate her firm’s expertise? What would set her company apart from others? Ongoing research of blogs and other social media channels will be an important part of the process.

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Whether this population is called: Millennial; Gen Y; EchoBoomer; Net, Boomerang or Peter Pan Generation–see what’s important to them, how they view technology, news, TV and Internet.

Infographic Source: Ethan Bloch, Flowtown.

Earlier this week I spoke on a panel of social media professionals to 70 executive directors and marketing staff of nonprofit organizations at Simmons College in Boston. The subject was Social Media: Tips and tools for using social media to build support for your mission. The event was organized by the Center for Non-profit Success.

We had a great group of panelists who provided a balance of tools, case studies and strategy. My task was to present on strategy.   While everyone had a Facebook presence, only two or three audience members had a strategy to back up their social media activities. This is common amongst most nonprofits and many for-profits.  Unfortunately, without a strategy in place, these organizations may not be creating content that serves their audience, delivers on their organizational objectives or have the triggers in place to understand how successful their programs are.

The great news is that once your strategy is created and you know what you need to do, your daily social media marketing activities are efficient and carry more impact. Having measurements in place is rewarding. Once you know what’s not working, you can eliminate  time spent on them and focus on successful tactics. This is crucial for justifying resource allocation and funding.

The main steps in creating a strategy are:

• Develop objectives for your marketing and social media program
• Conduct a competitive review to hear best practices in your industry
• Profile your audiences and understand their needs and how you can serve them
• Draft a plan that identifies objectives, tactics and measurement strategy for 6 months
• Implement the program and measure it monthly, tweaking as you go.

More resources

My slides

Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report

The title of MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Handbook, Social Marketing ROAD Map, is not only a clever analogy referring to the territory marketers must navigate to map out a social media strategy, the acronym is memorable and quite right-on. ROAD stands for: Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

I know writers are supposed to resist the temptation to use clichés—but I can’t help it—so indulge me here for a moment while I offer you a personal perspective. For me, someone who fears getting lost, my Global Positioning System (GPS) has changed my life with its turn-by-turn voice directions. The ROAD Map Handbook offers the comfort and confidence that I’ve come to rely on from my GPS. I think you too will find great direction from the guidelines, best practices and tactics, templates, suggested resources, worksheets, list of social media platforms, and comprehensive glossary.

Whether you’re a marketer just starting out in Social Media or have been traveling these roads for some time, you’re bound to find many valuable tips and strategies in MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing Road Map Handbook.

You’ll want to read the Handbook yourself to receive the full benefit but to get you started, here are some of my favorite marketing signposts. See if any of the concepts speak to you or challenge how you’ve thought about your social media and search campaigns. (Share your thoughts in the comments.) Also, check-out MarketingSherpa’s upcoming social marketing workshops that begin next week in Boston.

Signpost #1: Include tactics that maintain viral momentum when building social media campaigns.

Signpost #2: Integrate social media with your other online marketing tactics.

Signpost #3: Get on board with integrating Social Media and SEO tactics. Social Media has the potential to greatly improve your search engine campaigns.

Signpost #4: Social content is getting indexed by search engines and generates increased number of listings in search results.

Signpost #5: Social Media’s true benefit to search campaigns is increased clickthrough rates which will bring: increased traffic to your website, leads and online sales, email addresses, and more items added to shopping carts.

Signpost #6: Social Media generates reams of online content which needs to be optimized with targeted keywords.

Signpost #7: A key tenet of Social Media Marketing is to provide value through great content and interaction.

Signpost #8: Add relevant URL’s to social media profiles, e.g. Facebook, twitter.

Signpost #9: SEO keyword research can identify keywords and phrases to use in social media channels to attract more visitors.

Signpost #10: Creating a blog enables you to share your industry expertise with clients while generating massive amounts of keyword-rich content for your domain and search engines.

Signpost #11: Social sharing allows email recipients to share email content on popular social networks and other social media sites.

Signpost #12: Assess and select specific social media brands that will most effectively power the tactics and fit into the social marketing architecture. Lack of architecture results in “random acts of social marketing.” 
Brands include: Social Networks (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn), Microblog (e.g. Twitter), Video sharing (e.g. YouTube), Photo sharing (e.g. Flickr), Presentation sharing (e.g. SlideShare), Document sharing (e.g. Scribd), Social Bookmarking or News (e.g. Digg).

Signpost #13: The number of social media sites in your social marketing architecture is not important. What is important is that they each have a clearly defined purpose that supports your tactical plan of action.

Signpost #14: Many of the most successful social marketing architectures have a common structure based on a hub and spoke design.

Signpost #15: A website can be the hub of your overall marketing strategy while a blog is the hub of a social marketing strategy.

Signpost #16: The website offers key touch-points for attracting anonymous visitors and converting them into identifiable leads or customers by offering marketing information needed to make purchase decisions.

Signpost #17: A blog is an important aggregation point for frequently updated content and destination point for inbound links. Blogs are very search engine friendly, usually achieving rankings above a website.

Signpost #18: Social networks, multimedia sharing, and social bookmarking sites serve as spoke sites for the hub by feeding traffic to the hub and enabling the hub to feed traffic back to them for engagement and community building.

Thoughts? Comments?

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to Sergio Balegno, Research Director, MarketingSherpa for providing a review copy of  Social Marketing ROAD Map for this blog post.

Image by JMC Photos via Flickr

It may be early on in the race to Social Media marketing success, but there are already some notable leaders and laggards emerging.  Which industries are the ambling tortoises, and which are the speedy hares?

In this post, we will review the findings of a recent report from intelligence provider Social Media Influence (SMI), and share our own analysis to help you handicap this race to success.

In their June report entitled “The State of Social Media Jobs 2010,” SMI surveyed the marketing departments of all Fortune 100 companies, to find out whether they have in-house social media resources, outsource their social media campaigns, or have little to no investment in social media marketing.

The graph below shows the results of their survey.  The blue line represents the total number of companies in that industry, while the red line represents those companies in that industry that SMI deems “social media-savvy” (i.e. they devote significant in-house resources to social media marketing efforts).  As you can see, the leaders of the group include Tech/Consumer Electronics, Healthcare, Retail and Automotive.  On the flip side, the laggards are Petroleum/Energy, Financial Services/Insurance and Utilities.  (Click to enlarge image.)

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In the new book, The Yahoo! Style Guide, bloggers are advised to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages.”

I review the analytics for this site on a regular basis and am often intrigued to see the far-reaching range that posts can have. This past month visits came from 47 countries/territories and 23 languages. (Drilling down a little further I could even see that one recent post was picked up and cited on a blog in Brazil and then viewed most heavily in Sao Paulo.)

So what’s a blogger to do?

• You can start by following five best practices from the style guide: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include “signposts”: words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and nonliteral usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn’t translate literally.

• If you’re not tracking where your visitors are coming from, you may be surprised. Check out the Google Analytics tabs for map overlay and languages.

• You can also view a selection of instructional videos about Google Analytics on YouTube. Below is a helpful introduction to get you started:

Image by CLUC via Flickr

A new Infographic with facts and visual perspective on the Internet:

Via: Medical Coding Certification

In a new post by Denise Wakeman she suggests repurposing your blog posts into different formats to “get more exposure and more value from the time you’ve initially invested in creating the content. Not to mention that you can drive more traffic back to your home base.”

What can you do with the post once its been published on your site? Denise suggests turning the content into different formats such as “reports, white papers, articles, slide shows, videos, podcasts, teleseminars, ebooks, etc.”

One place where you can repurpose your content is in your email newsletter by including a few lines in a short piece and linking back to your blog. That way you’ve not only repurposed the content but possibly have taken your non-blog reading client to your posts and demonstrated to them what they’ve been missing. Include too, a call to action to to sign-up to receive updates about your posts via rss feed or by email subscription.

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We’ve been thinking more about the one deal a day business model since our post last week, “Who’s Buying In to Groupon, LivingSocial & the One-Deal-a-Day Business Model,” which explored the demographics of users.

In a recent post by Barrett Lane,  a blogger for Yipit, he  looks at considerations for businesses who are contemplating running an online daily deal.  We also found a post by Jim Moran, co-founder of Yipit, which sheds some interesting light on the psychology of persuasion and what motivates individuals to act on a purchase.

Last but not least, a discussion of one day a deal offers wouldn’t be complete without looking at how engaged a business is in social networking.

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There’s a lot happening on the Internet these days. People are looking forward to checking their e-mails and following businesses on Facebook and Twitter all in the name of deals, not any deals for that matter, but the “one deal a day” type. One deal a day is a web-based business model in which a single type of product is offered for sale for a period of 24 hours…and operate within geographic territories.

People are not only checking their e-mails and reading online content about deals but business is reportedly up for Groupon, LivingSocial and their competitors. Techcrunch reports that people are buying coupons for restaurants, massages, discounted memberships to fitness clubs and museums, local activities, tourist attractions, and merchandise.

Marketing has always been about looking at demographics and understanding what sells in specific markets. Techcrunch states “You can tell a lot about a city by what is being bought on Groupon.” Apparently Boston residents love laser hair removal, Segways, and learning how to fly a helicopter. San Diegans are into Pole Dancing, unlimited carnival rides. Denver loves Cold Stone Creamery and Speed Raceway. Atlanta is into NASCAR and Chicagoans enjoy the Tall Ships.  The site has accumulated 3 million subscribers and currently manages roughly 40 markets. Groupon states that their customers are socially active, both online and off. 68% are between 18-34; 50% have a bachelor’s degree, 30% graduate degree; 49% are single, 33% married; 77% women, 23% men. 66% read Groupon write-ups every day and use Groupon primarily as a guide to explore their city. (see more about groupon’s demographics)

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