Social Media Marketing

I was watching Fox News the other day, I don’t remember what show it was but the commentator was talking about community.  He said that a community revolved around his neighbors and people that resided within a certain proximity to his physical location.  According to Wikipedia: “Traditionally a ‘community’ has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location.”  This made me think about all of the people that I’m connected with online and all of my readers/friends.  I haven’t met most of you and we definitely don’t reside in the same physical location, but I definitely still consider us a community.

I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for my friends over at Techrigy, which is a social media⁺ monitoring and analytics platform.  They have a kick ass freemium version of their service so definitely sign up to check it out.  My post for techrigy was all about the notion that tools only get you so far.  I can drop you off in the middle of nowhere with everything you need to build a shopping mall, but if you don’t understand how to use the tools to meet your goal, then you aren’t going to get very far with your shopping mall.  Having said that, here is a snippe from my guest post:

A few days ago I did a teleseminar for around 400 authors on how to use social media.  Prior to the seminar I received around 130 questions.  I couldn’t get to all of them on the seminar so I thought I spend a few days and go through them here.  There are a lot of questions so if my answers aren’t as in depth as you would like I apologize.  Questions that say something like “how can I marketing my novel,” will also not be addressed because a lot of that was covered on the teleseminar.  This is part 3.

Let’s get started:

Where to start? If I have limited time funds and know-how…

I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for Zane Safrit on what to expect from an initial social media campaign.  As usual, here is a quick snippet from the post, if you like what you read then please click over to Zane’s blog⁺ to read the rest:

“So let’s say you have your social media strategy all set to go. You have someone who is going to handle all of the implementation, all of the resources are in place and you have the full backing of your management team to get started. You’re on day one of getting started, so what are some of the things you can expect from your initial social media campaign?”

A few days ago I did a teleseminar for around 400 authors on how to use social media.  Prior to the seminar I received around 130 questions.  I couldn’t get to all of them on the seminar so I thought I spend a few days and go through them here.  There are a lot of questions so if my answers aren’t as in depth as you would like I apologize.  Questions that say something like “how can I marketing my novel,” will also not be addressed because a lot of that was covered on the teleseminar.  This is part 2.

Let’s get started:

How did you manage to get up as first result in Google?

This graphic from Nielsen Online really says everything that needs to be said.

The increasing reach of “Member Community” Web sites across 2008

In case anyone out there still thinks that this social media⁺ thing is a fad, well here ya go.  Social networks and blogs are up across the board…around the world.  According to the Guardian (which got info from Nielsen) the increase of social network usage has a lot to do with cell phone usage.

Questions/comments⁺/thoughts?

Yesterday I did a teleseminar for around 400 people mostly authors on social media⁺ basics.  I covered a lot of information in around an hour.  The call was hosted by Arielle Ford who runs a series called “everything you should know.”

Hope you enjoy!

social media for authors 128k

social media for authors 64k

I’m sure you’ve heard about what Skittles have been doing lately.  If you visited the site a few days ago you would have seen the skittles.com homepage redirect to the twitter⁺ search page showing all of the conversations on twitter that mentioned “skittles.”  There has been a lot of commentary about what skittles has been doing and not everyone agrees.  So far twitter has redirected the homepage to twitter, facebook⁺, and now is now point to the skittles wikipedia page.

Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog⁺, recently put together a survey of the top digital marketing tactics for 2009.  Over 1,500 participated in the survey and the results for the top 10 digital marketing tactics for 2009 are as follows:

I recently wrote a guest post for Jason Baer from Convince and Convert.  The topic of the post was how to embrace your customers through social media⁺.  In the post I discuss how easy it is to lose sight of your customers as your social media campaigns expand.  I also provided a few tips that will help keep organizations keep their customers on the radar at all times.  Social media is a never ending dynamic project, actually it’s a part of business.  Here’s a snippet of the guest post:

“When you get involved in social media, there are a lot of things you need to think of and oversee, everything from strategy to implementation to community management. However, as time goes on and as a social media presence begins to grow it’s easy to lose focus on the consumers.