September 2006

The social media landscape is littered with companies who have failed miserably at social marketing. The poster child for failed social marketing programs being GMC. The concept of letting buyers make their own Chevy Tahoe commercial probably sounded like a good idea. Nobody at GMC thought about how to handle “negative” ads. So when consumers and/or environmental groups put together ads that focused on the environmental impact of the Tahoe, GMC pulled the offending ads. Not quite a two way communication.

There are several sources of information if you are looking for a list of Social Networking Sites. Rand over at seomoz even out together a web 2.0 list where they rated the best sites in each category.

The community over at Wikipedia have also compiled a very useful list of social networking sites. The Wiki list includes information about the focus of the sites and user size.

Either list is a good starting point if you are researching social networking sites that are in your vertical market. Before jumping in, I would recommend observing the conversation first to make sure that it is a neighborhood that you want to be in and then join in the conversation.

Brand mangers face a big challenge with social marketing because it requires a willingness to engage in a two-way conversation with customers. What if they are unhappy with your product or service?

Someone asked me last week about the best way to communicate with your target audience once you had identified their neighborhoods. I was catching up on some blog posts over the weekend when I saw this great post by John Cass on conversational blogging.

If you take John’s post and replace the world blogging with social marketing you have the framework for conversational social marketing:

The White House must not have got the memo from Mark Cuban that YouTube was in trouble. Today the White House announced that it was using YouTube to distribute government-produced, anti-drug videos.

President Bush’s top drug-policy adviser, John Walters, said the agency was using emerging technologies to try to reach its audience. “Public institutions must adapt to meet the realities of these promising technologies,” he said.

Not everyone was in favor of the government using YouTube Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project predicted computer-savvy critics of U.S. drug policies will quickly edit the government’s videos to produce parodies and distribute those on YouTube. “This seems pretty new and pretty adventurous.”

Matt Cuban yesterday engraved the tombstone for social network fav YouTube. In part, Cuban said:

“Take away all the copyrighted material and you take away most of Youtube’s traffic. Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal. Like any number of competitors out there that decided to follow copyright law

Youtube, we hardly knew you.”

Whether you like Cuban’s style or not, he has amassed quite a successful track record in business and he does make some very good points about whether YouTube has a business model that can be profitable.

At the San Jose Search Engine Strategies Conference Brian Monahan from IPG spoke about the emergence of an alternative media world that includes Podcasts and Video. Brian mentioned that there are currently 40,000 radio stations and 48,000 Podcasts. Podcasts are a wonderful “new media” vehicle that allows a company to connect with its target audience away from its web site (i.e. in the communities and neighborhoods where their target audience is gathering).

When you think of social marketing and web 2.0, the web sites that jump to mind are Wikipidia, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and Teconorati. Underneath these five leaders are a huge variety of 2.0 web sites, each vying to become the next big web success. One of those sites is Squidoo, the brainchild of Seth Godin launched late last year.

Now Squidoo does not technically fulfill all the requirements of a social medium like [insert a few requirements of a social medium]. Its goal is become a resource for others instead of a meeting place, and content is not user or group edited.

In a previous post I wrote about how to implement a social media optimization (SMO) marketing strategy. In phase one you added some terrific content to your web site, and traffic and links have increased. So now you are ready for phase two: venturing into the world of social media optimization.

Why Social Media Optimization?

The goal of SMO is to make your web site more visible in social media circles. The SMO strategy developed in phase one has similarities to a traditional search engine optimization strategy. Once you head into the social media space, there are significant differences.

While in a client meeting yesterday it struck me that the social media options available to a business can be so overwhelming that companies can decide not to do anything simply because they don’t know where to begin. Social Media Optimization I believe should be part of your overall online strategy. SMO does not replace your PPC campaign or your search engine optimization efforts. Instead it works in conjunction with those programs. So assuming that you have a search engine strategy in place already, how would a company go about employing a social media optimization strategy? Looking back at Rohit’s original social media optimization concepts, Rohit explained that the goal of SMO is to: