Social Media Questions For Lee Odden - Part 2
We are really excited that Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank® Online Marketing, a Minneapolis, Minnesota search marketing agency has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.
In part one of our interview,Lee discussed how TopRank uses social media tactics to distinguish itself in the market. In part two Lee talks about how TopRank’s clients are using social media to grow their business online.
1. TopRank Online Marketing has an impressive customer base. Are your clients asking you for an SMO strategy? What social media tools or tactics are you seeing them use? What works? What doesn’t work?
Some of our clients have been with us/me for nearly 10 years, so as part of our ongoing online marketing consulting services, we provide overall recommendations based on what we think will best help the client stay successful and do not limit tactics to one particular channel.
Depending on the goals of the company, the industry, target market, internal resources and types of content that can be produced, TopRank provides its clients education and consulting on how best to use social media in their overall marketing mix.
Social media is not applicable for every company nor is it appropriate for all marketing programs. Helping clients figure out a strategy and the corresponding implementation plan can be a big part of the services we provide.
It all starts with an understanding of the client’s goals and their target market. Then we inventory the kinds of media and content resources they have to work with. Businesses that already produce video, images, podcasts, write a blog or run a user community can have a significant advantage of companies that still rely on text for their online marketing.
What works is alignment of the target audiences’ interests and needs with the content being delivered and promoted. What doesn’t work is pushing a marketing message without considering the communities that will see it.
For example, pushing articles and videos about how to make pillows is hardly going to resonate with the Digg community. Unless of course, the pillow has a computer inside of it running the Ubuntu OS. Publishing a MySpace page or a blog about that topic and growing a network of friends and RSS subscribers would help that content travel much further amongst craft and pillow making enthusiasts in a more relevant way.
2. What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?
I believe there’s a tremendous opportunity from really getting to know what the social communities are about. Because there’s no unified method of performing SEO, many of the newer search marketers perform site optimization tactics much like throwing spaghetti against a wall to see if it sticks. Doing that with social media without considering a social community’s way of interacting, can result in alienation and distrust of the resource being promoted.
In order to get value out of a social media marketing channel, marketers need to understand the importance of creating value for the communities. I’ve seen many drive-by social marketing efforts fail in their attempt to engage the audience and instead, create a negative brand experience because the marketer did not become a part of the community or offer something the community members would value.
Successful marketing with social media is a combination of active participation, involvement and creation of value as well as a continuous process of testing and measuring new channels to see what new communities might become the next Digg, Facebook or StumbleUpon.
3. Which SMO techniques do you think are wastes of time?
I think the issue of time wasting SMO techniques is mostly an issue of alignment. There are many purposes for conducting a social media campaign such as: SEO, driving traffic for content monetization, branding or public relations. When marketers implement tactics seen as successful without understanding the context in which they are successful as well as the purpose, it’s a waste of time.
In other words, what works for a social media SEO focused campaign is not necessarily going to transfer to a social media public relations effort and vice versa.
One example is the over promotion of social bookmarking and social news sites on blogs and resource web pages. Showing a multitude of links or icons for every major bookmarking service is a waste of time. More often than not, providing so many options confuses the visitor and they end up not bookmarking or sharing anything at all.
It’s better to test which bookmark services that users tend to click on and implement a select few services that best resonate with the blog’s audience. We’ve learned this lesson ourselves and have reduced the number and types of bookmark services listed after each post to the services we feel are most relevant to our content and our reader’s usage.
4. Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?
There are plenty of blunders inasmuch a lot of effort was put into various social media promotion efforts and no one noticed.
But I suspect you have a different kind of blunder in mind, such as when fake blogs or videos are outed. In particular, I think there are some large brands that in combination with their PR agencies have made some unfortunate decisions to launch campaigns involving fake people and content.
For example, fake blogs like Walmarting Across America or Sony’s fake PSP blog which, now curiously links to a site for Haagen-Dazs, come to mind.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Interviews, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Jul 31st, 2007
July 31st, 2007 at 8:19 am
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