Social Media Marketing Panel Discussion
Good post by Voltier.com where they interviewed several prominent people about social media marketing. The experts on the hot seat were:
- Mathew Inman of SEOmoz
- Eric Ward of EricWard.com
- Geoff Simon of Sky Search Placement Marketing
- Russ Jones of Virante Inc.
- Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising
- Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting
- Daniel Tynski of Voltier Inc.
Some of the highlights from the panel were:
Q: Can Social Media Marketing work for all types of sites, or just certain sites?
Geoff Simon - It depends on what you mean by “social media works”, any company selling any type of (P) can use social media and it will deliver some traffic. If what you are looking for is if that traffic converts, is it targeted and does it bring users to the site that is a different story. Our metrics show that consumer related sites perform better than B2B sites in terms of conversions from social media traffic (in general), there are always exceptions.
Good point here by Geoff in that social marketing is not just about traffic, ultimately it is about converting traffic and some markets convert better online than others.
Q. What Social Media Sites do you promote with?
Eric Ward - Any that are appropriate for the subject matter being promoted.
This answer really struck out to me as everyone else rattled off the usual social media sites ( Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Netscape).
What Eric was pointing out is that you use social media sites that match your target audience. If you want to reach an SEO audience then Sphinn is a much better option than Digg.
Q: Reddit and Digg are probably the big two, have you had success with others?
Eric Ward - Yes, many many others. Social shopping sites can be powerful.
Eric again surprises with his answer. Everyone focuses on the big 5, but social shopping sites fly below the radar for many people. When I interviewed Kris Jones about social retailing he mentioned three social shopping sites; Shogging.com (a Pepperjam Company), ThisNext, and ShopWiki.
Q: Anything else you would like to add?
Eric Ward - If the only time you ever interact with a social media venue is when you are doing so for a client, you are part of the problem. Why not get online without an agenda every now and then and see what makes them so wonderful.
Neil Patel - If you can relate to the social media audience you will succeed.
The power of social media marketing is not in the number of links that it can generate or whether being on the front page caused your site to crash. It is about creating a dialogue with an audience. To do that, you have to make sure that you are reaching an audience that cares about your product or service. That is the base of which all social media campaigns are built. If you get the target audience wrong, then you will never see a positive ROI from your campaign.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization, Social Retailing : Comments (2) : Aug 23rd, 2007
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:30 am
Thanks for the link, looks very interesting. Going to check it out now although the text is pretty hard to read over there. Or is that just me?
August 24th, 2007 at 4:27 am
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