Social Media Strategy

In a social media world where every blog has posts on 10 ways to XYZ it’s easy to see why many can get drawn into the doing before doing too much of the thinking.

All to often social media campaigns fall down because they start downstream, they are focussed around platforms or content or interactions. Twitter is the hot new kid on the block so let’s have some, rather than creating a well rounded social media strategy that’s aligned with business objectives.

If you start upstream it will be easy to see where everything fits in, creativity may be needed, in some cases just downright hard work, but you can’t prescribe the approach until you know where it’s going and how it fits in with everything else.

Upstream is where the thinking takes place, downstream is where the thinking is implemented and tasks are carried out.

Do you hire an agency? That’s decided upstream, formulating strategy is all about opportunity and capability, is there an opportunity that suits our goals and if so do we have the capability to take advantage of it?

Once you have a strategy you can start to formulate a plan, select platforms, decide on content and how to interact.

Whatever you do, don’t be task driven or creative driven, neither will work if you don’t have a social media strategy.

I’m going to put together a little toolkit that will hopefully help people easily put together a social media strategy and sell it to their boss, I will update this post when it’s online.

It wasn’t that long ago when a small website, run from a spare room, could take a foothold in natural search results. But have things changed? As more big brands start to grasp SEO the day of the one man website may be numbered.

For years big brands have not fully utilised the assets they have in a strategic sense to gain advantage in natural search results. They relied on brand terms to drive traffic. As the economy squeezes every last drop from their marketing budgets so they are now seriously looking at the long term efficiencies SEO has to offer.

They now build sites that get indexed, optimise their content to be relevant for key terms across the user journey and syndicate content to gain precious authority from inbound links. They are learning how universal search can open the door to traffic from images, video, maps, blogs and news. They have rallied around social networks to build followers who talk about them gently nudging sentiment in their favour while increasing their share of voice.

The sleeping giant is awake and its optimising the hell out of its website.

The resources these companies can move to influence rankings is way beyond the spare room start-up. If they apply the right techniques on an ongoing basis they could leverage economies of scale that could change the face of search. Many have seen the light, boardrooms now know what SEO stands for and like the idea of ‘free’ traffic.

The realm of search is changing, however, the keeper of the keys (Google) likes to keep the landscape fluid, Google likes the PPC income, it may change the rules more frequently to keep brands investment in SEO high to try and guard against a drop in income. Last year saw over 400 changes to the algorithm, how many this year? And next year?

The key capability big brands need is agility, the ability to keep moving as the rules of the game change. Natural search marketing is like trying to make a boat out of a car and just when you have you realise you need to build a train out of a boat.

One thing I’ve learnt running this video blog is that video can have a huge impact on your search results.

Taking into account velocity, the speed at which a new article can rank in results due to its freshness and universal search, the blending of video, images, news etc into web results you can easily dominate a keyword.

This blog is just a few weeks old but already I’m seeing the effects, take this key term “oprah twitter episode” this is the results page.

Oprah twitter episode key term

I have 3 results on the first page, admittedly it’s not a competitive keyword, but getting 3 positions is pretty good going.

For “Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Oprah” I grab the places just below Techcrunch

twitter ashton kutcher cnn and oprah

The page/blog doesn’t have any real authority but is piggy backing on the video sites, not only that, the results become much more noticeable.

So, if you aren’t using video or you aren’t optimising your videos then you could be missing a big opportunity.

Ashton Kutcher

In this episode of the iGary TV podcast I take a look at what’s happened on Twitter this week. A few weeks ago the words ‘a plus k’ wouldn’t have meant much, but since Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), of 70’s Show and Dude Where’s my Car fame decided to race CNN (@cnnbrk) to be the first on Twitter with 1 million followers everyone is aware of it.

So, the story so far, Ashton decided he wanted to beat CNN to 1 million followers on Twitter and pledged $100,000 to a charity if he did. Low and behold he did win the race.

Ashton Kutcher hits 1 Million Followers on Twitter

But, there’s been a backlash, or should I say #backlashton which is the search tag being used by people upset by the whole thing on Twitter.

#backlashton

Some have accused Ashton and CNN of gaming the system as Ashton had over 1,000 billboards given free to help him.

Ashton Kutcher @aplusk Billboard

Using mass media to collect followers on Twitter isn’t what social media is about, it’s all a bit retro, social media is about building an audience, engaging them, building trust and joining the conversation. Personally I don’t see too much wrong with what they did, but I don’t think it’s best practice, I wouldn’t like to see big brands following this example and Twitter could have acted better by allowing people to unfollow Ashton and CNN, instead there was a mysterious error.

How to Unfollow Ashton Kutcher

The great thing to come out of this is that Oprah (@oprah) is now on Twitter.

Oprah on Twitter

Oprah has made 10 Tweets and has over 300,000 followers, not bad for the first day!

With Oprah now using Twitter it could change the demographic profile of Twitter, which currently stands like this.

Quantcast Audience Profile Twitter

It could swing the age/gender profile more towards certain brands.

More importantly it could influence the Technographic profile of users, especially in the USA and UK, creating critics and creators out of spectators and inactives.

Technographics

By getting people involved as critics and creators means they are more likely to do the same elsewhere and as evangelists come from these groups this can help your brand.

Data from Forrester Research Technographics^® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com

How USA Korean BBQ firm Kogi are using Twitter to keep users informed as to where their trucks are.

Think it’s impossible to make washing machines fit into social media? Think again. Matt, a 16 year old from Macclesfield, UK, has created a Youtube channel dedicated to his washing machines, watch for more

A look at which social media sites do and don’t use nofollow tags on profile links such as Linkedin, Seesmic, Furl and Technorati and questioning why some social networks place nofollow on profile links.

I can see why nofollow is used on comments, but, your social network profile is yours, you are the editor, so a link to your own site shouldn’t have nofollow on it.

Some social media sites don’t add the nofollow tag, LinkedIn is probably the best and most under utilised. Instead of acepting the default My Company text for your link chose ‘other’ this allows you to enter the anchor text for the link.

Obviously if this gets abused I’m sure they will add nofollow, but for now, link away…

How a potential Cisco intern gained infamy with one misguided Twitter post and how quickly Cisco found and reacted to the post.

iGary Podcast Episode 8: Twitter can cost you your job from Gary Reid on Vimeo.

This week saw a young lady from California get on the wrong end of social media. MSNBC covered the story here, but basically she posted this on Twitter

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work

Of all the firms to pick Connie chose Cisco, probably one of the more social media aware out there, having been probably the only major company to do a complete product launch using social media.

The slideshow detailing this launch below

Most large companies monitor their brand online. Using something like Splitweet you can easily input a few keywords and see every post that contains them, like this

Splitweet Brand Monitoring

The moral of this story, be careful what you say and who you say it about!

Download the podcast iGary Podcast Episode 8: Twitter can cost you your job

iGary Podcast Episode 7 from Gary Reid on Vimeo.

I was speaking at the IAB Engage for Search conference on Tuesday and one statistic that stood out for me was from Charles Sword (Head of Mobile Advertising Yahoo). It was

40 Percent of Mobile search comes from just 200 Keywords

Here’s my take on it in my latest podcast.

I wasn’t just sat on stage…

iGary at IAB Engage for Search

But, I was also Twittering the event, when I sent out the stat that just 200 keywords make up 40% of search on mobile phones it started a conversation instantly.

Twitter IAB

To fill in some other stats

• Smartphones account for 12% of the market
• The iPhone 3%
• Over 30% of mobile search is from smartphones

Charles commented that although th hardware limits what you want to type in the driving force is behavioural, we use mobile search when we are out and about, such as food, movies etc.