Leveraging Social Media –
What do all these people love?
Yup, you guess it, we’re all big fans of Pringles. Ted Murphy from Izea posted to Twitter that he was looking for some Pringlish pictures for his presentation at Cincinnati AMA Digital Marketing Summit and he got responses from Drew, Corrin, Connie and yours truly. It was great fun to do and Ted’s presentation went very well. Here are some comments from the blogosphere:
From: R.O. Why! Marketing:
Ted gave some very helpful pointers on how to get started in the maze of social media opportunities. While we’re all caught up in traditional brand development and the interactive marketing programs we’ve always done, there’s an entire ecosystem out there right now of consumers, fans, critics and their conversations that happen whether we participate or not. It’s time to get involved, and to start influencing the conversation.
My key takeaways:
- Start listening -What is currently being said?
- Create some goals for your social media efforts
- Determine what content you can draw from -Text, video, photos, audio, etc.
- Find content you can capture -Customers, partners, employees
- Decide what you’re willing to share
- Choose your platforms
- Participate in other conversations, don’t just broadcast -The most important conversations may not be those you start. Seek out conversations about your brand & add value to them.
- Create your own storm of social media content
Really great event, and I think Ted’s talk helped make some sense out of the social media storm, and gave everyone a few clear steps to getting involved.
From The Future Value of Business:
Ted’s message about blogging was all about making a personal connection with your customers. Blogging allows a company to show its human side. A company no longer has to be just a name and a logo. A company blog shows your customers the passion, excitement and intelligence of the employees who contribute to the blog. The company now has feeling and a pulse. The company can now show their customers that employees are engaged, content, and willing to share their work experiences. Great Companies inspire Great Work.
From Pimp My Keywords:
His topic, “The Social Media Symphony” was subtitled “Harness the power of social media to drive traffic and sales.”
Far too many people are unaware of what social media means and Murphy explained it well pointing out that social media is a platform and distribution channels that provide scale to reach millions of people.
Consider this: Murphy said five years ago only a few people would have viewed a video of him snoring in the backseat of a car. Today, however, that video can be easily viewed by millions of people. The potential is unlimited.
Today, with Web 2.0, the difference is “social” and is now about people, conversations, interaction and community. A huge difference.
According to Murphy, the way social media works is to “listen.”
Listen for mentions of your company or brands. Understand what your customers are saying.
Listen for mentions of your competitors. And, listen for mentions of subjects related to your industry.
These “conversations” are happening at:
- Facebook
- Friendfeed
- Twitter
- Utterz
- Plurk
- Brightkite
- Tailrank
- Techmeme
- Digg
- Google Blog Search
- Technorati
- CoComment
Murphy added that once you have located a discussion, you need to conduct your research (Who started the conversation? What is their relationship with your firm? What is their goal?), then determine your goal and never ever go straight into a sales pitch.
While social media does take time (and who has “time” these days?), you have to start somewhere and do what you can to get involved and participate.
Sounds like it was a great talk. I wonder if the slides are available for download anywhere
metimes lumped together into the same camp where technology lives; but in reality can apply to anything that disrupts the status quo. Anything that prevents a process from following the same linear motion that has been running for days, months or years has the potential to provide you with competitive advantage. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always risk attached to change. But without change, challenge or questions a business stagnates, ends up living in the past and is doomed to failure (The recent demise of Woolworths is a case in point here). You can read the whole post by Jayne-Anne Gadhia here.
I was speaking to a Phil, a friend of mine who runs a 