Tactic Lust Has Little Value

Are you in love with on line tactics, such as facebook and twitter, but are wondering why you only have a handful of followers or fans? It is all the rage today to be a part of this craze we call Social Media Marketing, but if you are just talking to yourself, there is no net effect for your business. Said differently, being on facebook and twitter alone has little to no value to your small business unless you are engaging with your community of interest.

What Do I Say or Post

Social Media is outreach on steroids. it is a way for folks to share things of interest with other like friends and associations. Social Media Marketing can be an excellent way to expand your customer base. Master aligning content with your core customer base, and become a source conduit via the various social platforms within your Circle of Influence.

Be a Curator of Content That You Are Experiencing

Dan McCarthy summed it up nicley on a recent comment he left on his blog

The distribution challenge — how do I get the content I want to share out into my social graph as easily as possible — is a technology-standards issue. For Facebook et al to leverage value out of their audience, they need techniques to keep their audience as organized as possible. Ergo, a walled garden of a certain degree. As a marketer or a media player, you want to assess each potential distribution channel in terms of the scale that you can aggregate and the results that you get from distributing content. The equation would be something like: (Size of social graph on platform/click-thrus)+(Redistribution of links)+(Inbound link recognition by Google)=Weighted value of audience.

The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I’ve been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru’s I’m driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I’m highlighting.

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

That’s the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That’s curated content. It’s not original. But it is incredibly useful.

All Blog and No Comment Makes For Slow Growth

When we started our blog at our small business, it didn’t do so well. The fist set of posts went up in February of 2008. We did what we thought you were supposed to do, we provided regular content, (at least what we thought regular was at the time, we since have increased “regular) we posted relevant content to our business, and we had a pretty good writer with a journalism degree doing the posts.

Dribble, Dribble, Dribble

I love to do marketing experiments to test what works and what doesn’t work, and see our own small business as a “laboratory” to test ideas before bringing them to our clients. So, that is partly why we started blogging in the first place, to see what worked. I actually hung with the blogging test with lackluster results for much longer than typical, as by August of 2008, some seven months after the blogs launch,we only had about (35) monthly visitors. Frankly, most of the ideas we test fail, and so I was ready to pull the plug on this one too, as just being some type of fad for folks drinking the Social Media Kool Aid.

It Is All In The Comments

So, in September we made two significant changes to our blogging approach,

1. We added Guest Bloggers, which later became staff bloggers (more on that in a later post)
2. We required the Guest Bloggers to leave 3-5 comments on like other blog posts for each blog post they did for us.

An array of pretty interesting things happened from this turn of events, but the most significant was that our monthly blog traffic took off like a rocket. By March of 2008, monthly visitors to our Urbane Life Blog had grown to over 4,500 unique visitors.

Slow But Steady

Social Media Today penned a post recently titled Comments Have More Value Than Tweets, which tends to support this commenting theory.

If a person blogs and uses a commenting service like Disqus, you’re pretty much guaranteed they will receive your comment. Email gets ignored. Calls go straight to voicemail. Comments get responded to.

Commenting on someone’s blog accomplishes so much:

• you engage someone on their turf and in a very non-invasive way
• comments tend to have a high response rate, it’s likely you’ll get a reciprocated comment back
• comments let you showcase critical reasoning and smarts
• regular commenting is a sign that you value the other person’s opinions; that won’t go unnoticed

But here is the rub, and we speak this from first hand knowledge,  Blogging is Fun, commenting can become work. We typically get push back from bloggers and folks starting out blogging, as everyone wants to create content,which is good, but Social Media at its core is about connections, and leaving thoughtful, relevant comments on like minded blog posts is an excellent strategy.

How about you, what has worked for your blog growth,

Social Media Marketing: facebook news

One of the things that make the digital world so fascinating is the ability we all have to Share Content with our  Community of Interest Sharing can consist of our own content or others content we finding interesting, engaging and of value.

Facebook Makes Sharing Easier

As reported by Mashable on their blog titled Facebooks Version of the Re-tweet has Arrived

It appears the feature is live for everyone. To try it, just go to a friend’s posted item in your news feed, click “share,” and you’ll see a “via [your friend’s name]” (with an option to remove it). Once shared, the item will appear on your profile, with a via link that points to your friend’s profile. Your friends will also see the item in their News Feeds, creating the viral loop that is the Twitter retweet.

It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds, and we will keep you posted of what we see and hear, and how it affects your Internet Marketing Strategy. We sure would like to here your comments on this too.