Social Media and Your Organization

Social Media refers to a collection of online tools and platforms that generate 2-way, multi-way interactions. Most of these platforms have been around for years now — why is social media suddenly a big deal? The answer is that we’ve reached a point of convergence where the intersection of different platforms can magnify one effort way beyond the capabilities of a single platform (going viral). Furthermore, we now have tools available to track our activities.

What’s in it for You?

Imagine that you’ve written an article about your business or service or industry or expertise, etc. Before the web that article (if accepted) would certainly be seen by some of the people who read the publication, and you could, of course, make copies of it to give to people long after the issue date.

Today you could post that same material on your website or a blog or with an article distribution service. Someone could read it online, like it, and send links to it to their friends/colleagues. Someone that received the link could post it on their blog, suddenly reaching a few or a few hundred or a few thousand more readers. A blog visitor could tweet about it, reaching yet more visitors. All of these links would be feeding people back to your website where they can go on to learn more about your organization, products, services, etc.

Create a podcast, or series of podcasts, or a video. Announce it on Facebook or Linked In or in Twitter (or in all of those) to get it started. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Create an Awareness Network

Social Media is not a Direct Sales medium in the way that, say, Google Adwords is, but it can be a potent portion of your marketing mix. Effective use of social media will increase sales or lead to sales but those are byproducts of the process. Social Media is an arena that enables you to build awareness and create trust. If you properly target your efforts and you nurture them for a period of time, you will see results.

Getting Started

Social Media tools are mostly free. But there’s a lot of them and it can be very intimidating to get started. You’re going to need to select tools to figure out which outlets will be your focus, and then you’re going to need to understand how to use those outlets. You may also need help in the development of Social Media content, which could be blog entries, articles, white papers, podcasts, e-books and/or videos. You don’t need to understand everything about this massive landscape of possiblities—you need to narrow down and then effectively utilize a fraction of that landscape.

Visit our Resources page to:

Download our 8-page PDF Guide: Getting Started with Social Media, which can be opened using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

And

Listen to our Podcast, Social Media: What’s it all About?

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Social Media Strategy

in a nutshell

Use online tools to find out where relevant people are gathering on the web. This tells you what platforms and outlets you will use when you embark on your campaign.

Find out what people are saying about you/your business, product, service, competitors, industry, if anything.

• If conversations are positive, how can you get more?
• If conversations are negative, how can you turn them around?
• If conversations are non-existent, how can you raise awareness?

Determine your social media goals.

Create content to help you reach your goals. You have to give people “something to talk about”: Blog posts, videos, podcasts, articles, white papers, Facebook pages, Linked In pages…

Use your new content as the floor from which you will measure your progress.

Finalize which outlets you want to use as tools.

Engage (professionally).

Sync your social media efforts with your other traditional and/or web marketing efforts.

Track, adjust, improve, track.

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