Social Media Marketing, An Hour a Day: Social Media Channels

From a marketing standpoint, advertising is as natural as putting your pants on in the morning; you don’t even think twice about it.  However, to other people (the consumers), advertising is one of the most annoying things.  It’s an intrusion on our privacy and an unwelcome interruption.  That being said, Evans poses the question: If you couldn’t interrupt people, how would you reach them?

Marketing is tricky.  On the one hand, as a marketer, you want to create a buzz about your product or service with the hopes that it will lead to an increased revenue.  At the same time though, you don’t want to turn possible consumers off by aggravating them.  This is where online marketing comes into play.  Many more businesses are turning to online marketing and advertising because let’s face it; this is where most people spend the majority of their time.  Additionally, studies have proven online marketing to be more cost effective overall than other traditional means of advertising (i.e. television, radio, newsprint).

Building Your Online Reputation

Even if you were at the top of your game and widely recognized as a leader in traditional forms of marketing, switching over to online marketing means having to start from scratch; it means that you have to work on building your reputation all over again because ultimately, it’s your online (not your offline) reputation that drives your desired results on the Social Web.  So how do you go about building your reputation online?  You begin with a quantitative break down how popular you are in some of the following categories:

• ratio of blog comments to your blog post
• unique visitors
• dwell times (how long any one person stayed on your site)
• assessing social commentary about the content on your site (do people like it or hate it?)
• assessing the social commentary related to your product or service (is your website helping or hindering this?)

Other questions that you’ll also want to be thinking about:

• What are you doing to generate awareness about your product, brand or service?
• What channel  is your top performer in terms of return on investment (ROI)? How was it measured?
• Are your strongest touchpoint experiences driven by marketing (the expectation you set) or operations (the product or service you deliver)?

By continuously reviewing and tuning your content based on its use, you are continuously enhancing your relevance to specific audiences and thereby building your social reputation. -Dave Evans

The Main Points According to Dave Evans:

• Social media is most different from traditional media in that it lacks the option to force an interruption:  Your message has to be invited in.
• Social media is fundamentally measurable.
• Social media can be organized as follows:
• Platforms: This includes social networks along with white-label community and forum applications.
• Content: This includes ratings, reviews, photos, videos, podcasts, and similar content that is created and shared on the Social Web.
• Interactions: This includes the little bits of information that flow around through feeds, email, and SMS that tell participants what is going on across the Social Web.