There’s still a quiet little war being fought that erupts once in a while and spills out into mainstream. It exists between the old school marketers and the new guys that have come on the scene as advocates of change.

The confrontation always seems to boil down to who owns social media: The Marketing Team or The PR Guru’s?

It’s a common thought that social media should be treated just like any other channel for marketing. It has established rules, a fundamental purpose as well as variable strengths and weaknesses. It’s also good for crafting and shaping opinions, so on the surface it seems like it would predominantly fall in the realm of PR.

To position it in that manner would be a mistake unfortunately. That move would cause it to lose authenticity and create restrictions on messaging. If PR has the rope, then what about others within the organization? What about other promotions and value that can be delivered? It’s not feasible for PR to manage the multitude of voices in an organization.

So that leaves us with Marketing. Social media is a mass of contact points, and each one impacts the organization/brand/individual in a different way. Because this, I fall back on the same reason I say no to PR. The organization is made up of more than just the Marketing group.

Social media does indeed need to be owned by someone, but it should be a team that is specifically designed to represent the various facets of the company and deliver messages that represent the organization as a whole – not just from a marketing and PR perspective.

Often the best teams are made up of people who carry knowledge and understanding of both marketing and PR along with the fundamental understanding of what it means to talk WITH consumers and not AT them. Those organizations that rely heavily on a marketing or PR department will find themselves mired in the traditional corporate speak and ill-delivery of messages that never quite fall on the consumers the right way.

Not to say that all marketing and PR departments get it wrong. Certainly those that have restructured and changed their way of thinking to a more modern position on social media and customer engagement actually get it. They deliver their messages quite well more often than not. It’s those still living under the old rules of marketing and PR that cause businesses to struggle the most.

If any organization wants to remain ahead of the pack with social media marketing, there will need to be a hybrid team – and change is necessary.

Spread the knowledge ... Re-tweet this content.

Outsource Your Marketing in Minutes to Hundreds Worldwide...
Click Here >>>

• Be the first to comment...

You lost track of the amount of hours you have dumped into your marketing campaign in the last 4 months.  You’ve invested money over and over hiring experts in marketing to guide you through the small steps of crafting a winning strategy.  You’re finally prepped to hit the launch button - you have lift off.. and your rocket just sits there smoldering.

What happened?

By general standards it appears everything was handled properly.  You even did everything the “experts” and agencies told you to.  Keywords, blog posts, videos, direct marketing.  Still, you gain no traction.  You’re not even seeing gravity within your social media marketing where you thought for certain you’d gain steam among your followers.

Here are 10 reasons where you likely went wrong.

1. Your actual message is full of “I” and “me” instead of anything relating to “you” (you know..the customer)

2. You neglected to communicate the “Why” to the people you’re targeting

3. Your copy isn’t at all focused on the “What”

4. Further investigation reveals that there is little to no information on the “How”

5. …or the “What if”  is in.. “what if I buy it” or “what if I don’t”

6. You’re spending a lot of time positioning yourself as a thought leader, droning on about yourexpertise instead of actually defining a clear solution to a problem that the customer is having.

7. You’re basing your marketing off assumptions about your targeted buyers, often because you’ve sold some stuff before and since you’ve been doing it for so long you just know your experience puts you in the right place.  Probably a good idea to replace that attitude with hard fact gathering and listening.

8. You didn’t spend enough time testing your products and services before the launch - or you did no testing at all

9. For you, social media and your email are like a firehose.  Information goes one way and it goes that way fast.  It needs to be two-way to spark conversation.

10. You lack anything that resembles compassion and empathy for your target audience because you’re worried more about making money than solving their problems - and it shows.

You have to find as many ways as possible to narrow your message so that it speaks to each individual within your target audience.  You cannot be all things to all people, and you cannot survive the marketing game if your copy is too impersonal.  Especially not in a world where we’re driven by personal connections in social media.

• Be the first to comment...

Business owners breaking into the world of social media marketing and content marketing find a bit of a quandary when they’re trying to build out a strategy. Not only do they have to develop a number of goals but they have to settle on tactics, educate themselves, do research, define the buyer, understand the competition and determine the type of content to develop.

Then there’s that pressing question – how often do they develop the content?

With just a bit of research into content marketing through social media an individual or organization can come to understand the importance of the press release, articles, blogs, etc but you don’t often see information on how often you should send that content out.

A lot of business owners and marketers start worrying about how much is too much – and for that matter how much is too little. When you start thinking about content marketing for SEO purposes, you want to filter out enough content in your campaign to have a significant impact on your rank in the SERPs. You also want to hit that mark without coming off as spammy in any way.

Unfortunately, there really is no “one size fits all” answer to how much you should send out content.

Press releases used to be saved until the company had a pile of useful info and they 1 or several releases would be sent at a time. Now, businesses submit press releases for anything they perceive to be relevant to their target market. Does that means it’s always relevant? Probably not, but since most businesses typically have some kind of information or news to share relevant to their consumers at least 2-4 times a month, you can safely bet that putting out less than 5 press releases per month will gain you some organic listings without the fear of spam – as long as you’re not stuffing keywords into your press releases.

Articles – the red light district of link building. If you’ve got cheap content with no real value I’m going to tell you to stop submitting it and don’t use it at all. Most PLR does nothing but waste space and someone landing in your sales funnel that’s forced to read trash content with no clear, defining message and zero value won’t stay in that sales funnel for long. However, if you can produce quality content for your marketing campaign then pushing 1 or 2 articles a day would be beneficial.

If you do at least 1 article per day, you can gain a lot of ground in the SERPs over the course of your campaign. Is it necessary to do more? Not really, unless you want to run an aggressive campaign. Just be aware that an accumulation of links that occurs too quickly could create issues with the search engine algorithm, even if they’re organic.

Let’s not forget the almighty power of the blog. I’m sure many of us know people who only blog once a week, or even once every other week. Some blog several times a week like I do, and others blog every single day. It’s really a matter of personal preference. The more you post, the more aggressive your content marketing will be and the faster you’ll develop a presence within the web – contributing overall to your link profile and rank within the SERPs among other things.

Regardless of how much you choose to do something, always remember to create a refined strategy with your choices. If you decide to post to your blog 3 times a week then stick to the same days and do it consistently. That same advice goes for articles and press releases. Create a consistent routine.

When you generate a schedule for yourself, it’s harder to walk away from it or set it to the wayside in order to get other things. If you keep putting off your content marketing, the next thing you know two weeks have gone by and you’ve done nothing.

Toy with your schedule enough and you’ll find a strategy that not only works for you but one that produces results as well.

• View 1 Comment...

Think for a moment about what wisdom is.  About what it really represents.  The most simplistic definition, shortened, is that it’s a clear knowledge of what is true or right.

When you define what a pearl is, you have to take into account that there are very real pearls and very fake ones.  The finest quality natural pearls are extremely rare and require deep mining of the ocean to find those that have the most value.  Those with the highest quality are valued for their beauty, and have been so for centuries.  That’s why the word pearl is associated with something that is extremely rare, intrinsically valuable and very fine.

Cultured pearls make up the majority of what is traded in the market but you can still find valuable pearls within the wild ocean.  To supplement the industry and in an effort to turn profit, plenty of imitation pearls also flood the market.  Despite their attempts to replicate beauty, fake pearls are often easy to identify and stand out against the real thing like an ugly stepsister.

Take with that how we view social media, and consider the concept of “pearls of wisdom”.  When we peruse through conversations and  social media marketing attempts we can see that the most valuable conversations do indeed still occur in the expansive ocean of the web - but they’re very rare. It’s these rare conversation that actually grant an intuitive comprehension of solutions along with the ability to apply the necessary process to meet that solution.

Conversations that fall into the realm of “fake pearls of wisdom” are a bit easier to spot and can be quickly distinguished from the rest.  We see those more often with content marketing throughout social media that is hammered and spammed with poor quality PLR and recycled mish-mash

With social media marketing, business sometimes neglect the true transparency of their presence and conversations.  Without any clear understanding of what quality is, they move forward using old marketing tactics and gimmicks to create a social media stir.  The result is that people quickly pick them apart from the bunch as being “fake”.  What’s worse is the group that take an advertorial standpoint with social media and start pushing messages to their followers that add absolutely zero value to the fold.  The content does not lend itself to a solution, and lacks any real “wisdom”.

People migrate to, thrive on and demand true pearls.  At the same time, there’s a certain expectation that they are indeed hard to find.  That’s one of the reasons why those conversations provide so much value, because of their rarity.  The only way to make a bee line and connect with the user who is seeking your pearls of wisdom, and effectively drive the right message, is to view social media in the proper light.  You must be marketing on a human network where you can be caught seeking wisdom (both receiving and delivering).  If you’re anything but, such as striving for an integrated network of leads as you power efforts to gain attention and ad click, then people with disperse and gather elsewhere.

Social media marketing is a monstrous construct, like the witches golem.  Among the folds and debris that are constantly added to, you can find the pearls of wisdom that come from a very select and small crowd of people.  They provide information and authority that can last forever.

The rest?  Well, all those other forced results are temporary.

• Be the first to comment...

It’s amazing how advancements in technology can bring us back still in a full circle to remember out origins. Now, someone has taken the age old concept of bartering for goods and services and combined it with social media marketing.

The Tweet now has new value.

The concept, “Pay with a Tweet”, was cofounded by two men, Leif Abraham and Christian Behrendt who believe “In general, all content creators and marketers want to create buzz for themselves, their brand, product or service. [Pay with a Tweet] is perfect to create a quick buzz around you, your service and your products.”

Launched earlier this month, the Pay with a Tweet system allows consumers to pay for items such a retail stock or downloadable goods (music, downloaded paper) by exchanging the item for a Twitter message. The whole concept uses the power of the word of mouth marketing in order to generate buzz for a specific item or business in order to promote the brand. It’s actually quite brilliant in a way, because they’re leveraging something that already exists by using something that people are already doing.

The co-founders foresee a platform where business owners can sell and market their products to consumers around the world that are willing to Tweet about the products. Retailers and site owners can have a button embedded within their site or cart system that gives the message to consumers on what to tweet with an embedded non-editable link. Their exact brand message then goes out over the Twitter network. Users can still add their own additional comments to the message being sent.

While it’s a new system, it seems to have a fair amount of potential. I’m sure there will be plenty of people murmuring about the effectiveness of bribing people for Tweets but as content marketers, what else are we doing if not bribing people with words and information?

Is there any difference between a beneficial piece of content and a free razor? What do you think?

• Be the first to comment...