10 things you should consider before launching a social media marketing campaign

In the last few years, companies have started to incorporate various social media networks into their marketing campaigns. But it can be hard to get a handle on these networks. Here are 10 things to help you better use social media in your marketing.

1: Social networks are not the whole Internet
While social networking sites may be encompassing more and more functionality into themselves, that does not mean you need to use it all. Remember the “portals” from the 90s? What we learned then (but Facebook in particular has not learned) is that just because one site offers every imaginable piece of functionality, users aren’t necessarily going to think of it as a destination for that purpose. Retailers that jumped onto Facebook storefronts, for example, are now pulling back since users just don’t think “Facebook” when they want to make a purchase. Use the best tool to fulfill a need, not the one that the social networks provide you with.

2: Social networking takes time
With traditional advertising, your time investment is relatively low. You make an ad, arrange for it to run, and measure its effectiveness. Social networking, on the other hand, requires a very large time commitment to be a success. Merely having a Facebook presence is not enough; you need to engage the audience to keep their attention and give them a reason to care about you.

3: Advertising can be effective
Advertising on social networking sites can indeed be effective. The ads are targeted not to the user’s immediate need (as determined by the search query), like in search engine marketing, but by an accumulation of activity and self-reported data (interests, “likes,” and so on). The result is that social network advertising can be extraordinarily well targeted.

4: “Young” doesn’t mean “savvy”
A common mistake companies make is to hire a “social networking expert” simply on the basis of age. Just because someone is young enough to have used Facebook in college or high school doesn’t meant that he or she has the rest of the skill set to do a good job of running a marketing campaign. Likewise, people who spend a lot of time on Facebook or Google+ don’t necessarily know how to market with it. The sites are tools, and tools can be taught. The techniques are much harder to learn. Hire based on experience, not age or usage level.

5: Traditional marketing still has a role
Social networking is another tool in the toolbox — not a brand new toolbox. While you can shift some of your traditional marketing efforts to social networking, those traditional techniques still should be used. Social networking marketing has the advantage of being inexpensive for the most part, but if you have existing marketing campaigns that are pulling in business, cutting back on them to focus on social marketing would be a mistake.

6: Know what is “social” for your audience
Because social media marketing is the latest buzzword, it is tempting for people to label anything and everything a “social” tool. For example, LinkedIn, while considered a social network, really does not have much social activity on it except for a few niche industries and purposes (like recruiting). Likewise, Google+’s reach or activity seems to be limited right now, outside of a few areas (such as IT journalists). If a social network is booming but your audience isn’t participating in it, give it a pass and put your resources toward the places where your audience is.

7: Professionalism is important
It is good to have a friendly and intimate feel in your social marketing, but you shouldn’t ignore the basic rules of professionalism. Bad language, pictures of scantily clad women, and sharing inappropriate content may draw attention, but they put the wrong image of your company in front of the audience. You can still show personality and be funny and friendly in your social networking. Just remember that you have no idea about the personal values of anyone viewing your posts.

8: Get your Web site ready for social networking
Developing a social marketing strategy should not happen in isolation. Your Web site will need to undergo some changes as well to ensure that it plays nicely with social networks. For example, you need to learn how to make sure that the right images appear as the suggested pictures (especially for the default) when someone shares a link to your site.

You will also want to make sure that when your pages are shared, the “teaser text” is appropriate to the content, displays correctly, and so on. It is not hard to make these changes, and they will go a long way toward increasing the likelihood that people who see links to your site will follow them.

9: Care about nickels, not noses
Something that happens time and time again is that companies pay attention to the ego stroking (or ego crushing) numbers, like Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and Google+’s plus-ones. While those metrics are interesting, no one ever made a dime merely by having a lot of followers. You make money by turning followers into revenue. Whatever your monetization plan is, your social networking efforts need to support it. If you are not converting social activity into sales, it doesn’t matter how many people like your Facebook page.

10: Do not expect miracles
Social network marketing is the new kid on the block, but like most other new technologies, that is no guarantee that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It can help you reach new markets, can be extremely targeted, and lets you build a good relationship with your audience. But having a Twitter account doesn’t mean you’re going to suddenly double sales. Again, social networking is another tool in your toolbox, and if you work hard enough with it, you can do some very good things. But without careful management and a long-term view, it is not going to be very helpful to you.

By Justin James / TechRepublic

SOPA Opposed by White House, Google, Wikipedia

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act that has been going through the US House has been covered a lot in the past couple of months. All that attention came to a standstill before the holidays when the members of the committee held a hearing, and then the whole process was paused until later this month. And the latest action occurred just over the weekend, as the White House responded to SOPA and similar legislation under consideration:

While it was the first official acknowledgement of the bills, it was made clear that the President could veto any bill that "supports legislation which reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet".

This comes only days after a controversial DNS-blocking mechanism that ran at the heart of the SOPA bill would be scrapped until the U.S. House Judiciary can, "further examine the issues surrounding this provision". It was the kick in the teeth that the online community was hoping for.

But the White House’s comments made it clear that while under this U.S. administration, SOPA, PROTECT-IP and the OPEN bills will not pass.

This is good news to many, and heads off the January 18 deadline, when a number of major websites had threatened to institute a blackout in protest of SOPA.

First, a bit of background, if you haven’t followed the latest developments about the bill itself. SOPA is, as usual for these cases, a misnomer. It was drafted by Hollywood, and lobbied up into Congress to become the latest and most broadly reaching bill so far to allow companies to remove copyrighted material from the Internet. Right now, the US has laws at both the Federal level and State level covering copyright. It’s illegal to take someone else’s work and put it online, without their permission. Then, you have the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which expedites the process of asking someone to pull content down. This system works pretty well, although it’s prone for abuse. Basically, if a content creator finds his or her content hosted on another site, then all they have to do is file a DMCA notice, and by law the site has to pull that content down. Most large sites follow suit, and some, like YouTube, even have automated ways for big companies to pull down content in a very quick fashion.

However, not all sites comply, which is what brought ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security, to take direct action, in what may be a very dubious way to interpret the law. Basically, ICE receives complaints from copyright holders, then goes to domain registries, and redirects domains to their own page, without ever advising the sites themselves. They’ve done it to hundreds of sites so far, and it has caused quite a few controversies. They seem to be going mostly after torrent sites that link to some pirated movies, and sites selling counterfeit clothing. The problem, of course, is that there is no due process, no notification to the owners of the sites, and everything is kept secret because of national security. On top of it all, ICE considers all domains to be US-based, regardless of where the site actually is, or where the domain name is registered, because the master registry for all these top level domains is VeriSign, a US company.

So right now, we have laws, we have the DMCA, and we have Homeland Security unilaterally going out and pulling domains when asked for, with a secret court order, and no apparent due process. But of course, SOPA would go even further. The problem, at least for Hollywood, is that foreign sites don’t have to comply with the DMCA, since that’s a US law, and ICE can’t easily touch them either. So far, the industry has lobbied the US government to send diplomats and push countries to pass similar laws. But that doesn’t always work, so SOPA was created. In simple terms, SOPA would change the way the Internet actually works, at least inside of the US. It would work at the DNS level, and would create a great American firewall, in a very similar way that China’s currently operates.

Basically, the law would force ISPs and DNS providers to implement a way to block any request made for any foreign sites that is deemed to be "accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement". Also, it would force all payment providers such as PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and more, to cut off any payment services to any individual involved in those sites. Finally, it would dramatically increase damages and add prison terms for copyright infringement, along with adding "streaming" to the list of offenses, instead of just hosting or linking to hosted content. It would basically create a great divide where the US Internet would work differently than the outside world, and that has a lot of companies and technology enthusiasts worried.

Whether or not it happens now, the January 18 blackout date included rumors that Google would do a full day where their services would be down, and instead they would show a SOPA-related notice to users with other sites like Wikipedia and Reddit following suit.

Now that a serious blow has been struck to the original SOPA by shelving it for the time-being, what "outstanding concerns" are likely to be addressed for it’s rebirth? What would a workable anti-piracy act look like? Let us know what you think the future holds for backers of SOPA by adding a comment to this post.

By Patrick Lambert / TechRepublic

Wikipedia Goes Offline January 18

A warning to high-school students and undergrads: You may want to dust off
your library cards.

Wikipedia has announced it will join the sites Reddit and Boing Boing and go offline Jan 18 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act being debated by Congress.

Lobbied by some big media companies and designed to block access to sites
containing unauthorized copyright material, SOPA and PIPA have drawn broad opposition online.

The White House recently stepped back from supporting the legislation and hinted at a possible veto from President Obama.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, told BBC News, "The bill is so overbroad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you
know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy."

Associated Press on Social Media Policy: Too Far Gone?

Seen on mashable.

As the social web has exploded in growth, so has the need for companies to respond and set guidelines. For large companies especially, these rules can be key to avoiding PR disasters. You have to contemplate what might happen if someone says or does something stupid.

However, a lot of media companies just don’t seem to get social media. But the venerable Associated Press seems to have crossed the line by asking its employees to not only control what they say, but what their friends say. Now its employee union is fighting back.

Objections to AP’s Policy

According to Editor & Publisher, the News Media Guild, which represents 1500+ AP employees and journalists, is speaking out about two items in the new AP social media guidelines, issued last Thursday.

The first policy forbids any talk of AP internal operations. The second, more objectionable policy requires employees to delete certain things that their friends say on their Facebook page.

Here are the two policies, taken directly out of the AP’s social networking guidelines:

“Q. Anything specific to Facebook?

It’s a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted. Also, managers should not issue friend requests to subordinates, since that could be awkward for employees. It’s fine if employees want to initiate the friend process with their bosses.”

————–

“Q. What are the general guidelines for such accounts?

Employees must identify themselves as being from the AP if they are using the networks for work in any way. Posting material about the AP’s internal operations is prohibited on employees’ personal pages, and employees also should avoid including political affiliations in their profiles and steer clear of making any postings that express political views or take stands on contentious issues.”

The News Media Guild’s administrator, Kevin Keane, focused specifically on the Facebook profile policy in his response:

“It is making some people cringe. It is not appropriate for a company that heralds free speech.”

Finding a Middle Ground

Traditional media outlets have been all over the map with social media. While organizations like CNN, The New York Times and Gannett Co. have effectively utilized social media, other organizations are either catching up, haven’t been consistent, or just have made policies in fear of social technology’s repercussions.

The new AP policy falls in the middle of the spectrum. At the beginning of the memo, the AP clearly states that they don’t want to quash the use of social media:

“The bottom line is that the company supports social networking as a personal and professional tool, but expects employees to bear in mind how their actions might reflect on the AP.”

And while both policies in question were made with the intention of protecting the AP brand, we’re pretty sure that telling employees that they have to control the content of others is going too far. What others post on your social profiles should not be grounds for punishment. You can control what you post, but not what others post. Asking for that is just too much.

The best option for the Associated Press is to sit down with its employees and address these concerns and create a policy that takes everybody’s interests into account. Yes, social media can cause embarrassment, but the benefits of fast, direct communication are too much for even the AP to ignore.

Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology

Interesting news. (check out the video above, of Tom Cruise who is ecstatic about being a scientologist and shares with us a ton of related acronyms, which I have no idea about).

The Web’s struggle with Scientology has been well-documented. Anti-scientology protesters have put out YouTube videos, attacked Scientology’s website, and organized worldwide protests as part of Project Chanology. The Church of Scientology has responded on the web with online campaigns of their own, but it looks like they took it a little too far for Wikipedia’s tastes.

According to The Register, Wikipedia has banned multiple IP addresses related to the Church of Scientology for extreme, one-sided editing in an attempt to remove Scientology criticism from the Web. The decision wasn’t an easy one though: Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee took nearly half a year to resolve the matter.

Now, you must know by now that Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia edited by, that's right, you the user. Makes ya think...If you are using Wikipedia for business, keep in mind that it is a social knowledge base, not an actual authority. Although, there is a lot of good information there.

Mark Cuban's Take on Twitter for Business

From Mark Cuban's blog entry, on Blog Maverick. Mark is an American billionaire entrepreneur; owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA basketball team; and Chairman of HDNet, an HDTV cable network.

The best example of this is #follow fridays on Twitter. Where users recommend people to follow. Users being influenced by users. A far different experience than the Google search experience. Its also where Twitters anonymity will benefit it as users are able to interact with privacy. Something you really cant do on FaceBook (FB). On FB if you have a friend who knows about trucks. You just email them with a question. Maybe you put it out there to your network. But chances are that network is limited in numbers. Those limits are not in place for twitter.

From a business perspective, I'm sure I'm not alone in getting more referrals from Twitter than Google Search. That's money in the bank for Twitter and FB for commercial accounts. There is no reason why a big or small company, say Charmin selling toilet paper, can't set up a twitter account and do whatever marketing they can to build the largest number of followers possible. From there, Twitter could charge them on a cost per referral click originating from their followers. As long as they cost per click is lower than competing options, why wouldn’t they do it ?

Things change. We are seeing a change in our referral logs right now. That could translate into systemic change in user behavior and business opportunity.

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It's all about being able to maximize your access to the best tools out there, and be very creative about how to translate the features into money-making elements.