MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Social media has been around for several years, starting off originally as social book marking and advancing into the social machines that exist today. If you are looking into using the media to advance or promote your business, then there are a few things you should be aware of before jumping in.

Before signing up with a site, research the content already available. Each site is different with the way it works and which industry and users it attracts. Spend time browsing through the content and make sure the site is right for you and your needs. You need to be able to find your own niche within the community.

Sun Microsystems is a good example of finding the right medium for a company. CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, created a blogging format under his website domain in mid 2004. All employees where encouraged to start their own corporate blog, with Jonathan showing the way. Today Sun Microsystems is the largest company with a blog for employees and the CEO. Jonathon posts once a week for his readers. The idea behind creating the Blog was to improve both communications with the public as well as converse with developers and programmers. They also give a good foundation for the Sun Engineers to showcase their work and get credit for what they are doing.

One of the main reasons for the success of Sun Microsystems corporate Blogs is that they are real people being honest. None of the posts goes through marketing. Although the advertisers and marketing group have their own Blogs, they do not contaminate other employees’ Blogs. Today over 3,000 of the Sun’s 32,000 employees have a personal corporate blog. Many of the employees appreciate the fact that they can comment to the CEO directly on his blog about any company ideas. Jonathan also keeps his posts honest and straightforward, which both investors and employees value.

Wal-Mart was caught red-handed about their lack of honesty through their blog. The falsely created blog “Wal-Mart Across America” was about a couple that charted their 10-day cross country trip across America. They would sleep in their RV at the different Wal-Marts, as parking was free. However, the blog turned out to be a flog (fake blog). Wal-Mart had to issue an apology and confession that they had paid a PR Agency to develop the site. The “couple” from the blog were employees of the PR Agency and had created false profiles. Although it was a fairly innovative idea, their lack of honesty upset a lot of customers.

Make sure that you will be able to reach your goals within a site. A lot of users tend to think that because a social site is popular, they must sign up and get a piece of the traffic. However, this is not always the case. Rather choose carefully, remember quality over quantity.

Island Bicycles is a small business that realised the importance of investing in quality when it came to social media. The bicycle shop owner, Jeff Neilson created a profile on MySpace for his business. As he was a small business in a confined area, he realised that marketing globally wasn’t the way to go. He used the search tool to look for zip codes in his area and discovered that over 22 000 people on the site lived within a 10 mile radius of his shop. Using this to his advantage he started sending 20 friend requests on a weekly basis. He targeted people in a similar age group or who had interests in bikes. He reports that the success of his friend request is the company’s logo, which looked “cool” on the users page. Once a week he sends a ‘blurb’ to his MySpace friends announcing any specials, or new bikes that have arrived.

If you do sign up on a social media site, be considerate of the other users on the site. There is a reason why the term “social” is in the word “social media”. You will need to participate with the other users and comment on their sites or news. Don’t be too negative with their items either. Being part of a social media strategy is being in it for the long run. With this in mind, also don’t spam or post excessively. Pick the topics you want to comment on wisely, and make sure you have something useful to add.

Walmart made their second social media error with regards to the term “social”. In a marketing campaign, the company created a Facebook group. Misguidedly, they chose to lock down on comments and disable the forums. When questioned about this, they reported that the wall was open for comments. Users felt constricted as Walmart deleted any negative posts and forbade discussion, using the profile rather as a poster for their company. However, soon users started posting negative comments on Walmart’s profile, which spurred “Anti-Walmart” groups.

The other problem that caused negative responses from users was the style of the group. Walmart made no attempt to re-adjust themselves to the medium. They kept their strong marketing terminology strategy and did not alter their style for the target audience.

Unlike Walmart, a retail company, Target, changed their campaign for Facebook users for their Target Group. They altered their slogan “Hello, Goodbuy”, to a more subtle approach. They also encouraged feedback from users and responded positively to any of the negative feedback. They did extensive research into the Facebook audience and toned down the volume of their marketing message. By doing this, they created a group where users could converse with Target employees about products and review them. This is a win-win situation for both user and company, and is a good example of how social media can be advantageous.

Although the campaign proved to be successful, Target exhibited the same dishonesty that Wal-Mart did. The truth leaked out that Target was paying students to join their Facebook group and post positive comments on the site. This caused uproar among the faithful customers. Although this is bad publicity for Target, the lesson here is that honesty is the best policy. While social media can improve your company’s reputation, it can also destroy it. Nothing spreads faster than bad news and with thousands of social medias sites, including blogs, this is more the case than ever.

When coming up with a campaign, be innovative. As Target changed their strategy, companies should learn to do the same. This is a different type of ball game and creativity is what’s going to get you noticed. Ice-cream chain, Cold Stone Creamery promoted their new ice-cream flavour, strawberry cheesecake, through social media. They created a video of two ice-cream flavours, cheesecake and strawberry, falling in love and getting married. With Barry White singing in the background and scenes of cupid and the two ice-creams going on dates, the video is cheesy, but proved to be huge success on YouTube. The success was also due to the perfect timing of releasing the video just before Valentines Day. Riding on the success of the video, they took their innovative idea one step further and created a MySpace profile for their new characters, Mr and Mrs Strawberry Cheesecake.

For various sites there is a ranking system for beginners to advanced users. You will have to start from the bottom and build a foundation as you go. Make sure it’s a solid one. Make like-minded friends, scratch their backs and they will scratch yours. Don’t expect everything you do to be completely accepted. Just as you won’t give thumbs up all the time to other users, they wont give thumps up to you all the time either.

Social media is a different ball game to any other type of strategy. It is based more on a personal level and you have to keep this in mind. There is a lot of time and energy involved in using social media as a medium for promotion. However, if used appropriately with the right sites, it can be a huge success.