Internet Marketing Blog

Connecting Clients to Customers through Social Media Optimization

October 18, 2007 – 8:25 am

Every few years major changes take place on the internet and often times this is driven by the way the internet is used. A major shift in the use of the internet has been taking place. The shift is one of transformation from finding information through search engines and buying things through portals to one where people turn to other people for their recent in depth knowledge of an issue or experience buying a product.

The balance of power is shifting away from search engines and moving heavily towards social media companies. Many people now expect that a Search Marketing Industry Shake-up is Imminent. Google actually finds itself in a precarious position as a company attempting to protect old revenue streams resulting from search, while simultaneously moving into new social media territories that make Google Search as we know it obsolete.

How Does Social Media Marketing work?

If you had a good experience with a realtor, and a friend asks you, “Do you know a good realtor?” Odds are you might tell them about your experience and the name of the realtor. Offline this is as old as money, possibly as old as bartering, its called word of mouth. Online when a person shares their experience about a good or even a bad experience, its called social media marketing.

Maybe you have heard the funny spin on how you identify Marketing.

The That’s Marketing Analogy goes something like this:

• You go up to an attractive person at a party and say, “I’m Great in Bed!” -> Direct Marketing
• Your friend goes up to an attractive person at a party, points at you and says, that you are Great in Bed -> That’s Advertising
• You get an attractive person’s phone number and call them the next day, telling them that you are great in bed -> That’s Telemarketing
• You go up to an attractive person at a party, socialize pour them a drink, and flirt a little -> Public Relations
• You are at a party an attractive person walks up to you and says that they hear that you are great in bed -> That’s Brand Recognition

Now these can definitely get wackier than that if you want to see what a sales rep or tech support or even junk mail might be like in this analogy.

• 10,000 bloggers write about how you are good in bed and 10,000,000 people read those 10,000 blogs ->That’s Blog Marketing
• You set up a website using good keywords and valid html code showing that you are good in bed, the 10,000 previous bloggers link to your site, and 10,000,000 people per day come to your site through Google Search -> That’s Search Engine Optimization
• Your website includes a section where past lovers can publicly describe and attest to your skills. New visitors to the site read this, believe what they read and buy in to the concept that you are good in bed -> That’s Crowd Sourcing
• You ad a blog to your website and within it you provide tips and insights to your readers about how they too can become great in bed -> That’s Business Blog Marketing
• You put together an advertising campaign such that whenever someone does a Google search for the keywords “good in bed” then your short advertisement shows up at the top of the screen -> That’s Online Search Engine Marketing
• Being able to track people that come to your site, identify where they are from, how old they are, what keywords or websites brought them to you, how long they stayed on your website, what their favorite articles were etc. -> That all requires Web Analytics
• Being able to identify that people came to your site 60% of the time through blog marketing and 30 % of the time through Search Engine Marketing requires -> Response Modeling
• You set up a fan club for your website and charge a subscription of $20 per year. 5,000 other websites that refer new fans to your fan club through their own websites get a $10 / referral in commissions from you -> That’s Affiliate Marketing
• Your spouse or partner makes a video and puts it on YouTube and 20,000,000 people per day watch the video and confirm with their eyes that you are good in bed -> That’s Viral Video Marketing (Just ask Paris or Pamela)
• Your ex partners gather together on Facebook and create a club of people that agree that you are great in bed -> That’s Social Media Marketing
• Then there is the future. Typing a search in your iPhone looking for the person that is best in bed in a 25 mile radius and having your name and number appear -> That’s Mobile Marketing

As you can see there are many many new areas of online marketing and they can all work to your advantage and they can work together!

Google Search relies on an old derivative of word of mouth marketing online. That derivative is powered by the ability of a person or company to put together a website and take the time to mention the value or non-value of a product or service or even a subject. It used to be technically somewhat difficult to launch a website. Not everyone knew how to do it, nor had the money to hire a pro.

Today, a website can be launched in three clicks of the mouse. People are creating websites much faster today than they ever have before. Blogs are the most common form of personal website and today there are over 100 million of them on the web. Close to 200,000 blogs are created every day by some estimates. That means that Google’s ability to determine what is important based on what a website says is getting more difficult.

Increase in Website Noise is pushing more later adopters to ask someone their opinion. This is where social media has started to tip. It started with early adopters such as teens and twenty-somethings that were using MySpace and YouTube and Facebook. Now, many more people are using social media outlets to get information. Sometimes they do not even know they are using social media. YouTube is designed to integrate videos rapidly and easy from YouTube into any other website.

Moving Towards Mass Adoption of Social Media Outlets

Plugins and other tools are making it easier for other people to access social media sites like LinkedIn for professionals or even hybrids of blog networks, where multiple people sometimes thousands of people come together to write within an umbrella site such as Ask.com’s Bloglines or Squidoo or even About.com or even Wikipedia.

Google’s importance is fluctuating and its in this market of uncertainty that marketing firms that are plugged into the social media network can separate themselves. Many of those early adopters that learned the ropes of the social media networks also had firm foundations in older forms of marketing and now the importance of providing a return on investment through results, but many of the older larger monolithic agencies have missed the boat and they are throwing their clients money at the problem with little result. A BusinessWeek article on the topic of Social Media importance made the following remark:

What ad agencies need to learn is how to do this. They have to connect their clients to their customers, not the latest technology. And if they do their job right, they might even discover, heaven help us, that some of them belong in print. Because that is where most 40 and 50 year old managers in the US, Europe and Asia spend their time.

Are Big Ad Agencies So Clueless That Corporations Should Avoid Them?

Reading between the Lines

Now, there is a truism in that statement and also a pitch to place ads in print (maybe even in BusinessWeek). I’m not knocking the power of BusinessWeek’s potential to deliver advertising results in a magazine, but I happened to find that article online through a social media network myself!

The truism though is that successful ad agencies will need to connect their clients to their customers. That is essential and that requires an adept strategy to utilize a social media optimization strategy. Companies must manage their brand and presence and campaigns in ways that penetrate the places where there customers are going. Relying entirely on last years methods today will provide diminished returns today.

We espouse a firm belief in the 7 Pillars of Internet Marketing. We believe in it so much that we named our blog after it!

What it means is that we build our strategies from the ground up with a holistic approach that covers all the areas of internet marketing that deliver results. We do help our clients get their message to their customers and we measure the results to prove the Return on Investment exists. We then refine and improve the campaign in successive iterations as we hone in on the sweet spot. We then move on to the next area of opportunity and repeat.

This means we hit on SEO and online advertising the staples of many years now. We also hit on the older darling of email marketing and move into the areas that attract the attention of customers the most, interactive advertising followed by affiliate advertising which converts potential customers into paying customer through a leveraged network of thousands of websites. We utilize Web Analytics to track and measure our success, but this process is now rapidly becoming encircled by the sphere of social media, a concentrated cloud of customers that find their way to each of these destinations and tools through the people they know or the recent connections they have made through social networks.