While people have always talked about the companies they do business with, today instead of telling five friends in a bar about that bad customer service experience, or crappy product, they’re online telling 50, 500, 5000….

You can’t afford to ignore that. Social media is here to stay. Some of your customers are undoubtedly out there looking to engage with you through social media today.

The next generation of consumers won’t just expect to engage with you through online social channels, they’ll demand it. Will you be ready?

Check out this video of Damian in action, and be sure to roll by the Simply Zesty blog for lots of social media insight from Ireland’s leading social media agency.

But as Chris Pirillo points out at LeWeb 2009, the tools are NOT the community – the community is the people using the tools, the connections between them.

My favourite quote from Chris’s presentation:

If you believe a community is a tool, then you yourself are a tool.

Communities aren’t about tools and they’re not about technology – communities are about people, and understanding people is far more valuable than understanding the underlying platforms and technology when it comes to being a part of and harnessing the potential of online communities.

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

Social media is the buzzword in online marketing today.

It’s still in its embryonic stages, and not nearly as critical to online success, or indeed as measurable, as some more established online marketing channels (search springs to mind as the online marketing granddaddy that dwarfs all others in terms of potential ROI and measurability), but it is gaining momentum fast.

People are flocking to social media sites around the globe, using them to connect more effectively with more of their peers, to share, entertain and communicate. And of course where the masses lead, the marketers are never far behind.

While Social Media may not be as fundamental as an effective search marketing strategy to your company’s online success (yet), there’s are some crucial differences. You can’t really compare the two directly, because they’re trying to achieve two very different objectives.

Search marketing is focussed on driving targeted traffic to your site, and ultimately converting that traffic into paying customers,  social media is more about nurturing and building ongoing relationships surrounding your brand. It’s about taking that first contact — whether it comes through a search engine, word of mouth, social media referral, or perhaps even a newspaper ad (yes, it still happens ) — and building it into a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship.

Of course there’s crossover here: some brands use search for more subliminal marketing like brand awareness and social media is used for direct marketing… but by and large, for most businesses, the distinction outlined above holds true.

Finding the Social Media Win-Win

Social media marketing is all about finding a “win-win”. Get it right and the viral potential of online networks can do wonders for your business. Get it wrong, and that same viral effect can be devastating.

That’s one of the things that makes social media a scary place for traditional marketers, who tend to be more used to shouting than listening. The conversational aspect of social media marketing… the fact that you have to listen, adapt and respond to what people are saying about your brand in practically real time… can be daunting.

There’s a steep learning curve, and because it’s all so new there’s no “manual” to speak of… everyone, even the apparent pandemic of “Social Media Experts” you’ll find on Twitter, are just feeling their way here, whatever they may claim.

In Understanding Digital Marketing we explored a few of the Social Media Rules of Engagement – some common-sense guidelines to help you navigate a course through the social media jungle. But talking to my own children recently, I realised that good social media etiquette isn’t a million miles away from the way any sensible parent teaches their child to play nicely with their peers.

Back to Social Media Basics

Think about it… as parents we teach our children to share, to listen, to respect other people’s opinions while understanding the value of their own.

Sounds a lot like a roadmap for a successful foray into Social Media if you ask me. So why, as adults, do we struggle to apply the “social rules” we mastered in the school playground when we venture online?

• Sharing is caring: Barney, may be as irritating as hell, but he also has a point. Sharing is at the heart of social media interaction… so provide useful content, links and comments that add real value and are relevant to the conversation.
• Show a little respect: we’re always telling children to respect other people’s views, and that even if they don’t match our own, they are no less valid. That’s just as relevant online.
• Play nicely: wherever people congregate, be it the school playground, the pub or a Facebook Fan Page, there are going to be disparate personalities, some of which will clash. We try to teach our children to work through their differences and to be polite and courteous. It’s no different online.
•  Rules are rules: another important lesson children learn when they’re young is to play by the rules… be they the household rules we set as parents, the school’s rules, rules at the local swimming pool or the rules of a family board game. It’s no different when the places we visit are virtual.

Interacting with other people is tricky, but we’ve been doing it for a long time. Yes, some are better at it than others… in the pub, at work or online, but this isn’t rocket science. We all know the basics… we;ve been doing it since pre-school!

Image by hongxing128 via Flickr

I’ve just been reading a post over on Damien Mulley’s blog on some of the things that make him trust an online business more, and others that make him trust them less.

I’m going to commit a cardinal sin here and block-quote Damien’s lists (one of the “Trust Less” items) in the interest of clarity. Hopefully I’ll get away with it by adding more than one line of commentary .

First Damien’s “Trust More” list:

• Companies that have personalities and a team that adds humanity to their business both online and offline.
• Companies who care enough to monitor what blogs are saying and react, even when people have negative issues.
• Companies who contribute to online discussions and mailing lists without pimping their solutions and help even when the topic matter isn’t in-synch with their business area.
• Companies that ask for help, contributions, feedback

I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above… it’s about adding real value and contributing to the discussion. As with all human connections (and that’s what online marketing is all about today) the more you give, the more you get back in return. It’s just unfortunate that so few businesses actually “get” this… it’s a dialogue, a conversation, and if you want to engage with your audience you have to do at least as much “listening” as you do “talking”. Stop preaching… start connecting!

Now for Damien’s “Trust Less” list:

• Businesses that use domain names to describe what they do instead of using a company name.
• Business people that leave comments on blog posts with their keywordladen website name and not their name and surname.
• Businesses that write blog posts and internally link to their services in every blog post, again laden with keywords.
• Businesses that write blog posts that are neither interesting nor useful but instead are dressed up brochures.
• Businesses that write blog posts that do nothing more than block quote someone else’s blog post and then add one line of commentary.
• Businesses that use Adwords on their business blogs.
• Businesses that don’t name who they are on their About page.

I agree with most of these, but can also see the motivation behind them… however misconceived. Businesses simply don’t understand, and are often acting on poor advice.

First, I actually don’t have a problem with businesses using keyword-related domain names that describe what their sites do rather than their company name — as long as it makes it clear to users what to expect. For example, as a web-surfer I’d probably find something like www.officeapps.com a lot more useful than, say, www.ZOHO.com in terms of knowing what a site is about before visiting. But then of course you lose some of the branding potential. It all depends what you want to achieve – but it should be driven by usability rather than search-engine rankings.

And there’s the rub. Most of the items in the “Trust Less” list are motivated purely by SEO. They’re strategies aimed at one thing, and one thing only: getting higher Search Engine Rankings for particular keyword phrases. Often these decisions stem from poor SEO advice (and God knows there’s plenty of that around), and a lack of appreciation that traffic, without effective content/conversion, does nothing but consume valuable bandwidth.

Neglecting users in an attempt to impress/fool the search engines is always a bad idea. But most businesses are sold on the concept that driving traffic is the primary objective, over and above the quality of the user experience. Which is of course complete tosh!

Effective SEO is about looking after your users first, and then aligning that with what the search engines are looking for. Search engines want to deliver the very best, most relevant results to their users. It’s what their reputation, their audience, and ultimately their revenue model, is built on. The way they analyse that relevance and quality at the moment means that they sometimes get it wrong… but they’re getting better at it all the time.

So you need to make sure your site delivers for users first, but that it’s also structured /optimised to make it easy for search engines to understand what your content is all about. Aligning those two things can be tricky… and the real problem is that many businesses are persuaded, erroneously, to skew the balance in favour of search engines for short term traffic results.

For businesses looking to build a solid online reputation, sustainable search engine rankings and long-term online relationships that’s a huge mistake.

So many questions… when all you really want are answers. You obviously need to know all of these things and more to help you define a viable business plan and create an effective marketing strategy for your new business. But where do you start? Things like surveys and focus groups are often prohibitively expensive, and more often than not out of the financial reach of new businesses. You could make informed guesses, of course, but you’re really looking for something a bit more tangible.

Enter the Internet – that huge and ever growing ethereal melting pot of consumers and business. According to the latest figures there are some 1.3 billion people online, and they span the demographic gamut. There’s a pretty good chance that a healthy portion of your target market, and most of your competition is already online.

So what, you might think. Well, on today’s interactive web people are doing much more than simply looking for and absorbing information; they’re engaging in a two way discourse with their peers, a constantly evolving discussion about anything and everything that interests them – from how to grow runner beans to the relative merits of the Lisbon Treaty to what brand of hair-colouring they prefer. The web offers you a window into their world… a window of opportunity that could give your fledgling business that elusive competitive edge.

Web 2.0 maven Vanessa Fox, one of the guest speakers on social media at this year’s Search Marketing World conference in Dublin, believes that access to social media is levelling the playing field when it comes to market research. “Particularly for small businesses, who perhaps before didn’t have access to things like market research, focus groups and all those things that cost a lot of money, I think it’s very easy now for them to tap into the [online] conversation and see what’s going on,” she said.

Vanessa points out that there are all sorts of conversations going on online – not just about your business, but about key competitors, and about your industry in general – from which small businesses can glean real insight. “Even just the ability to hear what’s going on and take feedback from that I think is really valuable,” she said.

From conducting a simple keyword search to see who your main competitors are; to browsing through online groups, forums and blogs to identify the key influencers in your space; to setting up automated alerts and feeds that flag the conversations you want to track, and much more besides… there are a raft of tools out there to help you find out more about your customers, your competition, your industry and ultimately your business.

In the next article we’ll take a closer look at a few of them.

Image Credit: Explain market research by mafleen on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Pursue more established online marketing strategies and ignore social media and your letting a golden opportunity slip by – but by equal measure, if you put all your efforts into social media and eschew more established online avenues you could be missing the lions share of online business.

Or as Damien puts it:

How many people have an email address, how many have a Facebook account?

Consider all your options

You absolutely can’t ignore the online "conversation"… but then neither should you neglect the more established elements of online marketing, like e-mail, SEO, PPC, affiliate programmes and even online display advertising if it dovetails with your particular audience. Also, its often worth considering how offline marketing can augment and complement your online campaigns.

Do your homework

Know what you want to achieve before you start, know your market and where they spend their time online, identify the key influencers. Then align your marketing strategy accordingly.

New marketing doesn’t kill old marketing

Marketing is evolving — but that evolution doesn’t eradicate what preceded it, it just adds more strings to the marketers bow, giving you a suite of new and exciting ways to engage with the people who really matter to your business.

You can see — or rather hear the proof of this in any outdoor market, anywhere in the world. From the street markets of London to the Souks of Marrakech to Asia and beyond,  you’ll find the very first marketing medium in history — the human voice — employed to hawk the merchants’ wares, as effective in the digital age as it ever was.

A more rounded future

I think we’ll see a much more holistic approach to marketing emerge over the next few years, and will gradually see the stark delineation between "traditional" and "online" marketing converge into a much more rounded whole. We’ll stop thinking in terms of “traditional” versus “digital”marketing… it will just be marketing, and we’ll employ a carefully tailored blend of techniques spanning a variety of media to engage effectively with our target market.

It’s going going to take time, of course… but it promises to be an intriguing transition.

Outstanding!

I love the way twitter makes you condense your writing, squeezing the maximum out of every character. Here’s my swiftly penned missive:

She paused, shivering involuntarily; the wave of adrenalin surged through her, leaving her giddy and disoriented. It was quiet. He was gone!

Think you can do better — get tweeting, there’s not much time left.

These connected whiz-kids are looking around, wondering where they should work… and where are they looking? Online, naturally; but they’re not just looking at company and jobs websites, they’re checking out your online reputation on social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others, and are looking for the profiles of executives on professional networks like LinkedIn.

Social screening is a two way street

You read a lot about how employers are trawling these networks both to “check” applicants’ details and looking for prospective employees; about how candidates should have their professional profile up on LinkedIn, and how they should be aware of their online footprint and watch what they post. What you don’t hear much about is the fact that those same candidates are doing exactly the same thing in reverse. Be under no illusion, your prospective employees are checking you out too… and as digital natives they’re in their natural environment: i.e. they’re probably better at it than you are!

In a nutshell: if you don’t measure up, then sorry, you don’t get to employ the best and the brightest — and that could hurt the long term prosperity of your business.

Krishna De, a leading business, personal branding and social media coach based in Dublin, Ireland; highlighted the fact that Generation X employers really don’t get that social media is a two-way medium in a recent blog post. She reveals that even companies that consider themselves progressive in the social media space are lagging behind in this potentially crucial area.

Marketing your company to prospective employees — projecting it as a progressive and innovative place to work – is every bit as important as using digital channels to promote and sell your products and build relationships with your customers. And yet few organisations, and even less senior managers, seem to acknowledge it, let alone embrace the remarkable opportunities that social media affords to put their brand in front of tomorrow’s brightest young stars.

As Krishna De so effectively puts it:

If you want to win the war for talent, don’t leave it to chance what potential candidates may find out about you online – be sure to create your professional profile representing your personal brand online

Incidentally, you’ll find my public LinkedIn Profile here.

Are companies embracing social media effectively in the fight to attract the best candidates? Leave a comment and let us know what you think….

SMX Social 2008, Long Beach, CA: “SEO is a wasted industry. You’re wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You’re just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won’t kick you out. It’s a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.”

SES 2006, Chicago: “SEO is bulls**t…90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesmen.”

The firestorm that followed reverberated across the social web….

At the risk of attracting a little vitriol, I have to say that there’s truth in both of those statements.

Content isn’t king… the customers is

I agree, for instance, that spending time trying to “game” the engines for short term results is a futile exercise, at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term prosperity. For sustainable rankings you should focus your efforts on producing great content, and making sure the search engines can index it and recognise it as such… which of course is where SEO comes in.

I’m not convinced yet that purely human search — like Calacanis’s offering at Mahalo — is the answer to the search conundrum. Perhaps some sort of hybrid search will emerge… a synergy between algorithmic and human-edited search that delivers better results all ’round.

Ultimately great content is what users are looking for… and therefore what search engines, regardless of their flavour, want to deliver. And as search engines get better at determining what users really want when they fill in that little box, it’s outstanding content that’s going to win the day. Not because content is king — because the customer is.

Plenty of good SEOs

While there are certainly a lot of cowboys out there in the SEO world who prey on the gullible and exploit the naive, there are also plenty of SEOs who are passionate and genuine and do a great job of getting their clients’ websites in front of their users. They help people to find great content that would otherwise slip under the search radar.

Search engines are amazing, but they’re not good enough yet to find and analyse all the content on the web correctly. They need a bit of help. Good SEOs have the knowledge to be able to align their clients’ content with both what users are looking for, and what Search Engines can index… again, a synergy that, in a perfect world, ends up with a win-win-win for user’s, search engines and site owners.

The snake oil salesmen? They routinely crop up in every new industry all over the world: the vampirical underbelly of humanity emerging to suck sustenance from the unwary and anknowing. It’s not an SEO thing — it’s a human nature thing.

Fire the good people

Which brings me to Jason Calacanis’s latest outpouring of controversial entrepreneurial wisdom. In an interview on the Sydney Morning Herald’s small business blog this week, he advocates firing the good people to make room for the great.

Again, a lot of what he says in the interview makes plenty of sense… you do want to attract and retain great people… and sometimes good just isn’t good enough. If you want to cultivate a culture of excellence, you have to build a team of excellent people. So far, so good.

Where he loses me is with the following statement under the heading of rewarding obsessive behaviour:

“You don’t want people with balance in their life. You want people who are responding to email at two in the morning… People with balance in their life can work at the post office.”

Er… how do I put this tactfully… WRONG!

Excellence demands balance

Balance is a good thing… and if you want to encourage excellence in your staff you damn well better make sure they have some balance. Balance doesn’t mean punching in, working 9-5, five days a week and then taking the weekends off. But it absolutely does mean having more to your life than work. I like to call it working for life… as opposed to living for work, which is what so many people seem to do these days.

Without balance, all you have is… well, imbalance, and where does that get you? A company full of wired, burnt out former geniuses tethered to their internet connection is no company at all.

To get the best out of people, I believe, you have to encourage them to be people, rather than automatons. In my admittedly limited experience, people who obsess about work all the time — the ones who are answering their e-mail at 2am — may spend more time working, but are often less productive than people who have found a healthy balance.

But hey, Jason Calacanis is a multi-milionnaire serial entrepreneur… and I’m not….

What do you think?