The benefits of running Social Media are initially ‘soft’ benefits. Accumulated, these benefits build to reinforce you, your company and your ideas as good, strong and worth heeding. Benefits of social media would therefore include:

• People purchase from a trusted source
• If you ‘know’ an expert you take their advice. You trust their decisions and you act accordingly.
• Free Advertising
• Customers that evangelise your product.
• Repeated and permanent mentions of your web site and product on the web
• Free Gigantic Focus Groups
• Discussing of the pros and cons of your products in
  Blogs
  Forums
  Microblogs
  OnLine Mainstream Press
  Review Sites

• Detailed Customer Behavior Info:
  Conversion rates from specific campaigns
  Community response to specific campaigns
  Sites where conversations about your product occur
  Sites where traffic to your site originates
  Purchasing behavior in your store
  Products affiliates will group your products with

• Relevant Ideas:
  New product ideas
  New campaign ideas
  Product improvement ideas
  Packaging ideas
  Partnership ideas
  Sales Channel ideas
  Ideas generation (the more people the more ideas)

• Credibility:
  Recognition of company and staff as experts
  Recognition of company and staff as people (trustworthy)

• Naturally Occurring and Unexpected Sales Channels:
  Sales can now flow from anywhere, based on the networks of your new evangelists. (e.g. one of your products is for e.g. a disabled person. One of your followers thinks it is really good. They may well be part of all the disabled groups and users on the social media networks. By leaving a good comment about you on your faceBook page, all their connections see it also. Suddenly you have lots of free exposure to exactly the right people voiced by exactly the right person)

Objective

More business
Targetted visitors
More market information
Better search engine placement against a range of search terms
Brand development online
Credibity of brand and personalisation of the organisation
Elevate Westland above competitors and ‘claim the online gradening space’
Establish Westland as ‘The’ online gardening people

The main benefit is in and around the brand. It establishes your company as the easiest and best resource for expertise. If you are first onlne and you get it right, it creates barriers to competitors. It sets a standard and owns the relationship as contacts are established and become direct marketing contacts.

Notwithstanding all the idiosyncrasies of each individual organisation, it is possible to put together a basic template for a social media campaign.

Working on the notion of a client ‘Client X’:

DIY Social Media Campaign Template

1. Create Client X accounts on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. These accounts act as a billboard in those communities and bring Client X interest back to the Client X site.
2. Monitor all discussion forums, blogs, and other information sources on the web for mentions of Client X.
3. Create community tools on their own web site to encourage discussion, lead generation, and product development support.
4. Participate in every discussion about their product that happens on the web, even if only to thank people for discussing the product. Through this they personalise interactions between consumer and product.
5. Automate the monitoring of the web for the popularity of their products and those of their rivals.
6. Actively track performance measures of the sales of their products and their social media reach.
7. Update their blog daily and participate in other blog discussions across the web.
8. Be a person! Participate freely in conversations on the web that they are just interested in not necessarily about product or subject matter – unless specifically asked about it or it’s obviously relevant.
9. Demonstrate competence through their blog. This means most posts are not directly about their products, but provide value beyond their products. One post may talk about a new product being released, followed by ten related tips.
10. They build product reach using interactive tools like affiliate programs, business partner linking and some contests like “name the product” or “design a product” or “find the shop on a map.”
11. They reward good behavior in their communities and on the web. They personally write to / acknowledge their biggest fans. They invite people who are knowledgeable to write in the Client X blog and participate in the site. They gracefully acknowledge expertise, enthusiasm, and participation.
12. The application of social media systems involves the participation in the greater social web community. The directors and their staff need to be good ‘community members’ in order to reap the benefits of social media tools. (They have to honestly give to honestly get).

Tactical Social Media Campaigns

It can be effective to run social media campaigns alongside regular social media activity. These would be specific events designed to stand out and create a noticeable impression. These tend to rely upon viral dispersion but often get talked about by others online and in printed media as well.

There are references to many such campaigns online. I can case study our Australian partners Bendall’s involvement in the campaign with Australian PM Kevin Rudd

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following the devastating bush fires in 2009 and others. Some are convoluted and others strike a chord with people out there. You might as well give it a go, it will attract attention and give your audience a flavour of the sort of people you are. Social Media is all about people.

Bringing It All Together

Social Media is a platform. You build things on it. In order to build an effective campaign it has to be coherent, participatory, maintainable and acceptable to the public. That’s tricky, but it has been established that successful campaigns aren’t just acceptable, they are valued by the public.

Social media is a social contract – you are inviting your public to work with you.

Social Media is problematic for business. Business websites are being circumvented in favour of information available through social media sites. Information given freely through a social network is likely to be trusted while there is a cynicism associated with corporate information. Social Media can make marketing control difficult: It is viral and bad news can travel fast; subject related traffic can create competition in search engines for keywords; more dynamic competitors can steal a march. However, the medium is established. It’s use is growing exponentially.

In 2008 Forester reported that:

Employers are finding the benefits of using social media: 63 percent are using social media to build and promote their brand, 61 percent are using it to improve communication and collaboration, and 58 percent are using it to increase consumer engagement;

75 percent of employees are already using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for business purposes, up 15 percent from 2007;

Use of internal-facing communities is on the rise with 6 percent of organizations already reporting they deployed internal-facing communities, while 33 percent indicate their organization plans to implement internal-facing social media initiatives;

Similarly, external-facing communities are increasing: 27 percent of respondents said their companies were planning to deploy external-facing communities while only 13 percent indicated their organisations already have external-facing communities;

Online communities directed at specific interests and groups of people allow for more targeted marketing techniques and better results so for this reason 37 percent of organisations have specific areas of focus for their communities.

Business opportunities through Social Media

There are business opportunities through Social Media. Popular bloggers, like journalists and magazines, have their followers. They might be considered influencers from a commercial perspective and it is worth building a relationship with them. They are however not journalists or magazines and it is not necessarily wise to assume that cosying up to a popular blogger will do anything positive for your products or yoiur brand – the opposite can happen.

More certain is a social media strategy based upon engagement and participation. It is possible to extend the functionality of a WordPress website, publish content to it and have that information automatically appear across a range of social media sites such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. These posts should be complimented with dedicated activity on these media.

Openness and honesty are the watchwords of social media. Companies who have actively ecouraged their stasff to have social media accounts in the their company name and to use them come across as straight, honest companies airing their openness. Others will deliver through a social media persona operating for a company within the ‘social media sphere’. It might be a real person, it might be lots of information being fed through a single persona and it might be ghost written. Some of this does not sound completely truthful of honest, but it is a practical way around getting things written well, put in places where it will count and actually getting created at all after the first initial flush of activity has died down.

Typically (not exclusively) a busines social media campaign might involve :

• Running a subject based blog
• Entering subject related debates/forums/user-groups online
• Seek to achieve positive ‘redistribution’ of the information
• Posting tagged content on Flickr, YouTube, iTunes etc.
• Creating Twitter, Facebook and other accounts
• Linking all this together so that you can post the information in one place and it then distributes itself either automatically, or through others passing the word on.
• Engaging in the ebb and flo of information online – even if it is not specifically about your subject. This is social media not corporate media

The general objective of a social media presence would be to:

• Generate a following
• Branding (as in promoting the correct perception of your company)
• Have a direct relationship with a highly targetted audience
• Establish a definitive position on the web
• Build backlinks
• Create a networked critical mass of activity and content
• Become a trusted part of ‘the community’
• Initiate viral distribution
• Initiate a response

Social Media is a part of what has become known as Web 2.0. Web 1.0 would describe static websites where information flows one-way from website to reader and any dynamic functionality tends to be socially remote (forms, transactional etc.).

Web 2.0 broadly refers to a trend where the reader has turned publisher. Early examples were forums, still popular for Q&A research. An example of a Web 2.0 site would be Wikipedia. A reader can seek encyclopaedic information on a subject. Any reader can amend and add to the definitions on Wikipedia. The body of knowledge is created and maintained by readers not a central authority.

Social networking refers to self-published content and sites where content is contributed by many and read by many. They gravitate around social relationships or topics of common interest. There are platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, but the platform owners do not publish, they simply provide a place for others to publish and functionality to allow subscribers to share their content with others either openly or in defined groups.

Text, Images, Video and Audio

Since the web is easily able to accommodate media such as audio, images and video as well as text, social sites supporting these media have emerged. Well known sites would be Flickr, YouTube and iTunes. YouTube as an example allows you to create and post video, keep multiple videos in personal collections, tag with keywords and make the video available for rating and search by viewers both from within YouTube and through search engines.

Other social media activities have sprung up such as microblogging, primarily Twitter where users will publish small snippets of content. Content is published often frequently, either spuriously about mundane things or as a type of short-hand logging of information around subjects, conferences, projects and so on and as short cuts to more comprehensive articles on websites. Users follow and get followed by other users and in addition users will follow subject based posts and search for posts on a subject within the system.

Blogs

Perhaps most importantly, blogs have formed one of the foundation stones of social media. A blog is a ready-to-run website designed to take diarised content and index it by date and subject. Blogs can be centrally hosted or self-hosted. They are simple to use and platforms such as WordPress are ‘open source’ providing complete access to the code for the site, its underlying system and the way it operates. WordPress therefore allows a designer to turn a blog into a website yet retain all the linking potency of the original blog. Customisation, redesign and functionality extension is relatively simple for a designer. It means that anyone can have a website and easily create content. Part of the dynamic is the ability to link blogs to social media platforms and social media platforms to each other.

In addition a series of social media support functions have appeared. It has its own search and referencing sites, both as a central resource in the form of Technorati and also in the form of sites such as Digg and Delicious where readers inform these platforms about ‘good’ content. Links created on these sites are becoming trusted reference points and there is some suggestion that Google reflects this in its algorithms