A social media strategy is so yesterday

Just getting round to adding a social media strategy to your marketing mix? It's time to rethink. Even if a social media marketing strategy was new to you last week, you need to play catch up...and fast.

I've been online for just over 15 years. In that time, many internet marketing 'fads' have been and gone. Some have evolved into more exciting things. Others have just melded into 'the way we all work or exist online'.

Social media, previously known as Web 2.0, is one of the latter.

Social media isn't a separate entity, waiting for you to focus on it and develop the relevant strategy or portfolio of identities on different social networks, bookmark sites, micro blogging platforms or any other.

The world has changed, moved on, particularly where marketing is concerned. The last 15 years have seen some enormous changes in marketing, and many, many people, businesses and agencies have failed to keep up with or grasp the significance of the changes.

Marketing stopped being about you years ago. For a long time now, all marketers have had to adjust to a world where commerce had less power than it realised and much less than it hoped. The consumer voice has been getting increasingly loud over time, and the Internet has given it several hundred decibels more than any corporate can ever dream of. (Except maybe Google who seem absolute experts in what they are doing, although the naysayers are never far away, even from the big G.)

Consumers have a secret you may not know - they know how to find others of like-mind.

So, if you could come up with the single most important strategy you should be adopting in 2010, what would it be? Tweeting? Creating a Facebook page? Adding your links to every social bookmark site? Joining multiple forums and perfecting your sig file? Uh-uh. Nope. None of the above....try again.

Setting aside budget and human resources to deploy your social media strategy? Well, you'd be getting closer but it's not entirely about spending money and people's time either.

What you need to do is deal with every single one of your potential customers as a human bean. And to do that, **you**, yes **you** need to become more human, less corporate. Less about targets and more about interaction, conversation, establishing relationships, developing dialogues.

Think marcomms and then drop the bit that is 'marring' your communications!

It doesn't matter which so-called 'social media tool' you use. Get it right in one place and word will get around. There's nothing you can do to stop that. Which is nice ;o) People will use the tools which suit them to find the info they are seeking. They will ask their peer group, friends, colleagues, random strangers through any one of multiple sites. Can you really afford to be on all of those sites, monitoring and watching for a keyword or opportunity to post a reply? Waiting on the off-chance that someone may happen past and find you?

No. You wouldn't do that in the real world, would you?

Just as any good host or hostess will tell you, you need to work the room. You can pick 10 rooms to work as a business, or just one. Whichever you choose, you need to work it/them very well.

Whilst you may, for instance, choose Twitter as your 'room', it is highly likely that your audience will come from far and wide. You will be retweeted (RT) by people who have automated all their feeds into one - so you may be found on Facebook, Digg, Stumblupon, Delicious, an RSS reader, blogs, in forums etc just from a single RT. You don't need to be in all those rooms though to benefit from the original RT.

What you need to be doing is listening to your audience, communicating with them, responding to the emails, tweets, phone calls, orders. You need to direct people to you, for sure, with information that others share, and then listen, respond, help, talk, deal with complaints, offer advice, a shoulder to cry on,

It has to be about 'getting personal'. You can have 10, 100, 1000 loyal followers. 100s of thousands if you are a celeb. But if you do not treat each one as special, you will lose them.

Know them by name. Remember the last hiccup, celebration, or trauma in their life. Follow up with after-sales questions and advice and help. Make it personal. It's got nothing to do with social media and EVERYTHING to do with treating people as people.

If you are a business of 1, remember that you can really only cope with 150 'friends'. (You are a primate - I presume - and therefore this is a known fact). Choose your friends carefully and nurture them. If you are a business of 3 people, 5 people, 10 people, then look after 150 potential loyal followers, subscribers, customers etc * your staff numbers committed to being online.

Remember though that one bad apple can sour the whole cart so watch out for those people. Deal with them. Not harshly, but gently. Redirect them to somewhere more suited to their needs. Don't banish them and ignore them.

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

An irate complainant can do huge amounts of damage to your online reputation. Nip malcontent in the bud. Woo your difficult customers, don't just ignore them as they can go on a crusade to destroy you and you will be hard-pushed with your resources to look after the good guys in your network. Deal with them as you would an unwanted or belligerent ex-friend. And always remember to protect your loyal friends first and foremost. Help them. Advise them. Don't hard sell them. Introduce them to each other, knowing that for that contact, you may be remembered forever - even if it seems to have cut you out of the loop.

And if you think this isn't marketing - think again.

Why do you do exhibitions, attend breakfast meetings, join the Chamber of Trade, or even place an advert? It is to attract like-minded individuals to you. People you can network with, talk to, share contacts, ideas, sell your amazing product to.

Think out of the business box. Why do you go out with friends? Down the pub? To a restaurant, concert, the theatre, or to see a film? Is it to sit in a wholly isolated bubble all evening? Of course not. It's all about INTERACTION. With friends, strangers, even the lady selling popcorn, the barman, the waitress in the restaurant.

Many things you could do at home, if you didn't want to 'get out for a bit'. You aren't a hermit in your personal life, so don't be one in business.

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Google is building the *biggest* database

Every which way you look at the moment, Google is pulling hard data about you. This may be contact details, your IP address, your browsing habits and so on.

In a world full of media hype stories about identity theft and so on, you'd think you would see the odd concern about this.

Of course, you do see blog posts, never-ending forum discussions, etc amongst marketers or corporates but the reality is that, I think, we are all far too trusting of the G word. It's almost a blind spot, it seems to me, on our horizons.

I am writing a book at present on PPC. Part of it is about Google innovations, up and coming apps, new extensions and so on. The more I look into it, the more I am beginning to wonder what exactly Google is gathering all this data **FOR**.

Contact forms in PPC ads that go through Google. Request to calls that go via a Google number that you set up as a merchant. Local search that has your mobile phone nailed down with a few meters of your current position.

It is without a doubt - purely commercial. With a database full of mobile numbers, email addresses, home and business contact details, GPS positions etc, Google has a head start on anyone, any business, anywhere in the world, whatever business sector it decided to dabble its toes in.

And we know now that Google will go anywhere. And good. I love the shake up of the mobile and telecoms infrastructure sector that follows a Google announcement of free wi-fi or universal FTTH. Google's involvement in that particular game is world changing. As long as it's strategic. If Google owned and ran every network in the world, and therefore controlled all that data, I have to admit I would be nervous, and concerned.

But, in the meantime, with amazingly in-depth info about what each of the individuals and corporates search upon or buy on your ENGINE ...well, pick your target!

Is it more than that? Well, I have to admit, as a writer, that if you wanted to rewrite 1984, then we currently have a company who are accessing phenomenal amounts of personal data from people who are unbelievably trusting just because Google has become a household word.

I'm not saying it's wrong or right - just....shouldn't we question how much personal data Google has on each of us? Do we know anything about Google's network and data security? We all know that most virii (viruses) have been aimed at those browsers or Operating systems with the most users, so surely Google is a prime and absolute target?

If all of the emails, documents and dates you currently have on the free version of Gmail, Google docs, Google calendar were suddenly exposed, would that be an issue to you?

And what if that data became available for sale, as your credit card details may already be, to people who are not as seemingly trustworthy as Google? What if they were leaked? After all, Google is an American company. Is it a high priority target for 'attacks'?

Look how the world has been since the banks went pear shaped.

What would happen if someone took down Google?

Economically? Even a blip on Wordpress last week cost a fortune in lost e-commerce. Imagine if Adwords went down.....? The waves from that type of failure would be global and affect every business with a PPC campaign. Just a thought.

Most people haven't a clue how to find anything on the Net - hey, I've been in the internet marketing field for 15 years....I know! If their browser isn't set up to find a search engine, the majority of people are stuffed. 10+ years I have been watching dogpile.com, google.com, yahoo.com etc list in the top search engine terms for the month. If you know the URL, you don't need to search, folks!! It's called a location bar....type it in there. Nope? OK

Would you know, instantly, in a Family Fortunes type quiz show, 5 other search engines today in 2010?

Socially, many people probably would be reliant on properties which are now owned by Google. Youtube, for one. Do you know another place to post your 'must be shared right now' 30sec video? Ever heard of metacafe.com, dropshots, flickr etc? Nope, probably not. Do you have an iPhone app for any alternatives? Do you know what to search for to find one on a search engine other than Google?

I am just wondering whether we have all become too reliant on Google. And too trusting. After all, sadly, it seems to be human nature that we will support the underdog until they become successful and then we try to destroy them. Or is that just celeb culture and the Brits? I don't think so.

I believe we need many flowers to bloom to make the most of the amazing tech we have available to us. Yet, we seem to be manufacturing a world where only one can survive. I'm not sure this is right. For all the reasons above, and more.

And just to finish, I'd like to wish Nikki Pilkington congrats on her new sproglet. We've known each other quite a long time, had our differences over the years, and when she's back, I would hope she will have something to add.

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Do we still love Google?

As the search engines become more greedy for dollars, there seems to be an inexorable rise in the number of 'products' being introduced which would seem to be trying to un-level the playing field for small businesses, home based businesses, mom and pop type enterprises etc. Not only that but adding dross to the results, and seemingly making it ever harder for searchers to actually find what they are looking for.


Google have now admitted that search results will be manipulated by staff in future. This seems to be dependent on what is the flavour of the month eg through the public opinion voiced on SearchWiki rather than any other particularly scientific criteria. Additionally, they have announced that the previously exclusiveAdsense for domains is now open to everyone, so that search results will now throw up inactive (and therefore empty) websites in order to generate revenue from the ads shown, and clicked upon.

Personally, I would have thought that cleaning all those domains which generate 404 errors, have not been updated since last century, and those that only have adverts on would have been more appropriate in attaining the raison d'etre behind Google's mantra about generating the relevant results for the most beneficial user experience.

If the results are to be manipulated by Google staff, then it would seem that it is going to get increasingly hard to get a listing by, for instance, providing quality content that is caught in organic searches. It may be that SEOs have to rely ever more on PPC to actually ensure that potential customers find their websites. This obviously financially benefits those who are providing PPC eg Google, Yahoo et al, and will surely undermine the trust in the supposed impartiality of the search engines in delivering the best results for the users.

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Synonyms, Google and tildes

When you are optimising your website, and seeking good keywords to use, do not forget synonyms. Those are the related words to your keywords and phrases, and Google et al use them to suss out the overall relevance of your page for your top keywords and phrases.

How to find the synonyms? Well, you can use a thesaurus - there are online ones, or most Word Processing packages include them. Or you can get onto Google and type the keyword that you want synonyms for preceded by a tilde. That's one of these things ~ like they put over an 'n' in Spanish to make an enya.

that's one of these - ñ !

So, if for instance, you want synonyms for "cheap flights" (yes, I really do need a holiday!) you type "~cheap flights" into Google, without the speech marks. And bingo! All the synonyms that Google likes are highlighted in bold ready for you to pluck out and use on your own site.

And that's today's handy little search engine optimisation and keyword discovery tip.

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