Social Marketing Conversations

Yesterday we were able to deliver to our publisher the initial manuscript for book, ‘ROI of Social Media’ (which is the working title, we should have the final title here any day) and all we can say is ‘whew’!

The process of working with Guy Powell and Jerry Dimos has been a tremendous experience and I cannot begin to tell you how much I’ve learned in the process, but I do understand how it will impact the level of service I can deliver to my clients.  The association with these two men allowed me, as primarily a social media guy, to really grasp the scope of what social marketing does and what it will mean to marketers wanting to honestly connect with the audience of influencers, consumers, and individuals.

The video podcast posted here (after the break) is one that Guy and I recorded as an introduction of us to others – we’ll be pulling Jerry into one here soon.  In this episode, Guy and I talk about our backgrounds and how we came to meet.  The process of connecting with one another and the work we’ve undertaken so far has been a fantastic case study in the power of social media (we met via Linkedin) and the ROI for a personal brand in social media.

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I earlier posted about the Trinity of Social Media and in it I laid out three fundamental components in the strategy – a blog, a microblog and a social network. 

We get a lot of questions at TSMB Media about social media in general and blogs in particular.  This is a foundational post in a series about The Trinity of Social Media and blogs in particular that I hope you use, enjoy and reference often.

Lets start at the beginning - 

What is a blog?  A blog is a collection of articles, often by the same author or company, that is presented on the Internet, often for public consumption and comment.  It can contain any type of electronic or online content – audio, video or text.  I suspect that when we can transmit smell or touch over the Internet, it’ll contain them as well!  So a blog is not just the sharing of text for everyone, it is a sharing mechanism for whatever kind of content you might have.  I like text on a blog most, but that is because of the way the search engines index content – they work best on text right now. The tools are coming into play that will better index image and video content, but the technology is just not there yet or widely used by the audience – text is easiest to index right now.

What do you talk about on a blog?  Your blog is where you, as the individual or as a company, will create posts (or articles) of 200 or so words that showcase your company, your product, and your business philosophy.  Whatever you feel would be relevant to communicate to your audience of customers, prospects and stakeholders.  I have clients that have not one blog, but three!  One is targeted at their core business audience, one is more personal and one is a place they post industry observance.  Each of them draws a particular type of visitor or reader.  Likewise, I have clients that only have one blog and there, they post just video files with some text for consumption.

The content on a business blog then is primarily about the organization and why you are the company your customer deal with and prospective customers should deal with.  That is not all your blog should contain though – endeavor to share a bit about the company picnic, pictures and posts of internal events, videos of subjects that relate to your products, links to other blogs that support your comments or suppliers and places your products are being used or demonstrated. 

How often do you use or post to a blog?  Frequency of posts is relative to where you are in the life of the blog and the number of current visitors and subscribers.  Early on in the life of your blog you may want to post more often.  Frequent posting leads the search engines to make a determination that the posting source is a relevant news source and should be visited often.  More frequent updates = more frequent search engine visits, more search engine visits = higher authority, higher authority = better placement in search engine ranking.

So just post to a blog and I get readers right? Nope – not quite how it works.  In the Trinity of Social Media under the ‘Platform’ leg of the model, we point out two items; a ‘Posting / Publishing’ leg and one under ‘Reading / Commenting’. 

The reading of complementary and competitive content blogs is a very important step.  Participating in blogsphere will drive readers and comments / links about your blog elsewhere on the web – all good relative to your search engine ranking.

Your blog should be positioned as the foundational element in a social media strategy.  It should be the place you refer people to in your microblog post for more info, it becomes a place you connect to your off-line marketing, and it is where you always link your social network profile.

Why am I blogging? Passion… blogging gives you the control over what you are able to say about your passion, how often you want to say it and the context of how your message is presented.  If you are not passionate about your topic, it will show.  Your audience will not manifest and people will not come back to read your posts.  Zig Ziglar always said “fake it ’til you make it”, referring to being happy or successful.  This tactic will also work in social media… but only for a while.  If you do not find your passion, your voice will waiver and fail.  Find your passion and stick to it. 

What if your passion wanders?  No problem – the underpinning here is that you have to be true to yourself and you have to let it resonate in your blog content.

Are there pros and cons of one platform over another?  Sure, that question is beyond the scope of this post however.  I know I have the WordPress logo in the bubble, but it can be any blog platform you wish – important is to get the content out there and iterate on the message. 

What else do I need to consider relative to my blog? There are a few more parts of what makes a blog work for you.  My perspective is that unless you have a blog presence, the other aspects of the social media trinity lack the ability to create traction for your brand – without that blog there is just no where stable and consistent to point them.

I’ve been really blessed to be a part of one of the first companies to be selected by Microsoft to join the BizSpark program for startups that has been just launched a few days ago.  I wrote about it on the corporate blog at Silent Dispatch here and I have said thank you more than once to Dan Willis and Francine Hardaway for their support.

Here is how I see the program being structured; first from the business side beginning with the startup.  The startup is just bout any company out there, the criteria is pretty liberal (you can read the criteria at the BizSpark website here) so if you’re a new company, you may want to look at it pretty quickly.  Those startups are vetted by a local Network Partner, in our case it was Stealthmode partners.  This process allows companies to find out if they are eligible and how it might help them quickly before being forwarded to the next level, the MSFT Champ.  When I spoke to the Phoenix Champ yesterday, he was being overwhelmed with companies looking to find our more on the program.  he is signing up Network Partners as fast as he can I think.  The last part of the program and one I’m still exploring is the Hosting Partner relationship.  I’ll share more on this element as i find out more.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day finishing up the registration process, filling out online forms, connecting the various accesses to my Live ID  and reviewing the MSDN access that comes as part of the program and all I can say is ‘Wow’.  The resources being provided by this program are amazing.  Of course the software is helpful, but not jst to the dev team, as the biz guy at the company, I am especially pleased with the CRM access, the hosting company support and the local Champ we’ve been assigned.

What I see in this push from Microsoft is their interest in connecting their enterprise class development tools to the startup entrepreneur when they’re typically making a dev tool selection.  The model of the tech entrepreneur has been to use a low / no cost open source dev tool first and by the time they grew up and came onto the radar of Microsoft, the dev tool / database decision had been already made – often too late for MSFT to be a legitimate consideration; BizSpark changes all of that in a huge way.

Beyond the dev consideration though, I again want to point out that from a business dev perspective, the rest of the MSFT offering is very supportive of the beginning entrepreneur.  The Office suite, Project, CRM, Dynamics & Solomon accounting, Expression design studio… the list goes on and on.

I think that this project will carve thousands of dollars out of the monthly burn of the company and for other companies, may mean the difference between if they launch and how fast they can make it to profitability.

My verdict - BizSpark is good for business and it demonstrates how much Microsoft is willing to do to support the startup entrepreneur.