Face it, we’ve all been there. You’re a paying customer, you have a legitimate problem that the big, faceless corporation refuses to address. The hours being put on hold, the paperwork, red tape, and maddening bureaucracy, the endless navigation of phone systems, and repeating your story over and over again, only to be told in the end – “Fuck you.” By your airline company, your insurance company, your credit company. What the hell happened to the good old days when the “customer was king”?

Then, the best online reputation attack ever, by singer / songwriter Dave Carroll. After 8 months of stonewalling and passing the buck, United Airlines refusal to pay for the $1200 worth of damages to Dave’s guitar created a worse PR nightmare.

While I can’t say I’m a huge fan of his country style music,  Dave Carroll’s YouTube response to United Airlines breaking his guitar is a brilliant example of ordinary people using the power of social media to take back their power in the face of big corporations.

One smashed guitar, one YouTube video; 12 months and 4,467,537 views later, United Airlines is finally listening.

Related posts:

1. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan
2. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
3. What Is a Social Media News Release?

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals – SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience – where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources – you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 – basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

• Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
• Consumer Review Sites
• Social Networks / Online Communities
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Social News Sites
• Social Music Sites
• Video and Photo Sharing Sites
• Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

• Brand building
• Relationship management
• Product development
• Reputation management
• Customer interaction
• Customer feedback
• Customer support
• Community building
• Defensive SEO – Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert – usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map – a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement – this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking – only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great – you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing – thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus – think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here – you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
2. Social Media Optimization with StumbleUpon
3. What’s Your Buzz Share? 4 Easy Steps For Tracking Online Buzz

These days mention “buzz marketing” and most people think of your marketing message proliferating through the Web and beyond through the word of mouth and viral mechanisms of the social web. As I mentioned in an earlier post, social media buzz marketing can generate great free hype, exponentially expand your web presence, is relatively cheap, and has great search engine optimization benefits. However, it’s important not to overlook a key process that sets the stage for a successful buzz marketing campaign – effective buzz monitoring.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have the most buzz share of all 2008 presidential candidates

Buzz Marketing can be broken down into 2 key components:

• Buzz Monitoring – the art of online reputation monitoring (and management)

• Social Media Marketing – the art of harnessing user-generated content and online conversations to enhance your brand, through blogs, forums, social networks, wikis and more.

In order to effectively directly engage the public about your brand, it’s important to know what they are already saying about your company, products, services and/or executives. By doing your buzz monitoring homework, you will not only be able to understand how much buzz share you have in your market, you will discover where your target customers hang out, what they like and don’t like about your company, and a plethora of other highly valuable insights.

Buzz Monitoring In 4 Easy Steps

There are numerous ways to monitor buzz about your company and products using free tools. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim recommends 26 free tools you must have for your buzz monitoring needs. You may not need all of them, so keep it simple and narrow it down to the basics.

Here are 4 simple steps to help you jump start your buzz monitoring campaign:

1. Sign Up for Google Alerts

Google alerts is a service that notifies you by email of the latest Google results pertaining to your query or topic of choice. Google alerts covers your query results appearing in news, blogs, web page updates, video and groups.

Because of the large volume of alerts that will come to your inbox, it’s recommended that you create a “Rule” in Outlook that will filter all Google results to a specified folder.

Google Alerts will also list recent blog entries. However, to retrieve a listing of blog entries that span a longer period of time, use Google Blog Search or Technorati.

2. Monitor Blogs

Google Blog Search

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs – all blogs, not just Blogger blogs. Google Blog Search will search for the latest blog entries related to your query. You can also subscribe to search results for your specific keywords by RSS, and receive continuous Blog Search updates for that search term.

Technorati

Technorati is an Internet search engine that focuses on blogs. I find that its search results tend to be less relevant than Google or Yahoo, delivering a broad spectrum of results for queries with more than 2 keywords and delivering nothing when exact match is enabled.

It does allow you to query tags, and suggests alternative tags related to your search term.

For continuous updates subscribe to Technorati search results via RSS feed.

Co.mments

Tracking a blog may not reveal the full conversation about your business. Even if a blog post makes a positive mention about your business, those commenting on the post can still attack your reputation. Co.mments helps you to stay on top of blog conversations by keeping you updated of new comments, allowing you to break into the fray and defend your brand at a critical moment. Just bookmark, track and follow. You can also subscribe to your tracking feed and read new comments in your feed reader or e-mail client.

3. Track Conversations in Community Forums & Message Boards

Boardtracker

Boardtracker is forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.

You can pre-define search terms and receive an alert by email or RSS as soon as a thread matching your search term is posted in any of the thousands of forums it tracks.

If you want to track specific forums, you can also submit the forum url to be included in the Boardtracker database.

4. Use RSS Feed Readers to Stay on Top of Industry News

In the Information Age, staying on top of news the old-fashioned way can be overwhelming, time consuming, and inefficient. Why not let the latest news come to you? Sign up for a free RSS feed reader/ news aggregator and peruse hundreds of news items with your morning cup of coffee.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” can either contain a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

Several good, free RSS news aggregators are available, such as:

Google Reader

This is Google’s free news aggregator. You can also share news feeds by publishing your feeds to your public page.

RSS Owl

It’s a platform independent, downloadable news reader. It’s cool because it:
• Allows you to import your feeds using the OPML format
• Bookmark your favorite feeds
• Import blogrolls
• Export an entire category of news feeds into PDF, RTF, or HTML files.
• Has search options that allows you to search within news feeds or an entire feed category%

Related posts:

1. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan
2. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
3. Claim Your Blog on Technorati