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

Last week’s Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Maryrose Dunton, the Head of User Experience at YouTube,, who spoke about YouTube’s Nonprofit Program.The YouTube Nonprofit Program, is an in-kind donation by YouTube to the nonprofit sector that’s worth about $20 million. Currently available to established 501(c)(3)s, YouTube offers participating nonprofits:

• A premium branded channel – some environmental nonprofits that have done a good job with this include Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. The ability to upload videos of any length. Currently the limit on video length is 10 minutes.

• Rotation into the “Promoted Videos” section on YouTube’s homepage.
• Listing in the Nonprofit Channels and Nonprofit Video areas
• The ability to collect donations using Google Checkout (with no processing fee).
• The option to participate in the user partner program, which allows you to show partner ads on video – and share the ad revenue. However, there is currently no way to filter ads, which may not work for some organizations.

YouTube has 30 million visitors daily and over 100 million videos are viewed each day. By connecting nonprofits to the world’s largest online video community, the YouTube Nonprofit program will allow these organizations tap into a significant pool of potential small donors. While large nonprofits are able to receive 10-15% of donations from online fundraising, smaller organizations have the most difficulty establishing a web presence. By offering a dedicated channel on YouTube, YouTube’s Nonprofit Program hopes to empower smaller organizations to significantly expand their reach. Now its just the matter of these, often, short-staffed nonprofits finding the manpower to manage their YouTube presence.

YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofits

Maryrose recommended these tips to help nonprofits engage successfully with the YouTube community:

1. Keep it fresh, keep it short. Best not longer than 10 minutes

2. Be genuine, no public service announcements (PSAs)

3. Engage and interact with the community – have a dialogue, allow people to post video comments, be sure to respond to comments
4. Create a call to action

5. Invest in your channel – update content, make sure links and videos work

7. Do not fear comments, ratings, related videos – while you can moderate user engagement, do not disable the commenting or rating features as this tends to upset the community

New Plans for Nonprofits on YouTube

New developments coming down the pipeline include:

1. Extending the program to include international nonprofits.

2. Incorporating more calls to action that are important to nonprofits, petitions, signup forms.

3. Improving nonprofit discovery on YouTube’s website.

[tags]maryrose dunton, net tuesday, net2, youtube nonprofit program, youtube nonprofit channel, lorna li[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Ninja for Hire – Working YouTube to Break into Pictures
2. The 2007 Energy Bill’s Scary Nuclear Provision – Rockers Protest On YouTube
3. The State of the Internet

by Lorna Li

Search engine marketers, bloggers, and social media fanatics wore their favorite hats at Search Marketing Salon’s “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Launch party at the chic and intimate Otis Lounge in San Francisco. Tips were swapped, secrets were traded, and product ideas were bounced around that would take search marketing to the next level.

Forest Kolb, Sharon Lin, and Julie Blaustein.

“We need a Google Adwords Editor that also includes Yahoo and MSN on a single UI,” stated Clay Schulenburg, Interactive Marketing Manager for Healthline. “This will take search to a whole new level.”

F*ck the Yahoo bulk upload, is what I say to that!

Hear that, web entrepreneurs? That’s big bucks for you!

Jacob Morgan, Search Marketing Alchemist and Nicolette Toussaint

Search-obsessed bloggers that dropped by included Michael Brito, who writes a fantastic blog about Social Media & Conversation Marketing, Lisa Whelan social media queen on Vox, Jim Yu on how to be a Search Marketing and SEO Maven, and Andy Kaufman, the real estate blogger and Twitter king.

William Gauthier, Alicia Lin, Damon White, and Lorna Li.

e-Storm’s William Gauthier, Lisa McGuire, and Daniel Riveong

Leon Krishayana and lovely lady in black beret

Leon Krishnayana of iSpionage, offers a technology platform that helps search engine marketers track competitors’ PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ads daily. It allows you to see the ad copy, keywords, and average rank on the major search engines side by side. Very handy indeed.

Vera Belenky and Alex Gamburg

Other attendees included Mark Fiske, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Gap, Pete Park of web advertising agency Vectorhaus, Yan Rozovsky VP of LeadClick Media, Jason Hart of the search-focused Online Marketing agency Domain Methods, Jeff Rohrs, VP of search marketing agency ExactTarget, Leo Haryono, Head of Natural Search of Shopping.com, Josh Pierry and Clay Shulenburg of Healthline, Biren Talati, of Sandalstore.com, Peter Koontz, Founder and CTO of Sprenzy, Vera Belenky of Walmart.com, Alex Gamburg Search Marketing Director of Trulia, specializing in real estate search, Gabriel Carrejo, the original sinner, Forest Kolb of BizzFlip who has cracked the secret of the Digg first page, Sharon Lin, Online Marketer for Web 2.0 companies, Irina Greenman, and Danny Cheung, who is about to revolutionize the world of WordPress publishing the Good Magazine way.

More pictures can be viewed on the Search Marketing Salon Flickr album.

Join Search Marketing Salon on Facebook!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: searchmarketing salon, e-Storm, iSpionage, Domain Methods, Good Magazine, Sandalstore.com, Michael Brito, Andy Kaufman, Jim Yu, Lisa Whelan, Sharon Lin, Josh Pierry, Clay Shulenburg, Peter Koontz, Jeff Rohrs, Biren Talati, Jason Hart, Gabriel Carrejo, Pete Park, Mark Fiske, Yan Rozovsky, Leo Haryono, Leon Krishnayana, Vera Belenky, Nicolette Toussaint, Lorna Li, Jacob Morgan

Related posts:

1. Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party on Thursday March 27 at Otis Lounge
2. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
3. Ninja for Hire – Working YouTube to Break into Pictures

It’s time to wear your favorite hat, because Search Marketing Salon launches this Thursday. White hats, grey hats, and black hats are welcome – we do not discriminate.

If you are obsessed about search engine rankings, gaga about the SEO benefits of social media, and have a tale or two to tell about how you dominated the SERPs, have a drink with us!

When:

Thursday March 27 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Where:

Otis Lounge

25 Maiden Lane (b/w Grant & Kearny )

San Francisco, CA 94108

Join Us!

RSVP via Eventbrite for Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party.

To become an official member of Search Marketing Salon, join Search Marketing Salon on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Search Marketing Salon on Facebook.

[tags]search marketing salon, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, seo, ppc, social seo, web 2.0 marketing[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Search Marketing Salon “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Pictures
2. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
3. SEO = Green Marketing | SEO White Hats

presented by Giovanna & Aaron Wall

Tuesday night I went to one of the first SF Blogger Meetups to gather after a long hiatus and it was well worth the wait.

The group practically took over Amici’s pizzeria on Lombard and, with the exception of my bub.blicio.us buddy Victor Karamalis, included no one I recognized from the Web 2.0 circuit.

But it did include a treat – I got to meet, sit next to, and pick the brains of Aaron Wall and his wife Giovanna. Yes, THE Aaron Wall, of SEO Book and one of the most well known SEOs of our time. In fact, the couple is so successful with building monetizing blogs that they now occupy the ranks of the New Rich – a term coined by Tim Ferris of the 4-Hour Work Week. Both Aaron and Giovanna are seasoned veterans of blog monetization – they’ve optimized and monetized websites so that several of them bring in over six figures in income. Sharing their blogging secrets, as well as picking up the tab for 40+ attendees, was their way of giving back to the community.

They also threw in a free resource The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Alas, if only I could spend an ENTIRE DAY learning from Aaron or Giovanna!

The Blogger Meetup was largely made up of novice bloggers, and folks unfamiliar with the term SEO. Most of what the Walls shared was pretty general knowledge, seasoned with nuggets of valuable insider wisdom, some of which they urged, to keep to ourselves.

Topics covered were:

1. How to Generate and Grow Traffic

Content is King

Write good content that caters to your target audience – ideally content that is so good that it redefines the industry. Be sure to create a unique angle the reflects your personality. Mention and link out to other blogs – the owners will notice the incoming link, and often they too will share some link love.

A good tip from Aaron on scrapers stealing your unique site content is to create links to older articles in your blog post. That way, if scrapers pick up your content, at least they are providing links back to your site

Community Participation

Start online friendships by in conversations on blogs, forums and social networks related to your topic. Try to have a popular blogger mention you and link to you – this can bring considerable traffic to your site. You can also offer to write for other well-known bloggers.

Create a community project related to your topic and ask web-savvy experts to give their opinion about it. If your project is buzzworthy, all of the sudden you will have organic citations from thought leaders in the field pointing to your site from around the Web.

Pay Per Click

Use PPC to build traffic. My take on PPC is that it’s worthwhile if you have a product to sell that would at least enable you to generate some kind of ROI, otherwise buying this kind of traffic can get very expensive very quickly.

However, Aaron and Giovanna maintained that even if you’re not selling anything, buying traffic through PPC can be powerful, because, if your content is good, it can go viral. And niche keywords can actually be very cheap – around 5 or 10 cents a click, so if you have a small budget to play with, PPC traffic can be relatively inexpensive and worthwhile.

StumbleUpon Ads

For a nickel a visitor, StumbleUpon, a social search application, can drive considerable traffic to your site. StumbleUpon allows users to discover Web sites, people, videos, online communities, product information and more in a manner very much like channel-surfing, but for the Web. You can use StumbleUpon as a social media marketing tool for free – join a Stumble group for maximum impact – or as an advertiser. Other Stumblers vote your content up or down – the more positive votes you get, the more the StumbleUpon recommends your site to other Stumblers.

Paid Reviews

Solicit paid reviews from other bloggers through ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com.

2. Building a Large Subscription Base

RSS

Encourage RSS subscriptions by promoting RSS buttons aggressively. Create a page that explains what RSS is.

Create Brand Evangelists

Make your email accessible or use a contact form. Aggressively solicit comments and answer every real comment.

Encourage Registration

Encourage registration if you want to build a community and offer bonuses for registering.

3. Monetization Strategies

Adsense

The easiest way to monetize is Adsense, which is good for setting a baseline. Aaron recommended staying ad-free in the beginning and to avoid putting ads on your homepage unless you are very well trusted.

Affiliate Offers

Make sure that they are selective and relevant to your topic – and put the offers section on another part of your site.

Create or Sell a Product

Create or sell a product that is relevant to your topic; this works best if you are a recognized expert in your niche. You can also try to sell information-based products created from your intellectual capital, such as e-books, videos, or DVDs, or consulting services and speaking gigs.

Do not pollute your blog with advertising – it becomes a roadblock.

4. Technology

Aaron and Giovanna’s recommended blog platform of choice was WordPress, Drupal if you want to start a community. They also recommended Google Analytics or HaveAMint.com for site stats.

5. Other Takeaways

Trendspotting

One of the key takeaways from the Meetup was the value of spotting trends. According to Giovanna, “The best way to make $ out of blogging is to spot trends and be an early adopter.”

Here’s how to do it:

1. Research trends

Tools you can use to spot upcoming trends include Google Trends, trendwatching.com, ebay’s Marketplace Research Pro, which for $20/month gives you access to what people are searching for on eBay.

2. Keyword Research

Once you’ve zeroed in on a new trend, research the keywords around those trends, buy a domain name with those relevant keywords. Remember:

• Make sure the keyword is in the url
• Hyphens are branding suicide
• It doesn’t matter if your domain is a .biz, .org, or .net

3. Launch a blog about it.

Now all you have to worry about is creating a continuous stream of compelling content. Good luck!

As a blogger, creating quality content is probably the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of blogging, and not all of us have budgets to hire writers.

But according to Aaron, if you have a niche site optimized for niche keywords you can still receive a healthy stream of organic search traffic without the need to aggressively create content. The need for fresh content depends, a great deal, on the market.

Aaron, “I would never start a blog about SEO now – it’s too saturated a field.”

Giovanna, “If you are starting a blog about mortgages now – good luck!”

Given that the blogosphere only seems to be expanding exponentially, like a rogue galaxy hurtling out into space, it seems nearly impossible to gain any traction at all on anything, let alone monetize it.

Following these tips from Aaron and Giovanna Wall, you too, can earn money from your blogs. May the force be with you.

[tags] sf blogger meetup, blogging, blog monetization, blog seo, seo, search engine optimization, aaron wall, giovanna wall[/tags]

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1. StumbleUpon New Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Site
2. Flock Eco-Edition – Social Web Browser Goes Green for Earth Day 2008
3. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan

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

At the urging of the nuclear power industry, a one-sentence provision buried deep in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill can essentially make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.

Under current law, the government is only allowed to guarantee a volume of loans authorized each year by Congress, which amounted to $4 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy projects in 2007. This new provision is a huge change that could significantly expand the nuclear industry (considered to be a clean energy industry), which already plans to build 28 new reactors at a cost of approximately $4-5 billion each.

Opponents of the provision say that the loan guarantees that could serve as a “virtual blank check from taxpayers” to help build more nuclear plants. A nuclear power provision of this magnitude mars an otherwise attractive bill that supports renewable energy and improved fuel efficiency. Should Congress even adopt the 35 mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard and 15% Renewable Energy Standard, the nuclear provision would obliterate any environmental gains made by CAFE and RES.

Nuclear Power is Not A Solution for Global Warming

After decades of opposition from environmental groups and other organizations, the nuclear industry is enjoying growing political support as society has grown increasingly concerned about global warming and foreign oil dependence. Nuclear power is being touted as a viable energy alternative to greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Under legislation enacted in 2005, nuclear power qualifies as a “clean technology” because it does not emit carbon gases that contribute to global warming.However, nuclear power is far from clean.

According to Michele Boyd, legislative director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen:

“None of these so-called ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors deal with the fundamental flaws of nuclear power, such as dangerous radioactive waste, vulnerabilities to air attack and excessive cost,” said Ms. Boyd, whose staff began investigating the provision shortly after the Senate passed the bill last month.

Support a Strong, Clean, Nuke-Free Energy Bill

Nuclear power generates a lot of bang for the buck now, but its byproduct, radioactive waste, creates huge environmental risks that future generations will be forced to face.

Here’s what you can do to let Congress know you favor an energy bill that truly supports environmental sustainability.

• Lobby Congress by signing the 2007 Energy Bill Petition for Strong Fuel Efficiency and Renewable Energy
• Sign the Nuke Free Energy Bill Petition

[tags] new energy bill, 2007 energy bill, nuclear provision, nuclear subsidy, nuclear loan gaurantee, CAFE, corporate average fuel economy, renewable electricity standard, renewable energy, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, YouTube[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Why CAFE and RES Matter for 2007’s New Energy Bill
2. Power Shift 2007 – Students Demand a Clean Energy Future
3. What current provision of the Waxman-Markey bill will have the greatest impact on green marketing?

“Buzz marketing” is a hot buzzword I hear a lot of these days. Being an analytical type, I want to really understand what it means, before I sling it around like corned beef hash.

Buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing (WOMM), guerrilla marketing and viral marketing are often used interchangeably to describe marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness through self-replicating viral processes.

While Seth Godin, author of Unleashing the IdeaVirus, states that viral marketing is, technically, not the same as word of mouth:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.

most marketers will not debate the difference.

Buzz marketing can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. In this series of posts, we are going to focus on the viral effects of a buzz marketing campaign that leverages social media networks, as opposed to viral advertising strategies and tactics.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Buzz marketing that leverages the network and conversation effects of the social web is often referred to as social media marketing.

According to a great series of posts on Do It Yourself Social Media Marketing by Stepforth Web Marketing:

Social media marketing (SMM) or social media optimization (SMO) is a method of promoting your brand (be it yourself, a product, a service, or a company) by strategically making your presence known across various social media networks (such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, MySpace)

Do not expect your social media marketing campaign to immediately drive business – it’s best used for branding or online reputation management, that will indirectly convert your target audience into fans, and your fans into customers.

Why do Social Media Marketing?

Every day, someone out there, somewhere is discussing something important to your business. They could be discussing your brand, your company executives, your competitors, or your industry.

Either they are hyping up your company and generating positive buzz about your products, or they are criticizing your service and sowing the dissention over the value you bring to your industry, and humanity in general.

According to internet marketing expert Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim:

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.

It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.

A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.

It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.

A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.

It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.

This is happening whether you like it or not, so why not join in on the discussion? By participating in online conversations you can contribute your valuable expertise, quell misconceptions and doubts about your company, product, or industry and grab some more valuable web real estate in the process.

What are the SEO Benefits of Buzz Marketing through Social Networks?

When users search on your company name or targeted keyword phrases, search engine results pages (SERPs) will frequently display threaded discussions on social networking sites like Ning, forums like Webmaster World, and user review sites like Yelp. If there’s a lot of activity on these threads and, thus, continuous, freshly updated user-generated content, these threads will often rise to the top of SERPs.

These discussions can often include positive as well as negative opinions about your company or organization. Therefore, defensively, you want to be sure that you are doing your best to manage your online reputation, and diffuse or bury any negative publicity that could appear on this valuable SERP real estate.

Pro-actively, you should absolutely capitalize on the positive buzz, establish yourself as a thought leader or industry expert and generate as much brand awareness as possible. All the while, you can scatter valuable target keyword phrases and links to important web resources, especially your own, all over the social web and blogosphere. This can drive a great deal of traffic back to your website or other online locations where your product is sold.

If you have not included buzz marketing into your online marketing strategy, then you should. Otherwise, you are missing out on a great opportunity to generate a brand awareness and search engine optimization benefits for a fraction of the cost that online and traditional advertising requires.

[tags]social media marketing, SMM, social media optimization, SMO, buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing, WOMM, viral marketing, search engine marketing, SEM, search engine optimization, SEO, search engine results pages, SERP, seth godin, andy beal, lorna li, lornali[/tags]

Related posts:

1. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan
2. What’s Your Buzz Share? 4 Easy Steps For Tracking Online Buzz
3. SearchStatus Plugin for Firefox – Designed Especially for Search Engine Marketers