Social Media Marketing is not spam. It’s an honest campaign by which a company provides key insights into specific points of interest. If other words, if you are a plumber, your social media marketing campaign would be pro-tips aimed at plumbing laymen.

As a business that is participating in social networking, you MUST strongly avoid pitching your product. If pitch marketing is a hammer, then social media marketing is a magnet. Draw people to you by providing quality content about your industry. There’s nothing wrong with a small blurb about who you are and what you do, but don’t forget that the meat of social media marketing is about the content.

Don’t be lured into automating your social media campaign.

You aren’t fooling anyone.
Don’t forget that all those followers are real people. Interactive marketing means that you are speaking with individuals and creating relationships that continue to grow and change. People are smart and they can tell if there is a real person behind that business’s Twitter account.

Automated responses are SPAM.
As a business, if you are using automated direct messages you should question your purpose for being on Twitter in the first place. You’re dealing with real people and they can tell that your direct message is simply a prewritten marketing message. If you aren’t taking the time to put a personal effort into each one of your messages your audience will know it.

You can’t streamline personality.
Each business’s culture is different and it takes time to develop that personality through social networking. Engaging with your customers through Twitter is not a push button program. It takes time to develop a campaign and standards for social media marketing.

Take a look at this quote from Bernard Moon over at Mashable.com:

I just hope that Twitter won’t go the way of MySpace, where fake accounts are abundant and the majority of my “friend” requests are from small businesses pitching a product or scammers trying to sell their fool’s gold. MySpace grew because of its wild, wild west environment, but eventually it became too unruly and disengaging for most people. – via Mashable.com

Your business doesn’t engage in underhanded schemes to provide its product and services, so why should your marketing campaign creep around in the shadows. Customers like transparency.

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We’ve discussed Twitter a lot on this blog, but there are a lot of other social networks that have some great reach and interactive features to help get your business and services to as many people as possible. I’ve been doing some testing on Friendfeed and I’ve been enjoying the service more and more.

As Twitter continues to have stability issues, Friendfeed is a great environment to distribute your content to people you are interested. The big difference between the two sites is that Friendfeed will aggregate all of your social channels into one place. So as you post pictures on your Flickr account and videos to your YouTube account your Friendfeed profile will display all of your activity in one central place.

BONUS TIP:
So if you don’t have a blog, here’s a great tip. Use your Friendfeed widget on your website to display the latest activities that your business is doing online. Just go to http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget and customize your widget to fit your website’s theme. You now have a centralized hub for all of your social media marketing displayed neatly on your website.

Subscribe to the LEVELTWO Friendfeed here.

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It’s actually very simple to understand why social media marketing works. If you provide quality content using social distribution channels your marketing message is more likely to be viewed, interacted with, and shared.

Viewership
Social media is different (not better, just different) from search engine marketing because you are relying on your customers to perform two actions before you even get a chance to present your message.

1. First they have to actually search for your keyword.
2. Then they have to see and click on your ad.

Social marketing does not rely on your viewers to take an action before your message is delivered. You are distributing your content to them. As they browse Facebook they might notice that a friend of theirs recently became a fan of your product or company. That’s a customer testimony you didn’t even have to ask for!

Interactive
Because your viewers are consuming your content using a platform (Facebook, Twitter, ect) that they already love and feel comfortable with, they are more likely to interact with your message. It is more likely that they will view, comprehend, and comment on your content because rather than pulling them into your website and force feeding them information, you are pushing interesting content to them.

Shareable
The core of social media marketing is housed in the ability for people to share interesting content. Surrounding every memorable video or well written blog post is a plethora of “share” buttons (our own blog, for example, has lots of them). And blogs are structured so that people can send static links directly to the content that they want to share with their friend. The viral factor is a natural phenomenon.

In summary, your viewers are more likely to see, interact, and share you social content because that’s what social networking is all about. It’s about the end user and if you provide quality content, the rest will take care of itself.

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Want to have better control on what people see when they search for you business’s name or brand online? You need to launch a social media and search engine optimization campaign.

The average business person doesn’t know what those phrases actually mean and if you are not planning on engaging a professional marketing agency to help you launch your online branding campaign, you’ll need to know what to do and where to go to get started.

Here are some basic questions that commonly plague social media startup campaigns. These tips come from SearchEngineJournal.com.

Isn’t social media the same thing as search engine optimization?

Social media and search engine optimization can certainly go hand in hand, but they’re definitely not the same thing. Social media requires a lot more personal attention and focuses more on building relationships with your clients and customers.

There are so many social media sites out there, how do I know which ones to use?

The answer to this depends on what kind of company you have and what type of market you’re trying to target. However, consider penetration. With sites like Facebook and Twitter taking over the Internet, can you afford not to be there?

My company’s name is taken on the social media sites, what do I do?

Get in contact with the network’s help desk. You can bet that they’ve dealt with such a situation before and likely have a policy in place. My tip: When you contact them, use a corporate email address. It will give you tons more credibility in your request.

Also, over at Mashable they have a great article on how to take control of your personal brand. Their five tips are:

1. Claim your Google profile
2. Reserve your name on social networks
3. Establish a personal hub
4. Have a reputation management strategy
5. Promote your expertise

You can read the previously mentioned articles by clicking on the links below.

5 Ways to Take Control of Your Personal Brand Today on Mashable.com

6 Hurdles to Clear When Exercising your Brand In-House on SearchEngineJournal.com

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We talk a lot about social media and how it can be used to grow your business, but there’s other social activity that you should closely monitor at your business, your employees.

Sharlyn Lauby has posted an interesting article about whether companies should implement a social media policy for their employees. The policy would specifically state the company’s guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world concerning their job.

“Employers need to be upfront with employees that they have no right to privacy with respect to social networking. “Employers reserve the right to monitor employee use of social media regardless of location (i.e. at work on a company computer or on personal time with a home computer).”

Wow. That’s a little harsh. Right? Well, not really.

What’s said on the internet, stays on the internet, forever.
Don’t forget that your personal Twitter account that you think only a few friends read is actually very public. With the growning number of Twitter tools, each tweet is quickly logged into hundreds of different databases. There’s no way to permanently delete it.

The time to think about drafting a social media policy is now. Twitter is growing at a rate of 1,382%, and it’s just one of the many social networking applications in the market. Companies are using social media tools to establish value in terms of marketing and branding.

Take hold of your company’s reputation from both your customers and your employees. Ignoring social media does make the influence any less powerful.

Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy? on Mashable.com

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The other day I watched over the shoulder of my wife as she was searching for a local shoe retailer. She opened up Firefox and up popped Google.com as her homepage. The surprise came when she typed the name of the retailer into the Google search bar rather than just typing the URL (which she actually knew for memory).

I didn’t really think much more about it until I ran across a blog post on MarketingProfs that stated a company’s corporate homepage is Google.com.

People are starting to view the Google search bar as their URL entry box. Instead of typing “www.zappos.com” people are simply typing the world “Zappos” into a search form.

This is a key point to remember for businesses engaged in internet marketing.

1. Do you rank first for your company name?
2. Are there any negative comments that show up for your company name?
3. Are your competitors advertising using your company name as a keyword?

If you are not seeing the results you want when you search your own business name you can

1. Advertise on Google using your company’s name
2. Launch a social networking campaign focused on branding and reputation management
3. Optimize your website for search engine ranking

These methods are proven to work and you can often see results within days of launch. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Take a look at some other points made in the article.

A brands biggest concern…should be the negative pages that show up in the results organically. Those are the listings that are much less in Google’s control and more in the hands of consumers/brands.

Just because there are people who are writing about your product on Yelp and GetSatisfaction, doesn’t mean you have to sit back and watch your search results get contaminated. No one is barred from producing content on the web. A brand has just as much right to talk about their great qualities and respond to those who disagree.

Creating great content around your product in pivotal to your organic search success. A big part of Google’s secret formula for organic search is traffic. If you build it (something great), they will come. The better something is, the more traffic it gets, the closer it will rest to your ideal search results.

Creating a small 2 to 3 page microsite is not enough. Engaging your industry through social media and social networking is how brands succeed at reputation management and internet marketing.

Marketing Profs – ‘A company’s corporate homepage is Google.com’

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Remember the days of dialup? The internet was on all the local 10 o’clock news channels because it was something new and different. Fast forward to 2009 and things are reversed. Customers now expect companies to have a website and if it doesn’t have dynamic interactive content then it’s nothing special. Everyday the standards are set a little higher.

So it’s a safe bet that generating business online 10 years from now will be phenomenally more difficult than it is today. That’s why it your niche company is primed for success online right now!

If you offer a speciality service or product, you are in a perfect position to dominate the market by identifying your company as the leader in its field.

However, if you offer a service or product that is more common, take the initiative and market yourself in more definitive verticals. Set yourself apart by being a specialist in niche markets rather than an entire industry.

1. The internet is a global marketplace, but that doesn’t mean you can’t define your target online audience within a specific geographic radius.
2. The big name industry players might have a strong brand, but you can dominate your market by saturating your region with content to reinforce your expertise.

As a niche company you have a strong advantage by defining your geographically targeted audience and marketing your company as a leader.

As a niche service company it is

1. Easier to distinguish yourself as an expert.
You will have less competition and more opportunity to cover your specific vertical.

2. Easier to convert a highly defined target audience.
Providing services and products specifically tailored to that vertical will result in a higher conversion rate.

3. Easier to replicate the business model for expansion
A taylor made product or service that has proven to be successful in one market is ripe for further development.

Also, take a look at why your small business is made for customer interaction.

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Your small business is built for customer interaction. However, even your best attempts to provide quality service to your customers will not please everyone. So what do you do if you have a bad review posted on a website?

There are several actions you can take if your online reputation is in danger.

1. Ignore It.
   If the customer has gone to the trouble of posting a negative review, chances are they are a passionate person, so if you try and contact them they might not respond the way you’d hope they would. So your first option is to just leave it alone.
2. Confront It.
   On the other hand, a customer may have posted a negative review simply to let others know about their experience. So if you contact them directly and offer to correct the problem chances are they will be willing to replace their review with a updated review. In most cases review sites will allow for the reviewers to update their comments.
3. Get Help.
   It may be that the problem is too large or has gotten out of hand. In that case you will want to contact an online reputation management company (try this one) to help solve your issue. With the right tools, you’d be surprised how fast a professional online marketing company is able to track down and address the situation.

More posts about online reputation management:

• Your Small Business is Built for Customer Interaction
• Free Online Reputation Management Tools
• More Tips on How to Connect with Your Visitors
• Reputation Management – Monitoring your Brand on the Internet
• Tagged Reputation Management posts

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If the economic slowdown has slowed the volume of your workload or maybe your number of patients has decreased, we’ve got great news for you…

Use this opportunity to take more time with your clients. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, your small business is built for customer interaction.

Traditional marketing campaigns take lots of money to launch, so try:

1. Starting a blog
2. Joining Twitter
3. Starting a video blog
4. Inviting your clients to participate in your social media campaign (guest blog, customer review, answer their questions online)
5. Making an informative video about your industry and publish it on a social video site
6. Launching a low budget marketing campaign
7. Ditch your email newsletter and create a blog
8. Creating an alert based on keywords twittered in your territory
9. Monitoring your online reputation
10. Adding some social networking features to your boring website

I keep hearing that during the tough times are when some of the most innovative things are created. So, get out there and create something!

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My RSS reader is overrun with people talking about reputation management (see screenshot to the right). I do my best to wade through as many articles as I can, but I’ve noticed a trend in what everyone is talking about when it comes to reputation management.

Most of the blog posts just list out all the free online reputation management tools because that’s what most people are after. They like the free tools because unless you are a large company with a huge amount of online conversations about your brand, you may not be convinced that your business really needs to take online reputation management seriously. So until that day comes, here’s our list of free online reputation management tools and when you’re ready to dive in, we’ll be right here. By the way, this list is in no particular order.

• http://monitorthis.info
• http://www.blogpulse.com
• http://www.google.com/alerts
• http://news.yahoo.com/rss
• http://twittermeter.com
• http://tweetvolume.com
• http://backtweets.com
• http://monitter.com
• http://tweetbeep.com
• http://blogsearch.google.com
• http://www.backtype.com
• http://technorati.com
• http://www.cocomment.com
• http://www.yacktrack.com
• http://boardtracker.com
• http://boardreader.com
• http://www.big-boards.com
• http://search.twitter.com
• http://socialmention.com
• http://www.serph.com
• http://www.keotag.com
• http://www.filtrbox.com

However, if you are convinced that the internet is too big of a place to let your brand’s reputation run free, you might be interested in our own Reputation Management tool.

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