This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the second pillar, Strategy.

Marketing in Social Media is fast becoming an important piece in most companies’ marketing plans for this year and moving forward.  More companies are adding Social Media Marketing as a line item in their budgets this year.  They are either maintaining what they invested in it last year or adding more money to it, which is pretty impressive seeing the state the economy is in and how budgets are being slashed left an right.

What Are Your Company’s Goals for Social Media?

With that increase in money towards Social Media Marketing though must come accountability.  At the end of the day, how what is your Return on Conversation or Investment for entering into the Social Media space?  Do you have goals set in place to help understand whether or not the marketing tactics you’ve researched and laid out very carefully in your strategy are really helping or harming your company?  Without a clear set of goals, how do you know what to even measure and what do the success metrics look like?

A study from Business.com surveyed its audience about their plans for 2010.  In it one of the figures showed that over 25% of the companies who were intended to participate in Social Media Marketing were planning to implement 10 or more marketing tactics in social media.  Wow!  10 or more!  How does any marketing team keep track of all of that, and whether each tactic its successful or not?  It’s a tall order.  Even taller is how do they know how each of these tactics help reach the goal set in place – if there are any?

Goals are Different than Metrics

Measuring, counting, accumulating anything is looking at metrics for a particular tactic you are implementing.   Measuring tactics alone doesn’t really mean you are hitting your goals.  Goals are more encompassing of the bigger picture of where a company wants to be.  It isn’t to gain 100 more fans on a Facebook page – that’s measuring a tactic.  A goal is something like “Increase Customer Retention by 10%” and figuring out what metrics you measure in your social media tactics that can help prove social media helped to meet or contribute to meeting that.

Counting tweets, retweets, fans, friends, website traffic, referrals, and everything else is all about the metrics.  Individually they can mean absolutely nothing.  For your goals to be successful you need to look as how all of these metrics work together.  Which are the strong pieces and which are the weak.  You do need to measure, and look at these individually  – how else will you know if the particular tactic is helping you?  But when you look at your goals, it has to be from a higher view, and remember that’s what the C-Suite and Senior level management is looking at too.

When you are putting together your strategy, make sure you lay out your goals first – then figure out what metrics help you understand how what marketing tactics you are implementing are helping you reach those goals.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the second pillar, Strategy.

If there is one thing that is certain in this every changing world, it’s just that – change is certain.  As the tides of the internet and the whims of social media community members ebb and flow, so does the popularity, web site traffic, interest and buzz around tools, applications and sites in social media.  Even with all your research, six months down the line, the social media marketing tactic that you identified as part of your strategy could be in serious decline and not performing.  On the other hand, the marketing tactic could be even more of a success than you imagined.  The question then comes to any company – “Are You Flexible Enough in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy to Change & Adapt to Those Conditions?”

Can You Plan to Be Nimble?

Some companies have internal politics that make it nearly impossible to be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changes that happen in social media.  There are budget constraints, signatures that need to be obtained or a bunch of other hoops that a social media marketing team must go through in order to change parts of their strategies on the fly.  This is where mid-sized to small-sized businesses have an advantage to super big corporations, a lot of times it’s a quick phone call or email to get that change done, not a check list of permissions that need to be obtained.

The key for these bigger corporations to be able to be flexible is to plan in flexibility if they can and to also educate senior management about the entire social media environment.  If they understand that you are monitoring and measuring closely and need to be able to stop or invest more into something within a short time frame and have the data to back that up, they may be more willing to allow for more flexibility and less rigid processes for your strategy.

Don’t Be Afraid to Stop

When something isn’t working, why would you want to keep doing it?  It’s a lot like beating your head against a brick wall, you’re not going to move the wall, you’re only going to get a bruised forehead & a headache.  If you have the data to tell you that the tactic you are implementing isn’t meeting the success measurements or helping you to attain the goals you set in place, you need to be nimble enough to either change the approach slightly or stop it all together and even replace it with putting more investments and resources into other tactics that are hitting their success metrics.

Continuing to deploy and invest in social media marketing tactics that aren’t working just because they are cool or you like them a lot and feel comfortable in that community, is likely only prolonging the failure and wasting your valuable resources.  You’ll get more out of being nimble and flexible enough to adapt and invest in places that are garnering your more engagement and success than in places that you merely feel comfortable with but aren’t producing for you.  This is why its important to diversify your strategy with a few marketing tactics and not to fall in love with one or two particular sites, tools or tactics.

Be Ready to Invest in What’s Working

Sometimes a particular marketing tactic can work a lot better than what you had even expected.  Those are the nice kind of surprises that marketers like to experience.  If something does take off and works like gangbusters in your strategy are you prepared to invest more time, resources and money to further enhance the success of what’s working so well?  Do you also readjust your goals, the amounts invested and time you are allowing the program to run?

Being able to plan into your strategy the ability to change rather quickly is important for the success of your plan.  It’s especially important to be able to take advantage of things that are working better than expected, or if there’s a new opportunity with a feature or a tool.  Sometimes implementing new tools can make your team even more efficient and free up some time and resources, so can you then dedicate that newly freed up time and resources into current tactics or implement new ones?  These are things that your team should be looking at when you are first planning your strategy.

At the end of the day if you can plan in some “padding” into your strategy that will allow you to be flexible you’ll be better able to adapt to the every changing social media marketing world.  If you educate your C-Suite about the way social media can change but show them you have the data to back up the reason for changes, you’ll end up being more nimble and better able to adapt and find a lot more success in your future.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

If you’re aiming to tackle social media monitoring, then finding a suitable tool is simple. A stable of popular products such as Alterian SM2, Radian 6, and Sentiment Metrics offer users the ability to conduct complex searches through millions of historical records. The process generally entails inputting a list of important keywords–some of which are bound together by Boolean operators–and examining the output of records in order to answer questions such as, “which web communities are the most popular for a given keyword?”, and “who are the key influencers in these communities?”.

In theory, the social media monitoring tools provide these answers along with a variety of pretty charts and graphs that further illustrate the point. In practice, however, those of us that are tasked with reporting on this output are occasionally encountered by a sea of unintelligible records in which the charts and graphs are at best, misleading, and at worst, completely erroneous. Every client is different, and the variance between each keyword set can make one project a breeze while another project a burden. If you aren’t experienced in finding coherence within a large data set, you’re likely to be left with a disproportionate number of burden projects. But have no fear, adhering to these five key principles can drastically improve your efficiency and help you fully navigate through a sea of records.

1. Start with the most recent data – Your end goal may be to provide six months of historical data about a product, brand, or a specific subject area, but there may not be a need to immediately query all six months at once. If you’re critical, you’re operating under the assumption that the first set of search terms will need to be tweaked several times before returning acceptable results. By starting with the most recent results, your social media monitoring tool spends less time searching and returns fewer total records. This allows you more time to find negative terms, and more time to find recent relevant records that may warrant new keywords. It has the added bonus of ensuring that the top domains returned are likely to still be active and the sentiment will reflect the most current market perceptions.

2. Branded terms may be your bread and butter – When prioritizing which questions you want to answer through social media monitoring, you should consider that the most specific keywords will often return the most relevant results. Branded terms often offer the kind of keyword specificity that can perform the heavy lifting required to filter irrelevant results. For example, imagine how much more targeted and relevant search results for “Sausage McMuffin” would be instead of results for “Sausage Biscuit”. By leveraging specific branded terms, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend manually filtering spam.

3. Be aware of ambiguous terms – Sometimes, branded terms are not the silver bullet for relevancy.  For example, for every specific car brand such as “Volvo”, “Mercedes-Benz”, or “Lamborghini”, there may be a “Dodge”, “Saturn”, or “Smart”. The latter terms also offer little in the way of negatives that could refine these searches; attempting to create a comprehensive list of negatives can potentially open a can of worms that sucks time away from other valuable areas of investigation. Therefore, if you are trying to gauge the relative volumes of conversation about Volvo versus Dodge, you’re better off comparing specific models such as the “Volvo S40” versus the “Dodge Avenger”.

4. Do not always equate high volume with high influence – When reporting on key influencers, it may be tempting to choose the domain in which a keyword appears the most often. Make sure you consider factors such as multi-channel reach, unique monthly visitors, PageRank, and other factors that may enhance the authority of one domain over another.

5. Show no mercy for Twitter – When searching for short-tail keywords, spammy Twitter feeds can often overcrowd the result pool. The solution to reducing the volume of these results can be to use more complex search terms that reduce the likelihood a result will be returned given then 140 character limit. You may miss some important domains, but you can be confident that the ones returned are more likely to be targeted and relevant. A better way to find important twitter feeds may be to find high value domains that also use twitter to release content and engage their audience.

Social media monitoring is a work in progress, but hopefully these five key principles will help you decide on how to proceed. Surely, semantic analytics will advance by both process and technology, but in the meantime, there is a large enough space for ingenuity in social media monitoring to drive a truck through.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Help Your Online Marketing Strategies

Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing endeavors are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.  However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 (formerly known as Techrigy) can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Give You the Basics

Buzz monitoring tools give you the essential, basic information you need about the conversations swirling around the chosen key words or phrases you are monitoring.  Unfortunately, sometimes even the basics can be misleading, especially when it comes to sentiment.  Unless you have a buzz monitoring tool that allows you to change the dictionary in the sentiment area, you could either be falling down a lot of rabbit holes or worse yet, missing some conversations entirely because your buzz monitoring tool placed the conversations into the “general” or “neutral” area.  Your bare bones buzz monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, don’t even give you the option of sentiment analysis, so when using that tool, you really are at the basics of buzz monitoring.

• They Tell You What
  Any of these buzz monitoring tools will tell you either in a long or brief description, what’s being said around the words or phrases you are choosing to monitor for your strategy.  That’s a basic need of any strategy.  Understanding what’s being said about you, your company or it’s products or services is vital, without it you are pretty much operating in the dark.

• They Tell You When
  Did the conversation happen withing the last 24 hours, or the last month or the past year.  Depending on the tool you use, will depend on how far back your research in buzz monitoring can take you.  Some tools can go back into the databases for as long as they’ve been collecting data.  Others limit you to 90 day, 6 months or a year.  Google alerts will let you go back as far as it has the data, however, that’s very manually intensive work for anyone on your team.  Deciding on how long to look back at is important too.  90 days (or 3 months) can be a relatively short space of time that you won’t be able to see the ebbing and flowing of conversations, on the other hand going back 2years could be too much data and overwhelm your researchers..

• They Tell You Where
  Buzz monitoring tools also give you a vital clue, or a scent / trail to follow by telling you where the conversations are happening.  However, that being said, marketers doing research have to keep in mind, sometimes buzz monitoring tools cannot get into each and every niche forum.  If they are behind a “walled garden”, where usernames and passwords are required, those conversations generally will not come up in the buzz monitoring results.  While buzz monitoring tools can give you a pretty detailed pointer to go and look at a particular thread in a particular community, or a tweet stream, or a Facebook page, no one tool is going to tell you where every conversation that has gone on..

• They Tell You Who
  Finally, buzz monitoring tools can tell you who is talking about you.  For the most part you can at least see the major players in the conversations about the words you are monitoring.  Now they aren’t going to tell you name, address, phone number and email.  However, they will tell you their twitter name, blog URL, avatar/moniker in a forum  and some  tools might even give you an idea of how influential the conversationalist is.  This can help you a lot in your research in deciding how to approach and engage with different individuals.

What Buzz Monitoring Can’t Tell You: How or Why

The missing pieces with buzz monitoring tools is the how and the why conversations are triggered.  How did the buzz about your product get started?  Why did someone feel compelled to share a conversation in a forum?  These questions are also very basic and fundamental pieces of research that should be answered before you pick any online marketing tactic to place in your social media marketing strategy.

Buzz monitoring tools are great at pointing you in the right direction.  Much like a hunting dog aids the hunter, they are indispensable tools you need to get the job done.  Without them, you wouldn’t be able to know the conversations go on at all.  But just as important as knowing Who, What, When & Where is the “How” and the “Why“, and to understand those you need human analysis.  Someone actually needs to go in and perhaps watch or lurk, as well as listen and learn in a community to get a feel why conversations happen they way they do.  They might even need to ask questions of your targeted community’s participants to get a better handle on how they originally found out about your product or service.

In our next series piece on the Research Pillar of the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, Kevin Olson, Serengeti Communications’ research guru, will be explaining how Human Analysis affects the research process for social media marketing.

This week has been a pretty busy one for the team here at Serengeti Communications, especially those of us blogging here at Social Conversations about Social Media Marketing.  On Tuesday both Beth Harte and myself presented at the Social Media Plus conference in downtown Philadelphia.  It was a great conference full of a lot of really insightful presentations and questions from the audience.  Beth and I spoke on two different issues surrounding social media – B2B Marketing and How Search & Social Media Mix.  Then on Wednesday I had an interview with Cover Story on Webmaster Radio talking about our new social media measurement dashboard,  Social Snap, how we at Serengeti Communications approach building strategies for Social Media Marketing and also about my new book, Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.

We’d like to share our presentations with you and would love to hear your feedback or questions!

Social Media & Your B2B Marketing Mix

Wondering how social media marketing can fit into your marketing communications efforts for your B2B business? Beth Harte’s presentation gave attendees of Social Media Plus just want they needed to understand planning, expanding, executing and measuring when it comes to Social Media & B2B Business Marketing.

Social Media & Search Marketing, What’s the Link – How Can it Work For You?

Wondering what the link is between Social Media Marketing & Search Marketing? Well at the core, it’s about being found. Liana “Li” Evans’ Social Media Plus presentation gave attendees information about how social media marketing and search are related and tips on how to capitalize on it for their own online marketing and social media marketing success.

Social Media Strategies, Social Media Measuring Dashboards & Social Media Books

In this interview about Social Media Strategies & Tools, Li Evans discusses the release of the Social Media Marketing Book, plus a new social media strategy tool called Social Snap, a dashboard that gives organizations quick insights into the results of their Social Media marketing program in one place. Just hit the “play” button below or “play in popup” to get the podcast started.

 

 Social Media Measuring Dashboard & Strategies Interview on WebMasterRadio.fm [33:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Like I said… quite a busy week, but a lot of great conversations about Social Media Marketing!

I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.

With all of the tools, case studies, and resources available the excuse to not implement a smart social media strategy that drives relationships, brand favor and revenue is walking down a mighty short plank. 

If you’ve heard yourself or your management say: 

“Social media only works with consumers…” 

“Those are B2C social media tactics…” 

“The B2B sales cycle is too complicated to implement social media…” 

“We can’t measure social media ROI…” 

It’s time to stop making excuses and start rolling up your sleeves to get down to work! Yes, it’s true… Your B2B customers are talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, in forums and in blog posts or comments. What’s also true is that your competition is right there listening and offering an option to solve their pain because you are not. What are you going to do about it? 

Not sure? Sometimes it’s as 5 simple tips sending you in the right direction. But if you’re the type of B2B marketer that needs in-depth information to feel comfortable, make the business case or to get started with social media here are some resources and case studies. 

Reading: 

• Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media – by Liana ‘Li’ Evans (Serengeti Communications’ Director of Social Media)
• Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It – by Monica L. O’Brien
• Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones – by Joseph Jaffe
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR – by David Meerman Scott
• Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business – by Larry Weber
• The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media – by Paul Gillin
• Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand – by Shel Holtz & John Havens
• Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care – by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
• The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right – by Debbie Weil
• Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back – by Rohit Bhargava
• Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success – by Katie D. Payne
• Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment – by Jim Sterne

Case Studies: 

• IBM (Product Development)
• IBM (Communications)
• Equation Research
• Cisco Systems
• Business.com
• Boeing
• SAP  

If you still need help getting started consider doing an audience research analysis to uncovered how your target markets are using social media. Doing so will give you the insights you need to plan your social media strategy.  

[Photo: iStock]

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York on a panel discussing social media and how it works with the marketing mix. I am a firm believer that while mass marketing and communications has driven marketers away from their roots of being “market-centric,” social media is the catalyst that is forcing those roots to be firmly planted again. 

What does ‘Market-Centric’ Mean?  

Typically learned in Marketing 101, the three stages of marketing evolution are usually forgotten by time the next semester starts and it’s definitely ancient history by time students of marketing start their first job. Let’s look at a quick overview: 

• Product orientation: A focus on quality and quantity of output, assuming that customers would see out and buy items that were made well and reasonably priced. Typically demand for goods exceeded supply and finding customers and marketing is a relatively minor function. You could look at this mindset as “We build it, they buy it.” (Late 1800s – on)
• Sales orientation: A developed focus on sales as consumers tightened their belts resulting in less spending. Companies realized that they needed to stimulate sales and to do so they turned to advertising and aggressive sales tactics to move product. The typical management mindset is “If we build it, they will come.”  (1930s – on)
• Market orientation: A recognition that companies had to build what customers wanted to buy instead of what they wanted to make or sell. A market-oriented company is one that understands its market well and doesn’t create product (or services) unless they know there is already a demand. That’s a “market centric” mindset. Management knows “We don’t build it, unless we know they will come.” (1950s-on) 

The problem today, is that a lot of companies are still stuck in the product and sales orientation stages and consumers aren’t even aware of their products or are ignoring their pushy sales/advertising all together. There are many current challenges that this one post won’t answer, but I hope my slides from SES NY will get some wheels turning and demonstrate why companies need to become “market-centric.”

The Marketing Mix: Social media touches every aspect of the marketing mix from product development to pricing to distribution to promotion. But companies need to “listen” to what people are discussing online to take advantage customer and prospect wants/needs. For example “I really like X, but the price is too high.” If a company hears that sentiment more often than not, it’s time to consider your current pricing. 

The Four Ps vs. the Four C’s: For sometime there has been argument that the 4 C’s should replace the 4 P’s in marketing. I think we need a combination of the two in an attempt to balance the need to be market centric and meet market demand, but also to meet the company’s goal and objectives.   

Integrated Marketing & Communications: There seems to be a misnomer that “integrated” marketing and communications is simply about making sure marketing pieces match (i.e. seamless branding and messaging). That is only one part of what IMC is about. The main philosophy of IMC is to be data-driven. Typically, the only data companies could rely on was primary or secondary research or the data that sits in their CRM systems. Usually both don’t really tell you about the unique needs of your customers as individuals. That’s where social media can fill the data gap. Customers act completely different when they are in their “own online space” (i.e. social networks) than when they are being interviewed with questions that are orchestrated internally to either build upon an argument (“See, we proved there is a need for XYZ!”), develop PR (“Survey says…”) or get a pat on the back (customer satisfaction surveys). 

Why Integrate Social Media: Another misperception is that customers interact with marketing pieces (direct mail, email, ads, etc.). They do not. What they do interact with are the brands that they have a relationship with. And now with social media, they don’t only interact with brands but the people that represent those brands. 

Thirty Seconds: That’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention and change their perception or get them to act. By sending mixed messages or messages that are ineffective you’ve wasted those precious seconds and your budget. 

The Problem with Integration: Silos. Companies function with too many silos. This is particularly an issue within marketing. There are too many functional teams, too many separate budgets and too many politics. At the end of the day, customers do not care about your internal silos and pandering to the silos is an ineffective way to do business. 

Five Key Steps to Integration:  

• Identify your customers and prospects
• Estimate the value of your customers
• Plan communication messages and incentives
• Estimate return on customer investment
• Evaluation and future planning               

If you want to learn more about these five key steps, pick up a copy of Don & Heidi Schultz’s book: IMC The Next Generation: Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns Using Marketing Communications. 

Integrated Companies: I selected two B2C companies and one B2B company that I see as doing a great job to integrated social media into their marketing mix. They are Geico, Coldwell Banker and BreakingPoint. Again, it’s not just about cohesive branding/messaging, but listening and evolving.

Is your company market centric? If so, what are the benefits? If not, what are the challenges?

While at Search Engine Strategies in New York last month, Web Pro News did a live interview with me about Social Media Marketing Strategies and what you need to figure into it when you are planning your own.  Abbie also asked me about social media sites that businesses can incorporate into their strategies beyond Facebook & Twitter.  While Facebook & Twitter might really seem like the tactic you should be implementing because they are the “hottest” things in social media right now, you might want to take a deeper look into forums, message boards and even location based social media communities like Foursquare as part of your strategy.

Last week I had the delightful opportunity to present on two panels at Search Engine Strategies in New York City (#sesny).  Beth Harte, my colleague here at Serengeti Communications presented as well, our John Lynch, also of Serengeti Communications was live blogging on both Endless Plain and Take It In House some of the great sessions the conference had to offer.

I get a lot of questions after the sessions, as does Beth, some of these questions pertain to certain aspects of our presentations and we just don’t have the time to bring up the slides again.  So in the effort of sharing some of our knowledge with our audience we like to upload some of our presentations to SlideShare to give you a bit of understanding around the conversations going on in Social Media Marketing.  You can get the basic of understanding from just the slides, but if you were present for the panels, likely these will make more sense and refresh your memory.

Social Media 101 – The Basics

This was a solo presentation I did about the basics of social media.  The who, the what, the how.  Very top level, very 101.  I presented this from the standpoint of the audience knowing that social media is out there, its hot, and its likely something a marketing department should know about.  There’s some do & don’t tips as well as things to keep in mind.  This basic presentation can give marketers an idea of just how involved developing a social media strategy is and it’s not something to step into lightly.

Speaking Geek:  Introducing Your Social Media Ideas to Your IT Department

On this panel it was all about speaking geek to your IT people.  The other panelists took the approach of search and ppc and discussing it to their IT departments.  My presentation was how to approach your IT team about the social media tactics you want to implement.  Bringing your IT department in early is key to success, they can tell you if what you want to do can be done or maybe help you find a work around.

Later this week Beth Harte will be placing her presentation out on slide share as well, and it will be available on our Endless Plain property.