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!

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.

Fear.

Almost every company has it when they take one look at what’s going on in social media. The question is whether you embrace it or run from it.

Fear of the unknown, of what “could” happen stops a lot of companies right in their tracks. It also has them making a lot of crazy decisions when it comes to their own internal social media policies.

There’s two pieces to fear in social media that can really hold a company back from being successful with their online marketing strategies. The first piece is being afraid of what your employees are doing online. This fear causes companies to restrict access to the internet. At Search Engine Strategies in New York yesterday, keynote speaker David Meerman Scott said that 25% of companies restrict their employees access to the internet. Instead of looking at it as an asset, these companies are fearful of what “could” happen.

The second piece is fear of what people are saying in these social media communities, fear of them getting the message wrong or saying something bad. They site this as their reason for not getting involved with social media, or taking an approach of “telling” their customers online things, instead of listening and engaging. They are fearful of how customers are engaging with their products because they want it to be all about those carefully crafted and fine tuned messages they put out.

At yesterday’s keynote David Meerman Scott pointed out one company that wasn’t afraid of “loosing control” during his keynote. Let’s face it, toilets aren’t sexy, toilets are pretty darn boring, you don’t think about them and you really don’t see them in commercials on TV. They are really more like a commodity, they are something you need to have and that’s that.

Toilet manufacturer CWS decided to just “loose control” and have some fun and created a commercial which went viral on YouTube. Not only did it go viral, but it managed to change the perception around their products and it has helped to increase their sales.

If a toilet manufacturer can loose control and find success in social media, I think it goes to show that just about anyone can.  You just need to “loose the fear”.

First a Little About the “Ethics” of Ghost Tweeting….

While at Search Engine Strategies Chicago I was interviewed by Web Pro News about the panel that I spoke on about Social Media and the ethics of “ghost tweeting”.  A lot of people had a lot to say about Guy Kawasaki and his use of Twitter back in March when he was the keynote speaker at SES NYC, most of it was not good in the eyes of the search marketing experts speaking about his keynote.  Granted, some of his tactics could definitely be classified as spammy, but at the end of the day, Guy Kawasaki is a marketer.

That being said, was his “Ghost Tweeting” ethical?  I’m more of the opinion it’s not a question of ethics, its more of a question of disclosure and expectations.  Knowing how busy Guy Kawasaki really is, most people likely wouldn’t have expected him to not be running his Twitter account by himself.  He’s got staff, he’s got help.  The problem with the situation was that he wasn’t disclosing it until Dave Fleet called him out on that fact.  Was his audience in an uproar about it?  Yes, some were, some stopped following, but since the disclosure, he’s gained more followers.

At the end of the day, its about the relationship you want to make with your audience.  Are you forming personal relationships with your audience, do they expect that from you?  Or are you just disseminating information like Guy does with his account?  There’s no real interaction going on, so the expectations are much lower. So what’s ethical, what’s not?  You’re audience is actually the one that will decide.  If you are trying to “trick” them by employing other people to tweet for you in a personal way, it will show through eventually.

And Then About Measuring Your Social Media….

Abby then went on to ask me about Measuring Your Social Media Strategy because Serengeti Communications put on a session about doing just that at SES Chicago.  Measuring has to be a key fundamental part of any Social Media Strategy you implement.  Without measuring how do you know what’s successful and what isn’t working?  What are you wasting your time on or what should you dedicate more resources too?  Along with that is your agency – SEO, PPC, PR or Advertising – selling you a laundry list of social media tactics because they know how to set up those types of things or is it because there’s been significant research done and you are going to be actively engaging with people in those social media channels?

It’s certainly not easy, and there’s no cookie cutter approach!

I’ve always been intrigued by Jeff Jarvis, ever since he single handily brought a firestorm down upon Dell and coined the term “Dell Hell” so seeing his keynote at Search Engine Strategies Chicago was at the top of my priority list.  I wasn’t disappointed this morning either, Jeff Jarvis hit some very relevant points with his presentation, especially when it came to this changing world of search, online marketing and “old media”.

I found his keynote very poignant, taking a look at how big media (newspapers) have really got it all wrong when it comes to Google.  Murdoch and some of the other media industry giants want to blame Google and paint Google as a monster, when in reality its their own lack of knowledge of how to operate in this new medium that is the actual boogie man in the closet for these media conglomerates.

I wrote about Murdoch’s idea to block out Google a few weeks ago, and I keep coming back to the same thoughts that Jeff Jarvis has.  Google’s not stealing content, Google is actually providing opportunities, it’s just that these old huge media companies don’t know how to properly and efficiently turn this opportunities to their favor, instead all they really want to do is blame someone and right now that easy target is Google.

Jarvis pointed out that the way the media outlets operate now is that they make people come to the news, they expect to dictate to the audience what is news and that they decide it.  That way of working is at an end.  People want the news that they want to find them.  This isn’t fairytale wishes either, with the internet this is going to be reality very soon.

Jeff Jarvis then questioned why haven’t these media companies gone the way of what YouTube has, by making everything embeddable?  By making things portable, you can reach more people and its easier for people to share what they think is important with their audiences.  There are some places experimenting with this already, The Guardian, Jarvis explained is one example.  The Guardian wants to be part of the fabric of the web and they are understanding that they need to come to you with their content.

At the end of the day, Google isn’t the enemy for newspapers.  As Eric Schmidt pointed out in his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Google offers 100,000 opportunities to newspapers a minute to win loyal readers.  They do that for FREE.  It’s not Google’s fault that “blustery” CEO’s like Murdoch can’t figure out how to capitalize on these opportunities that are being dropped on their virtual doorsteps

Not sure where to begin with how to build a strategy in social media?  Wondering what the difference is between just marketing and engaging?  How about measuring the affects of  implementing your social media media strategy?  Well then if you have the time, come to New York City on November 5th, 2009!

Nathan Linnell, our Director of Analytics and myself (Liana Li Evans) are conducting a training on social media strategy and measurement for Search Engine Strategies on that day for the early morning session of the training day.

In this social media training we’re going to teach antendees all about what goes into building a social media strategy and what do you need to know and do to measurement everything involved from successes to failures and when do you just stop, re-tweak and start again.  You’ll get a lot of take aways and you should be able walk away and apply your knowledge you’ve acquired to your own online media strategies.

If you are interested in attending the Social Media Training in New York city check out the SES Training page about the entire training day.    If you can’t make the social media strategy and measurement training in New York and are interested in getting training for your organization, feel free to contact us!

Yesterday we launched the first tweet chat aimed at discussion and conversation about social media metrics, both measuring and monitoring.  The focus of the conversation was around “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Your Social Media Efforts”.

There’s a lot of confusion out there about what to mesaure and how to measure it.  People are finding that a mix of free tools, paid tools, home grown tools and spreadsheets can all work together to accomplish their tasks.

We’ve taken the transcript of the #SMMetrics Tweetchat from yesterday and made it into a PDF that you can download and print, or just view.

• #SMMetrics Tweet Chat Transcript 09/09/09

Next week @nathan_linnell (Nathan Linnell) will be heading up the TweetChat and topic will be “What Metrics Are You Using to Track/Monitor Your Social Media Efforts“. To follow or join in the conversations around social media metrics just follow the hashtag #smmetric and include it in your tweets so we’ll see your questions and contributions.

#SMMetrics Tweet Chat is Every Wednesday at 1 p.m. EST.

Nate Linnell (@nathan_linnell) and I (@storyspinner) noticed that there wasn’t a lot of discussion going on about metrics, monitoring and measuring in social media, so we decided to lead up that charge! Starting on Wednesday September 9th at 1 PM Easter time, we’ll engage the Twitter community in a talk about Social Media Metrics. You can follow the hashtag #smmetrics to join in the conversation. Our first week’s topic for #smmetrics chat will be focused on: “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Social Media“. So come on in and join the conversation!

If you’d like to get just a taste of what Charlene Li spoke about at SES San Jose in August of this year, SES has just released a video full of snippets of her keynote, an interview with Charlene and interviews with people who attended the keynote. Also in this video piece, Pattie Simone of WomenEntrepreneur.com has some really great points of why Charlene Li’s keynote resonated so well, “anyone can be a publisher now and it’s important to get those people on board with you.”

Charlene also goes into a bit of detail around the engagement pyramid she spoke about in the keynote,  so take a little time and have a listen.