In the world of social media marketing, one of the ultimate attainments of any marketer is to claim that you had one of your social media content pieces “go viral”.  Going Viral means that your content that you’ve provided to your audience whether it’s a video, a blog post, an audio clip, an interactive flash game or even a photo has really connected with your audience enough that they have felt the need to pass it on, and their audiences have passed it on and so forth that this “spread” or “viral” passing on is now bring you new visitors to your content (and hopefully your site) in masses that are not normally seen to your site.

Having a piece go viral is great – right?!

I ask this because I see it happen a lot by happenstance or accident.  Companies put something out on their site with no plans on how to capitalize on the attention a media content piece gets once it does go viral.  There’s no goals set, there’s no actions to be taken, there’s no accountability.  Let’s just “shoot video” and put it out there.  Let’s just make this cool game and put it out there!  People will love it and people will come to our site.

Great!  They love it, they come to your site, they see your picture, watch your video or play your animated flash game, but what do they do next after maybe sharing it with their friends?

While getting the people to your site through viral content is cool and while gaining links to your viral content is cool, at the end of the day has it done anything to lift your brand perception or raise your bottom line by those visitors doing some other action other than viewing the viral content?  As someone who came from the search engine optimization (SEO) world I understand the implications of gaining links via viral content, and the affects of the influx of traffic can have.  But here’s the thing, are the links really pointing to the content you really want to be known for, or is it just for that one viral piece.

I have a friend in the industry who created this flash game for Christmas time.  This flash game hit it viral pretty big and every year around this time, he sees the traffic spike again because people love to play this game that involves reindeer and Santa.  All of a sudden around November it’s “new” again and people pass around the link.  The game draws a lot of traffic to the page and that page has gotten a lot of links.  You think that would be awesome right?

Here’s the reality of the viral piece – It hasn’t lead to any major leads or conversions for what he sells.

The game has nothing to really do with their business.  The people who play the game aren’t really their target audience.  There’s no action at the end of the game to encourage the player to visit just what their product can do.  The game itself has nothing to do with what the company sells.  While his “time on site” statistic and “new visitor” statistic rises, that’s not really telling the full story.  Of course they are going to rise because people are playing the game and passing it on to their friends – they aren’t rising because they are interested in the company’s products or services.

So when it comes to wanting successful “viral” content, there’s got to be a social media  strategy spelled out.  Writing a list about top 10 Thanksgiving cooking disasters isn’t great viral content for an automotive parts site, but it could be for a company that sells pots and pans.  Make sure you plan out your social media strategy when it comes to creating viral content, too, not just let it be another list item in the list of marketing tactics your agency has told you to deploy.  While accidental “viral” content can be seen as “hip & cool”, and maybe you might not have planned for it to go “viral”, you can still have it benefit your bottom line.  Take some time to figure out how it can positively affect your company, brand, products or services and re-adjust that “accidental viral content”.

If you are planning as part of your social media strategy to create viral content, make sure you look at all aspects of how it can positively affect your bottom line.  From increased subscribers to your blog to purchases on your site, make your viral content work for you, not against you!

This piece is a prelude to my Social Media Marketing Column on Search Engine Watch that will appear on Monday November 23, 2009.

While I’ve always taken the approach of sound strategy over just “throwing spaghetti against the wall” and deploying various marketing tactics (including SEO for Social Media), Serengeti‘s CEO Nan Dawkins has put it quite eloquently as “tactics in the absence of strategy is like doing nothing at all“.  In social media this is never more true.  Just doing something in social media, like setting up a Twitter account because Oprah’s now doing it is likely one of the most errant reasons to venture into twitter if you are a business.

A Social Media Strategy isn’t about SEO coming first, or grabbing accounts on social media sites.  That should be an inherent and FUNDAMENTAL part of your social media strategy.  You honestly can’t have SEO first if you don’t know why you are doing a social media tactic in the first place.  Planning a social media strategy should come first.  That includes researching and understanding why you are going to do certain tactics over others, why you should be investing time and resources into something and understanding how to approach it, whether its optimizing the profile or just starting a conversation, planning the strategy is really what should come first in social media marketing.

There are many layers to a social media strategy, in my column on Monday I talk about 4 pieces of a strategy in social media that companies should consider, however there’s a lot more.  Beyond understanding your audience, setting goals, deciding how to approach the community and re-evaluation of your strategy there’s the other pieces you need to consider as well.  Strategy is much more than just a laundry list of sites that fit your keyword research that your SEO company tells you to fill out profiles on to gain another spot in the search engine rankings or starting a blog named on a key word that you really don’t have a prayer of ranking for.

In addition to the subjects I write about in Monday’s column, companies need to think about and plan how SEO, PPC and even EMail marketing fit into your overall social media strategy.  They should complement and aid your social media strategy, not be treated as separate entities “to be dealt with”.  Keyword research is just as fundamental to a successful social media strategy as it is to properly optimizing your website’s pages.  It’s not a question of when it should be done, its a matter of it fundamentally being done at the very beginning of ANY online marketing strategy.

Another layer of your social media strategy that should be considered is the whole issue of deciding who owns the conversation, who’s voice do you use,and  which members of your staff are best suited to implement what parts of your strategy.  Don’t forget bringing legal into the equation either, not including them in on how your strategy is formed from the start can have devastating consequences to your social media strategy.  Having your legal team help you out from the onset can make your social media strategy that much more sound as well as successful.

Have you thought about contingency plans?  What happens if one of your tactics gets misinterpreted and ends up being a huge public relations nightmare?  What is your plan to handle something like this?  What if one of your employees while thinking they were following your guidelines and ethics your company set in place, slipped up?  What if it’s found out your SEO was tweeting and writing your content for you, instead of someone from your company and it creates a firestorm?  Your social media strategy needs to account for issues like these that could arise.

As you can see while it’s easy, free and quick to grab those social media profiles and just start hammering away on them, the harder part is understanding if its really going to work for you.  Planning a strategy is never easy, but those companies that do end up being way more successful with their social media efforts than those companies who start accounts at random because they read and article or were told they “need to” and then abandon the accounts 6 months down the line because there’s no interaction going on and they feel social media has failed them.

Chess Photo Credit:  Flickr user pshutterbug
Map Photo Credit:  Flickr user New York Public Library

Rupert Murdoch the CEO of News Corporation is really creating a bit of buzz in the Search Engine world.  Why?  Well it seems that Murdoch believes that his collection of news sites which include U.S.  media outlets such as FoxNews.com, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and international news outlets such as the Daily Telegraph in Australia, The Sun and The Times in the UK as well as channels such as National Geographic, would not suffer greatly if he blocked Google from accessing them and allowing Google to have them in their index and offering them up as relevant search results for searches done on the site.

So is he crazy?  Does he really realize the effect that taking such a drastic measure will have on his search traffic?  I would suppose they have some inkling since Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer was quoted by the Telegraph.co.uk as saying

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

I cannot claim to be an expert of News Corp’s properties or their properties’ demographics, but most people consume their news these days via hearing about it on a site, primarily social media sites, and then going to a search engine to find out more.  It’s happening more and more these days – look at how much Twitter and its trending topics affect how people search.

When people see things trending on Twitter, say for example like Kayne or Taylor Swift when Kayne so rudely interrupted Taylor’s acceptance speech for an award.  On Twitter you saw that both Kayne and Taylor Swift were trending terms shortly after the incident happend.  Without going to a search engine to figure out why they were trending, you’d have to guess through the tweets that were happening.  By going to the Google, at that time, searching for either one of their names produced a news one box with links to news articles that contained a lot more relevant information.

While Miller says the traffic received from Google is the least valuable, I wonder where they are looking to get more valuable traffic?  Other than relying on their return visitors through bookmarks or direct type ins, there’s not much more valuable traffic.

Social Media although it looks like it could be the answer to all their prayers, if you take a look closer, it’s likely even less valuable than Google’s traffic.  News media sites primarily focus on social news sites like Digg, Fark, Reddit or Ballhype.  If they are expecting better traffic they should really look at how members of these communities function.  Community members in these sites click on the story to see if they want to vote for it and immediately leave to go vote on more stories back on the social news sites.  This type of “hit and run” traffic is a lot less valuable if you are trying to get the visitor to stay on the site longer or view other  pages.

At least with search traffic coming from Google visitors stay on the site longer, especially if there’s photos or videos to interact with on the content, because they want to become educated on the topic they searched for.

All of this hull-a-baloo that Murdoch is making sounds more like someone who’s just pissed off with the popular kid they were playing with and wants to take his toys home so no one else can play unless they come with him and that hopes the rest of his “gang” will follow him back to his house.

If other news sites actually start analyzing their web analytics for their sites and really break down the search traffic, I have a feeling they are going to continue to “play” with Google because they will find the traffic from Google is actually quite valuable.  They also might find that while Social Media News Sites will drive traffic, if they segment that out and analyze that as well, they can see a difference in the quality via time on site and pages viewed.

So what say you?  Is Murdoch crazy for pulling his sites from Google or is he’s one of the smartest guys to try and start a “Google Revolt”?

Serengeti Communications Interview at Search Engines Strategies

While in San Jose, CA for Search Engine Strategies in August, I was interviewed by the Search Engine Strategies team about building relationships in social media communities.  It is a bit longer of an interview, but I discuss a few points that we really didn’t get into on the panel that discussed managing social conversations.  John asked some great questions which the audience didn’t and in social media, really needs to be addressed.

We discuss tying social media to your bottom line, and what that bottom line really means.  Unfortunately some companies are deeming that social media doesn’t work because it isn’t selling more of their products.  Click to purchase rarely happens in social media, instead companies must look at other measurement methods to understand exactly how successful or unsuccessful their efforts are.

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of presenting on three panels and at the last minute, the honor of getting to introduce Thursday’s keynote speaker, Charlene Li.  As an avid fan of the book Groundswell which Charlene co-authored this was a real honor to do no matter how last minute it was.

Charlene had a lot of great nuggets of wisdom in her presentation which focused on the How to Prepare for the Future of Search and how social media is affecting it each and every day.  The biggest piece of advice was probably the hardest for any SEO or PPC professional to comprehend; Focus on the Relationship with People, Not the Keywords People Use.

Conversations in Social Media

That was the point of my presentation at Search Engine Strategies as well.  The session “Managing Social Conversations” included myself, Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo, Mike Volpe of Hubspot and Brian Kalma from Zappos.  The whole panel had that focus too, in social media its about the relationships and conversations you are having with your audience that ultimately win the day, not the keywords that drive those conversations.

There were two primary focuses to my presentation, the first was that social media needs a strategy.  That requires a bit of work to create something successful.  Research, defining and measuring all go into strategy – it’s not just tactics like putting up a Facebook page, or starting a Twitter account.  If you don’t have a sound strategy behind doing those tactics, your efforts will most likely fail.

The second focus on my presentation was on measuring and monitoring.  Without measuring and monitoring how does a company know that what they are implementing with their social media strategy is really working?  Unfortunately most companies have been conditioned to relate success to a “click to purchase” ratio.  In social media this type of action rarely happens.  So what’s a company to do?

In Social Media – Measure Something Different!

So what do you measure?  How about interaction, involvement, influence and intimacy?  These are all factors that can be measured and proven to affect the bottom line of a company.  These can be measured and monitored through buzz monitoring tools and web analytics, its just a matter of understanding the data and turning it into actionable data. This is what our new social media white paper: “Social Media Impact: Unicorn or Elephant” is all about, so sign up for it if you are interested in learning more about doing Social Media the right way.

You can take a look at our Social Conversations presentations including the ones from SES SanJose and connect with us on Slide Share.

With all the hype around so many different types of social media marketing tactics, from Twitter to Friend Feed, it’s tough not to automatically fall into the trap of the “ooooh, we need that too!” Unfortunately for a lot of companies, that lure is too strong and they slap up a Facebook page or a Twitter account without thinking about forming a strategy around it.

Just because the media is hyping how Oprah is using the latest, greatest social media site, doesn’t mean that every business should be doing the same. If your competition has a blog that doesn’t mean that you need to have a blog.

Understanding that marketing in social media is unique to each and every company is a giant step in the right direction of success. No two audiences are the same even if they are competitors. The philosophy of the company, the way employees interact with customers and even the look and feel of a product can all affect who is in your audience. Not only that, audiences online are different than those offline and its likely that you and your competition appeal to two entirely different audiences within the different social media sites.

All of this means that there’s no cookie cutter approach to creating a Social Media Strategy. For every company the approach is unique. Taking the time to do research will help point you in the right direction of where the conversations are, who are the influencers you need to connect with and what should be your success/failure measurements. There’s no out of the box solution for this, every company will have different results and different ways to implement common social media tools and sites.

Don’t fall for the hype of the shiny new social media objects, in the end it actually cost you a lot more than it would to take the time to formulate your own successful social media marketing strategy.

Any Social Media expert will tell you that the first step in creating an effective program is to know your audience. This is a no brainer, right? Of course you know your audience! (This is the point in the conversation when I often see an eye roll; I’ve also noticed some nodding off around the conference table.)

At the very minimum, most marketers have some demographic data on who the customer is. In many cases, marketers are armed with more than demographics. For example, a marketer may know that potential customers tend to be environmentally conscientious or travel extensively.

But is this enough information to develop a Social Media strategy? Not really. A good Social Media program is essentially a plan for developing relationships with customers and potential customers. You need more than a limited profile to know how to start building those relationships (just ask EHarmony).

Think of it this way: If you really want to make friends with a person, what do you need to know about that person? Age, gender, income, education and the fact that they like fast cars might be helpful, but if you want this person to like you, to talk to you, to be your friend, more information would be helpful. For example:

• Where does your Potential New Friend (PNF) like to hang out? What kinds of places does he/she avoid?
• What kinds of activities does PNF participate in? What does he/she not like to do?
• Is PNF shy? Or does he/she love to socialize and meet new people?
• What is PNF passionate about?
• What makes PNF really mad?
• Are there things you should avoid doing or saying when engaging with PNF?
• What are PNF’s friends like? What kind of people does he/she like to be around?
• How should you approach PNF?
• What does PNF need that he/she doesn’t already have? If you were going to bring a gift, what would it be?

Yes, it’s a lot of information to gather. The good news: It’s possible. By listening to consumers online and tracking their conversations, networks and activities, marketers can learn plenty.

At Serengeti, we create Social Media Strategies based on this sort of in-depth analysis. True, it is a significant undertaking. However, consider this: 50% of the Fortune 1000 companies who launch Social Media programs this year will fail (Gartner Group). Taking the time to understand the people you are trying to build a relationship with is simply common sense (or perhaps due diligence).