Social Media Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Optimization, Social Media Done For You

A survey released Wednesday showed that 94 percent of enterprises plan to maintain or increase investment in social media tools and online communities, while only 6 percent plan to decrease investment.

The “2009 Tribalization of Business Survey” conducted by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research evaluates the perceived potential of online communities and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. It measured the responses of more than 400 companies, including Fortune 100 organizations, which have created and maintain online communities today. The communities ranged from fewer than 100 members to more than one million members.

“Despite risks associated with participating in online communities, the internal costs of community formation and management and the fact that we are in the midst of a profound recession, organizations’ continued and enhanced investment in online communities underscores the perceived potential for the value that they may provide to the enterprise,” said Ed Moran, director of product innovation, Deloitte Services LP. “Social media and communities are expected to continue to play a significant role in the way in which companies are interacting with employees, customers, partners and the larger business ecosystem, thereby redefining the very edge of the corporation.”

Of the companies surveyed, a majority agreed that increasing word-of-mouth (38 percent), customer loyalty (34 percent) and brand awareness (30 percent) continue to be the top business objectives of online communities, followed by idea generation (29 percent) and improved customer support quality (23 percent). However, in the majority of companies surveyed, marketing continues to be the primary driver of online communities, resulting in a significant gap between community goals and organizations’ capability to fully leverage these communities on an enterprise wide basis.

While the number of active users and their level of participation have been considered the top measures of success for an online community, this year survey respondents are paying close attention to non-active users or “lurkers” — people who observe the community but don’t participate in the discussion. More than 32 percent of respondents are capturing data on how these individuals derive value from the community.

Additionally, 20 percent of survey respondents have set up formal “ambassador” programs, which give outsiders preferential treatment in return for being more active in the community. Almost 40 percent of the survey respondents also indicated that more full-time people are being deployed to manage the communities.

According to the survey, the biggest obstacles to creating a successful community — getting people to join (24 percent), stay engaged (30 percent) and keep returning (21 percent) — can be remedied through partnering and new management practices. The study indicates that very few companies, however, are taking the steps necessary to overcome these challenges.

While 58 percent of respondents evaluated partnering with existing communities, complementary vendors, or end users when developing their community, 55 percent of the companies that evaluated a partnership did not actually partner.

The top two analytics for measuring success are the number of active users (34 percent) and how often people post/comment (32 percent), indicating that participation is still considered to be the biggest measure of success. Potentially more useful analytics, however, such as increase in search engine rank and citations/links on other sites, are less often utilized.

Posted via email from Marketing Elder Care and Marketing Senior Services

Wake Up St. Louis Business Owners: 94% of enterprises will boost social media, online communities is a post from: St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing Service - SEO, Organic Link Building, Social Media Campaigns and Traffic Building

Small Business Owners in St. Louis – Who's Stealing Your Clients Using Social Media?

Val — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:34:22 +0000

What does it cost to think?

The Original Post: What is the cost of thinking? Can be found at: http://www.relationship-economy.com/?p=5232

Your boss says”Our competitors are stealing our customers using this social media stuff. We need to use this stuff and do it better than our competitors and we need to do it NOW!”

You are then tasked with “doing it” but you have no experience or knowledge of what to do. So you look for help and find an outside resource whom supposedly has the experience and knowledge to know what to do. You bring the option of hiring this person to your boss and they ask about the cost and what will they get from using this resource. You tell your boss the cost but aren’t sure exactly what it is you’re going to get. Then your boss says “I know we need to do this but I don’t know what it is or what we’ll get from it”.

How can a company put value on something they don’t understand? How can they understand if they have no reference to “think about it”?.

What Is Required To Think?

Thinking about social media cannot increase understanding without the appropriate knowledge. Anything new or innovative takes time to understand and determine how to use it effectively. In order to think effectively one must first acquire the knowledge necessary to think about using social media strategically, tactically and with specific purpose. Without the knowledge thinking will only produce the wrong outcomes because your thoughts are limited to what you know, not what you don’t know.

The reality is that learning to leverage social media requires people and organizations to reThink everything. This thing everyone calls social media has serious strategic implications and to just “do it” without gaining the knowledge to think about what needs to be done is a sure disaster.

Think About This

A business runs on communications. Without being able to effectively and efficiently communicate you end up wasting time and money. Money represents time and cost in rework, fixing misunderstandings, setting the wrong customer expectations and not effectively and efficiently communicating to your employees, customers and your market.

The cost of not thinking about these issues is increased cost. However being able to “think” about these issues may require the infusion of new knowledge which may not exist in your organization. W. Edwards Deming once said “knowledge required to change the existing system to a better system must come from outside the existing system”. Why? Because the existing system is blinded by its own thinking. Get it?

Thinking About Social Media?

Who isn’t? The Corporate Executive Board said “Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management”

More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.

If you dive into the social media water without knowing its depth or where the rocks are you are likely to break your neck. To avoid breaking your neck you should first get the knowledge about that which your about to dive into. Without knowledge people, and entire organizations, perish. Think before you jump. But before you can think effectively you must first get new knowledge. Social media knowledge doesn’t come from self appointed gurus or experts who know how to get you followers and traffic. The cost of thinking increases when you don’t think. Get it?

What say you?

Small Business Owners in St. Louis – Who's Stealing Your Clients Using Social Media? is a post from: St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing Service - SEO, Organic Link Building, Social Media Campaigns and Traffic Building

Effective Marketing for Small Business Owners in St. Louis Missouri: Social SEO & Channels of Distribution

Val — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:49:31 +0000

Posted by Lee Odden on Oct 5th, 2009

Original Text and Post available at: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/10/social-seo-channels-of-distribution/

At several conferences I’ve used the image above to illustrate how a blog can be the centerpiece to a social SEO effort where objectives are focused on raising brand awareness and improving customer relationships in a way that is beneficial to search engine visibility.

I see several key opportunities with a unified SEO and Social Media strategy:

1. Social media involvement produces content. Content that is optimized and linked to, does well in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore, optimized social content and the digital assets that are common to social media (images, video, audio and widgets) are all optimization opportunities. Better search engine visibility means more traffic to social media content from customers that are looking for it.

2. Of the top 20 search engines according to comScore qSearch in August 2009, 3 are search functions within social media web sites. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. MySpace and Facebook are also in the top 20. In fact, Facebook’s percentage of increase from July to August was more than double any other search engine in the top 20.

The increasing popularity of search within social networks presents optimization and analytics opportunities. Marketers need to realize search doesn’t just happen on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Twitter is many things, including social network, messaging platform and search engine.

3. While great content is instrumental for great performance within organic search results, publishing in a vacuum is naive. Creating distribution channels for great content can drive awareness, traffic and inbound links. Optimized content with a quantity of quality incoming links results in superior search visibility.

Social networks and media sites that have social networking functionality offer prime opportunities to interact with communities of interest and can be particularly effective as distribution channels.

If there were ever a legitimate way to automate link building, it would be the RSS disribution and syndication functionality to promote new content to people who are interested. Those same people are often publishers in the form of blogging, reviews, comments and new features like Google SideWiki with the ability to link out to what they’re interested in.

The diagram above illustrates this situation well, where a blog is the central repository of content and social media sites around it are the developed networks of communities and channels of distribution for quality, keyword optimized content.

What other opportunities do you see with Social SEO?

I’ll be presenting on this topic today at 9:45 during the MIMA Summit, Salon C. If you’re attending the sold out event, I hope to see you there. If not, check out the live video stream on the MIMA Summit web site. We’ll also be liveblogging the event here, so watch for more posts later this morning and afternoon.

Effective Marketing for Small Business Owners in St. Louis Missouri: Social SEO & Channels of Distribution is a post from: St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing Service - SEO, Organic Link Building, Social Media Campaigns and Traffic Building