Expansion Plus: Social Media Training, A Good Investment

 

Excellent article from our friends at Expansion Plus about the importance of Social Media training for your brand's employees. Enjoy!

ComScore’s latest data about advertising online shows that social networks are garnering ad dollars from pretty much everyone except big brands. Social networking sites now account for one out of every five ads people view online.

Data from Equation Research’s 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report shows that within the next year an astonishing 82 percent of brand marketers will be using social media to promote their brand.

A UK recruitment company, Major Players, warns that this rapid growth may be stunted by a lack of social media knowledge in the talent pool. Candidates with social media experience make up only 2% of the talent pool, says Mark Begley, Major Players’ head of digital and creative. “An increasing number of companies have expressed their need to find highly skilled people to help build their social media capabilities and provide effective return on investment.”

Companies need to invest in social media training advised Begley.

The situation in the U.S. is no different: The PRSA Counselors Academy recently identified mastering social media skills as one of the top 3 issues for PR professionals in 2009 and 2010.

“Mastering social media skills is definitely a priority requirement,” said Betsy Berkhemer of Berkhemer Clayton, a retained executive search firm based in Los Angeles that handles senior level assignments in corporate communications, marketing and public affairs. “There is a demand for these skills and executive level individuals are scrambling to get up to speed. And social media is evolving and changing so rapidly it’s a bit like getting onto the onramp to the Indianapolis 500.”

Companies may have their eyes on the social media prize, but the “2009 Edelman Trust Barometer” found that as a source of company information, a company’s own website is seen as more credible than business blogs, personal blogs, social networking sites and advertising.

The Digital Readiness Survey from iPressroom, Korn Ferry and PRSA, notes that the fact that organizational communicators see social networking, micro-blogging and blogging as more important than actively managing the content at their own corporate website – particularly when people find company websites more credible than social media channels — may indicate a fundamental gap in judgment with respect to online communications planning.

Is it an either-or-choice? It shouldn’t be.

There is ample evidence to show that the majority of people are active on social media sites and that they expect companies to interact with them there. So mastering social media skills and developing a social media strategy is necessary. But understanding the importance of the corporate website is just as important.

Understanding search engine optimization (SEO), how to develop a web content strategy based on listening to your customers and watching your analytics, should be included on that list of skills to master in 2009 and 2010.

You want your site to be seen as the originator of your content. For example, if you distribute a social media press release through a wire service you should publish it on your website first. That way the search engines credit you as owner of the content – you get the ‘Google juice.’

A social media newsroom (on your own domain name) is one way to integrate and gather all your social media content on your website. It makes it easy for a site visitor to find your social content, your profiles and the places they can interact with you online.

Content that sparks conversations in social media sites is very effective for brand building; much more so than advertising. It’s not about the click through rate – it’s about how people perceive and talk about your brand.

Social media is best done by people within your company – your customers want to talk to your employees.

The Cluetrain Manisfesto said it best:

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

This Equation Research study reiterates what several others have found: the biggest barrier to a company starting a social media program is a lack of knowledge.

Social media training is vital to your marketing success in 2009 and 2010. Become educated on the subject of social media marketing and add it to your list of priorities for 2010.

Author Bio:

Sally Falkow is a Principal and Social Media Strategist for Expansion Plus, Inc. She is the author of The PRoActive Report, a leading blog for PR professionals. She is a senior fellow of the Society for New Communication Research and speaks at industry conferences and corporate training sessions on how technology affects the practice of PR today. The importance of social media in business today is another point of interest for Sally. She urges businesses and individuals alike to attain the social media training necessary to succeed in this new area of digital media. For more information, please visit http://www.expansionplus.com.

Hubspot: How Do You Market Successfully Today? Same As Always: Creatively

Original Post: http://tinyurl.com/oqcadq

Inbound Marketing Takes Time and Creativity

Many marketers starting down the path of inbound marketing expect to find it sprinkled with magic pixie dust -- that they'll be able to sign up for Twitter and buy a software service, then see the leads come flooding in.

Guess what? It doesn't work like that.

Inbound marketing requires time and creativity. In fact, creativity has ALWAYS been a vital part of marketing and ultimately is the defining difference between a successful marketing team and an unsuccessful one.

Still, there are four recent changes that you need to understand before jumping into your creative happy place.

1. Different Tool Set

The tools needed to achieve marketing success today have changed a little.  Am I saying that traditional channels are worthless?  Absolutely not! These new tools are here to stay and are a requirement to understand and do right.

• A Website -> The 24/7 access is unparalleled and has replaced things like catalogs, phone support, etc.
• Email Marketing -> Replacing what we used to get in our home mailboxes (cheaper and easier to measure)
• SEO -> It’s so important to remember that it’s not about what you call it. It’s about what your audience calls it.
• Online Video -> Slowly replacing certain uses for TV (cheaper and easier to measure)
• Social Media -> It’s still simply word of mouth—except in a one-to-many format

2. You Need to Target Niche Audiences

The shotgun approach of blasting everyone is a thing of the past.  Not only is it extremely expensive, but it’s practically impossible to measure.  Many of the tools listed above can help you find a target audience, but once again you are still required to be creative in approaching that target audience.

3. More Chances to Strike Gold

Everyone knows that the more you practice something the better you are at it.  It makes complete sense that if you throw 100 darts you are much more likely to hit the bullseye than if you throw just one.

We believe that unique content creation (blogging, video content, research, etc.) is a fundamental pillar of inbound marketing and there are so many reasons for this.

• Blogging helps SEO.  Larger website footprint, targeting of long-tail keywords, new content for Google to crawl, and hopefully people will link to interesting blog posts.
• New content means increased traffic.  Why is a visitor going to come back if they have already read your whole website?
• Visitor engagement.  Visitors can leave comments, subscribe, and share through social media.
  

The point is you aren’t going to be great at this the first time you do it, but you don’t have to be. 

In HubSpot's case content creation IS the marketing strategy.  The more value we can produce and the more channels we can fit into, the more likely we are to be found. Therefore, the more brand awareness and authority we can build with more audiences. 

Keep throwing those creative darts and some will succeed, and then again, some won’t.  Remember, because of the analytics of these tools we can learn what is successful and do more of that and less of the unsuccessful. 

You didn’t ride like Lance Armstrong the first time you got on a bike, did you?  Of course not!  You probably never will be Lance, but you can and will get much better at content creation the more you do it.

In a Global Recession Budgets Are Smaller

It is this final point which has helped many of the reasons above be adopted at such rapid rates.  The technology that we have today is light years above what we had even ten years ago.  In today’s tough economic environment a small business faced with the option of paying its monthly lease or doing traditional marketing will always chose paying the lease.

Some of the leading indicators do show that things are getting better, but we are not out of this recession yet.  If you have made it this far you definitely have proven to be smarter, more financially savvy, holding better brand awareness, and luckier than some of your competitors.  

The internet isn’t some fad that will disappear as fast as it established this foothold. Young generations have adopted the internet at extremely high rates. Finally, with the ability to do things cheaper, more targeted, and better analyzed we know the internet is here to stay.  If you are a creative marketer and able to adapt to these straightforward changes, you can and will succeed.