Marketing and Sales Guru

Social media is a great tool for any company. It not only helps to reiterate to your customers that you are more than just a company, but it can also help to create lasting relationships and dialogue with your buyers. Smaller companies seem to be hoping on the social media bandwagon faster than larger companies, which can be seen through numbers like this:
Percentage of Companies by Size using Social Media:

• Small businesses – 44%
• Medium businesses – 36%
• Large businesses – 23% (source)

These numbers are perhaps a result of the monetary savings only, but there is much more that social media can do for a company. They include:

1. WOM (word of mouth). Social media can be used as a PR or marketing tactic. When others talk about your company online and can link to you there, you can generate some positive PR and WOM.
2. Crisis management. In line with being able to monitor WOM, you can also respond. You have access to the people who are saying things about you (for the most part) and you can reply to them, even, at times, remedying the situation with solutions and answers they were looking for.
3. Brand Management. Being online makes you more aware of what’s being said about you. You are familiar and comfortable with the applications available to you, and you’re more likely to pay attention to what’s floating around cyberspace (also referred to as WOM).
4. Customer Engagement. Not only can you help to encourage positive WOM, you can interact with the people who are talking about it. Reward them for being your customer! Make them feel important and involved! These are crucial aspects to successful social media use, and you can greatly increase the good will customers can feel for you.

If you do use social media, be sure to measure the results and to keep an eye on things that are going on in different areas online that you may not be involved with. More importantly, however, is to first establish is social media is the right set of tools for you to use. Are your customers online? Can you see the benefits that social media can have for your company? Is everyone else in the company on board? Have you consulted with PR or marketing professionals about this step?

While there are a lot of companies online and partaking in social media, there may be reasons that others are not doing the same thing. If social media use (your tactic) doesn’t fall in line with what you’re trying to accomplish (your objectives), there’s is really little to no reason for you or your company to be using the tool. You will be wasting your time and resources on something that is not working toward a goal you’ve set as a company. Are you using social media because everyone else is? Are your customers even online? Answer these questions before you hop on that bandwagon; there may be a reason some of your competitors haven’t made the leap online either.

Are you using social media?

Social media can be a useful tool for most companies, simply because a large majority of consumers are online and using social media already. What better way to connect with people than to go where they already are? More important than your customers being online is the opportunity that social media presents that is two way communication. You can go online to communicate one-on-one with your customers when they have a question, concern, or feedback. You can share things with them that are useful and valuable.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can use and abuse social media as an outlet for your advertising. It works a little differently than that. In order to be successful online and in social media, you must be personable and personified. Social media isn’t meant to be used to spam your customers or to share your latest product, but rather it is meant to be used as an outlet for your educational marketing.

Educational marketing can be a great way to instill trust and to position yourself as a leader. More importantly, it shares with your audiences your expertise and gives them something of value that they can actually use. Social media, then, should be a place where you can share your educational marketing, but in a manner that avoids over advertising yourself and avoids advertising your products. There’s a fine line between too much self promotion and just enough, so be careful and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.

The most important thing to getting social media right is that you know why you are using it. What is your main goal, your objective? This should then help you to identify if social media is the right path for you. If your objectives are to raise more awareness in your community offline, than social media may not be the best tool to use. Instead, events, press conferences, media pitches, etc., things that will affect the physical neighborhood around you, those should be your best bet to meeting your objectives.

Really evaluate how social media will benefit you and your customers; their benefit is the reason you’re in business, after all. Ensure that using social media makes sense, and that it fits into your overall business and marketing plans. If your objectives don’t line up with the use of social media, you will rarely get results that are positive or worthwhile, and your using social media will have been for not. Don’t waste your time if it doesn’t make sense to use it. You can actually damage your brand by using social media if your customers don’t want to see you there.

Lastly, know that social media is not something you can set-up once and then sit back and relax. Like any business venture, it is something that you need to monitor, manage, and adjust as things change. More importantly, it is something that you and your company should be doing everyday. Update your accounts, post to your blog, and respond to your customers regularly. If that means every other day, do so every other day. Consistency is key. Customers get bored and will move on to something new when your information is no longer interesting or if your rate of updating is lacking.

So, the moral of the story: make sure social media is appropriate for your and for your customers and that you can maintain its use.

I got a few more questions about starting a public relations plan online, so I thought I’d share my answers. Below, find some tips on where to blog, where to submit press releases, and how to get traffic to your website from those press releases.

Blogging: Wordpress Versus Blogger

Creating a blog through Blogger or Wordpress is simple, fast, and easy. I recommend doing that instead of trying to build one yourself on your website as that can get a bit tricky and messy. Whatever method you decide, it is vital that you link to your blog from your website and make it clear that you have a blog. Also, try to keep a similar feel to your blog that you find on your website, perhaps even replicating the same design there; that can help to make the transition from the website to the blog (and vice versa) a little more pleasant and can help keep your “brand” visible in both places.

The only downside with using Blogger or Wordpress is that you have to rely on their services to be working, their storage limits, and the limits in terms of design. For example, I was trying to update my blog post with links, and received an error message for half an hour. When it works, though, it works well.

If you don’t have an IT team or web design group and know little HTML or CSS yourself, using one of the two blog sites can be very beneficial and time efficient. (There are other sites that let you make blogs as well, but those two are the most well-known, making it easier to find plug-ins, widgets, add-ons, and templates.)

I like Wordpress a little better than Blogger in terms of the use, but to my knowledge, I can do more with Blogger without the same run-arounds that Wordpress makes you do. (For example, I tried to upload a custom blog template to Wordpress, but ran into some issues as WP requires you to upload the template to an FTP site and then to your WP template folder; long story short, it was a pain, and I never did figure it out.)

Press Releases

So far as posting a press release to your blog, feel free to do so. A better solution: create a Newsroom or Mediaroom on your website to post press releases to, articles that you are featured in, news about you on other sites, etc. The media room creates a place for you to post press releases that will stay live as long as they are relevant. (If things change in the company that make a press release irrelevant or detrimental to keep up, take them down.) Sites that let you post free press releases to, like the ones I list here, may only keep your press release live for so long. Thus, posting them to your website can help increase traffic with the keywords you use there longer than the press release sites might do.

So, following from that, yes, people can find your press releases through Google, but you have to post them somewhere first for them to show up in a search engine result. That means that you must submit them to your blog and/or newsroom or some of the free sites at the link above. Then, search engines will help drive traffic to your website or press release. It is crucial that you use keywords that are optimized for search to bring in traffic. Be sure to pay attention to the longer keyword phrases that you may have read about in this post: SEO & Your Blog | Pay Attention to the Long Tail. It is very important to pay attention to the keywords you use in your website and press release copy as that can help to make or break your success.

Your Blog, Press Releases, and Calls to Action

Lastly, just to reiterate, make some calls to action clear in your press releases. Really drive traffic to your website if you post press releases on one of the free sites to help move people through the sales funnel. The first step is getting them to your blog and interacting with your website. People love choice and they love free things, so give them some free things and lots of options on your website in terms of places to click. Make it clear what their next step should be, like reading the recent study you did or the recent piece of advice you’re giving away on your blog.

Do you have any other tips for people looking to improve their online PR? Share them in the comments!

There are many benefits to using social media, many of them evident in the companies who are taking the time and making the effort. (For companies who may not be giving social media the attention it needs, benefits may not be seen as often.) So while the success of social media in your PR plans relies heavily on your output, it also depends on how well it fits into your PR mix. (Your social media efforts will not sell themselves…)

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What is social media? It is the new media that PR and other business professionals now deal with in order to reach their buyers and target markets. Instead of needing to go through other media, like newspapers and TV, companies can create that relationship with the public themselves. Social media can include things like blogs, forums, wikis, & social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare.

There are a few things to consider when thinking of implementing social media. You can ask yourself the following questions:

1. Will your target market and current and future buyers benefit from your use of social media? If the answer to this is “no”, it may not be worth your time to implement one or more aspects of social media. Your use of the tools mentioned above needs to benefit the buyer just as much as it should benefit you, the company.
2. Will you reach your target market and current and future buyers with your social media efforts? Again, if the answer is “no”, your time might be better spent on other PR activities. This question addresses where your target market and buyers get their information. If they are predominantly offline, social media may not benefit or reach the bulk of your market, and small, marginal results may be seen. Evaluate where your time should be spent.
3. Will you use the medium consistently and frequently? Social media is not something that can really be done “half-time”; your results will only be half as good as you would like them to be. To really feel the benefits or social media and to see a return on your investment (of time and resources), you need to ensure that your output equals the input you hope to see.
4. Why are you thinking of using social media? If your answer here is to advertise your brand, product, and services, social media is not for you. It is meant to be a tool to engage your audience, target market, and buyers, not to sell to them. (That’s what advertising is for…) Instead, use these tools to share with them things of value like information on your industry, answers to questions, etc.

Be sure that you’re also aware of the results you may see if you do use social media, but do so improperly (as it pertains to your company). You can not only lose out on potential buyers (or donations, votes, whatever you’re trying to get), but you can even tarnish your brand. Customers may not remember you if you do everything the same as everyone else, but doing it poorly usually stands out in their minds. While social media is easy to use, implement, and cost effective, know the reasons you want to use them, the sort of commitment you can make, and the results you hope to see.