SES San Jose panel – Small Voices, Big Impact, Social Media for the Little Guy
Moderating the panel is Stoney deGeyter President of Pole Position Marketing and Search Engine Guide Contributor
First up is Jennifer Evans Laycock from Sitelogic and Search Engine Guide Editor
Jennifer’s presentation is about Social Media Conversations for the little Guy – Jennifer states that it’s not social marketing but truly a conversation that is happening. She is focuses on how small businesses need to integrate social media into business and the tools for Social Media for Business
How you can meet your customer’s needs? Businesses should stop running to the Bleeding Edge and try not to jump in head first in on a new tool. If you are a small business you have a smaller segment and you need to use proven tools. If you jump to an upstart social media site that might disappear, it’s a waste of time, and you have wasted your time and money. Don’t put time and effort into something that is a flash in the pan
Social conversations are essential for the recession – it’s a great place to research their buying decisions and have conversations with their consumers online. Both businesses and consumers are tightening their belts; the consumers are worried about price and offers. Advertisers and consumers are now coming together and meeting in the middle.
“Now is the time to connect like you’ve never done before.”
Jennifer brings up 3 tools that are essential for small business
Flickr - Small Businesses should be using Flickr. “It’s not just posting pictures, it’s community and images speak a universal language. A business can get the passion out and have an emotional connection. If you make cakes or are a tourism company. Find a topic and share photos. The drawback is the do not follow protocol so you won’t have link juice but you can drive traffic.
Twitter – Laycock explains a little the best way to use it and creates an analogy to Post-It-Notes and you get to decide what Post-It Note you want up. Essentially creating a listening board.
You can set up ways to only want to read posts about “me or my company or a recently released product. It’s a great way to evaluate what the buzz is. Twitter has great tools. If you want to do a blog pitch you should use twitter to connect as a starting point to start the conversation. Retweeting – it’s the best way to get a message out to many. It gets retweeted by someone. It’s as easy as just cut and paste – you share it with your network and then it goes viral to thousands or even tens of thousands.
It’s a great place to ask a question – Take the pulse of the community. Twitter is its own news outlet to send news. She cited an example of a news station in Ohio that has every member of their staff on Twitter. The benefit they get the majority of breaking news in Columbus because of the community they have created.
Jennifer finishes up by displaying a pyramid that shows the importance of the Social Media tools and the hierarchy of those tools.
Up next Billie Jo Waara from Lawrence and Schiller and she has several questions that she asks businesses. How are you measuring social media? Are you measuring your digital dialog? What is your goal – why are you jumping in? Once you determine these questions, then you can find the specific metric you want to achieve.
She had several slides defining goals
I want more fans - (Brand Awareness)
Positive Opinions – (Sentiment)
Increase Traffic – (Engagement)
Increase Sales – (Conversion)
Once you decide your measurement what’s the starting point. A business can set the bar for friends and followers on day one after you have decided you want to have a goal of social popularity.
Billie Jo’s favorite tools are:
Social mention.com businesses can determine how many times San Jose was mentioned or how many times your brand or services are being mentioned you can engagement statistic
Twitrratr is listening and responding to what people are saying and is a tool that you can mine data out. Compete.com has a free area and subscriber area “Don’t live in a vacuum,” look at the competitive marketplace. Look at comparison site traffic
Also you can set up a sales funnel in Google – and look at the conversion point to determine the sale.
To determine the value of the conversation use Tweetstat or twitter counter
Next you need to execute your social media plan and after determining the starting points and the final goal and evaluate – radon6 is a great tool that has a lot of data – trender has stats on Google analytics and you can pull the conversations and a sample of that report.
To close out her presentation she stated, “document what you have done along the way – the information will disappear if you use free tools.”
Next up Ron Jones from Symetri Internet Marketing
Ron discusses the true methodology of Social Media
Social Media is the tool for conversations to happen and provide feedback for responses and voting. There is a shift in control from the institution to the consumer. The traditional rules don’t apply any more – you come in the back door and listen to the conversation and chime in and sometimes you might lead the conversation.
There are 3 steps to Social Media
1) Listening: is understanding the conversation engaging the audience and then measuring. Listening is crucial and is the foundation you want to find key influencers, who is leading the conversation. Listen to customers and prospects and what are people saying about the company (positive- negative – general) It’s free R&D for your company.
Ron brings up Urban Spoon and Yelp is another social media tool where people vote – location based tools that are essential for small business. Yelp provides a great tool for businesses.
Listening is also reputation management.
Ron had a client with disgruntle customers and found negative comments on twitter. The client reached out and turned the customer into an advocate and they offered to fix the problem. Ron Notes, “Be careful how you reach them – calling might be too big brother.”
2) Engage – the community
He noted Will it Blend? – It is a viral campaign and it demonstrates the product of the Blenders they have. They had 7 million views and sales grew 500%
3) Measure – It’s about sales awareness – use tools like Scoutlab –Trackur make tweaks on the campaign
For every 10 tweets you offer – you earn the right to plug yourself. Be consistent – Be committed and do it regularly
Happy New Year. 2010 and definately welcomed inside this household.
