PR 101

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So, you’ve have convinced whatever powers-that-be that you deal with that it’s time your company started using social media. Paying for your initiative, you’re delegated to be the social media point person. You think how hard can this be? You use email, you have a Facebook account and you even use Twitter now and then. You feel like you know what you are doing. That is, until you start the process of looking at which social media applications should be incorporated into the company’s marketing efforts.

That’s when you say: “oh Lord, there are so many social media platforms. Which ones can I use and which ones do I lose?” (Try not to say that out loud. People will stare). For you clicked on a sharing icon and saw 150 different social media platforms come up. You feel like Groucho Marx in “A Day At The Races.” Cold sweat trickles down the back of your neck. How are you supposed to navigate all of that and make an informed decision.?

Don’t worry, no one uses 150 apps. I use social media everyday and I doubt I could name more than 20 applications. You can ignore 90 percent of those. Why are there so many?

Right now, social media can be compared to the early days of search engines. Do you remember Open Text, Magellan, Infoseek, Snap, and Direct Hit? Eventually there was a shakeout and they went away. Others are still around, but have morphed into serving different needs. Today, Google dominates search. According to cnet.com, Google handled 69.5 percent of all Internet searches in 2008.

While I don’t think any single platform is going to ever dominate social media like Google does search, there will be a shakeout.  In my opinion, there are four platforms and one application that will always be on top. Others that compliment those four will continue to do fine. Still others will fade away. So, as I said, don’t worry about those 150. Most of them are not going to be around in five years.

The four applications that will remain on top, and therefore should always be used are: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The platform is a blog. So, why these four and a blog?

Because by using those five tools in concert, you can build a comprehensive, effective social media campaign. Sure, they are other tools that can be used – in fact; some of will make your campaign even more effective. But, think of this like learning to fly. No one starts on a jet. You start out with a single engine plane and work your way up.

The goal of a social media campaign is to demonstrate why someone should buy your product or hire your service. They days of when a company could say: “hey, I am great. Buy my product” are gone. The public won’t go for that anymore. You are using social media strategies and tactics so your company stands out. You want outsiders to give you kudos on Linked, Facebook and your blog. You want them to highly rate your products. All of this shows others that yours is a company to be trusted.

The other thing you want is ensure when a search if conducted for your industry or business sector, your company comes up on the first two pages of Google, or any other search engine. Yeah, it looks impressive when Google returns a million results, but come on, no looks at a million results. Studies have shown that the vast majority of searchers only read the first two results page.

I am going to go more in-depth in the coming posts about why these five. But a few facts about each. It’s why I prefer to use them. These are not in order of size of use. I am ranking them more in order of what I feel is each tool effectiveness.

First, blogging is something I feel everyone using social media should do. It is not the first thing you should be doing, but it should be eventually. Why? Well, this where you most effectively demonstrate your knowledge of your subject. It is also is one of the best ways to increase your Google rankings. As your blog gains popularity, others will spread the word around the web. They will link to your blog, using such things as RSS feeds and other methods. This helps improve your rankings.

As Google itself explains it: “in general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Once you have written that blog, people need to know about it. One note about that – the first two or three blogs you write are going to be read by your family and a couple of friends. It takes times to build readership. I now have around 5,000 readers but it took me sevens months to get that to level.

That’s where Twitter enters the picture. Twitter is essentially a headline service. I know it describes itself as mini-blog site, but blogs are more than 140 characters long. You can tweet – once or twice – about your blog posting. Anymore than once or twice is a breach of web etiquette. Yes the web has etiquette rules. They are unwritten, but they exist. What you want is for your followers to pass your blog around the Twittersphere, which will bring both bring traffic to your website and increase your search rankings.Twitter is also a great site to post comments and links to relevant websites.

The next site I always recommend is LinkedIn. I often refer to it as the grown-up Facebook. LinkedIn is a site for professionals to meet with other professionals. The value of LinkedIn is the thousands of groups that members have formed. I doubt there is any industry that doesn’t have a groups there. You can do three primary things on those groups: post questions asking other members for answers, answer questions, post a link to your blog or make comments on other posts, thereby improving your credibility; and post links to your blog, website or event. Again, that increases your rankings.

The third site is Facebook. Facebook is monster of all sites. It has over 300 million users – mostly in English speaking countries. It also has a business side where you can list your company. It is hard to pass up any site of that size. It is also a great place to post links, talk about your company and find out what others are doing. My

Finally, there is YouTube. YouTube is a video-sharing site. The old cliché said that one picture is worth a thousand words. So what’s a video worth? On YouTube you can post videos of a new product, a demonstration of what your company does, or a video blog where you can post graphs, videos within the video and other information. You can create a channel on YouTube where you can aggregate all of your company’s videos.

A note about YouTube – it’s the second largest search engine. Google owns it. See what I mean about Google dominating search.

In the coming weeks, I will go more in-depth about each site, starting with blogging.

NOTE: Before we get started, I would like to invite you to join myself and five other social media experts to listen to our Blog Talk Radio show Wednesday at 8 p.m. (GMT -6). We will talk about social media and how you can use it for 60 minutes. Please join us. Just click on the link.

So let’s get to using social media in your business, as I promised last week.

The thing you should know is that social media is not a burden; it’s a gift. That’s not me talking. It comes from Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines. Berg is manager of Emerging Media for the Dallas, Texas Airlines.

Social media is also going to make corporate websites largely obsolete, Randy Sprenger, Harley-Davidson’s manger of electronic advertising and direct advertising.

Okay, let your eyebrows go down now. Both Sprenger and Berg are veteran users of all forms of social media. They work for established companies who wouldn’t involve themselves corporately in something unless they were convinced it was here to stay. Both have seen the value of marketing their companies using social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook and blogs.

Berg and Sprenger were two of a number of speakers at the Public Relations & Social Media Summit last Wednesday (Oct. 14) at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. They are were a lot of fine speakers, but these two are the most relevant to what most companies today should be doing.

As an aside, I enjoyed the conference greatly. For anyone diving into social media, I recommend going to such conferences. The learning doesn’t just take place in the sessions. It also happens in the hallways, over lunch, and in the bar after it ends. You are going to get a diverse people at such an event. It is great way to meet people, trade information and learn how to solve social media problems.

From my research, I have to say that Southwest Airlines and Harley-Davidson are two of the best U.S. companies in applying social media tools to their businesses. That’s not to say that other companies are not doing very well also. But Harley and Southwest have leaped into the social media pool with both feet. They are doing this everyday and offer some valuable lessons for companies thinking about starting down the social media road.

Southwest ran a very successful fare sale using only Twitter, Berg said. Harley has its own YouTube channel for riders and would-be riders.

“My honest advice (to anyone getting started in social media) is to go home, grab a bottle or two of wine, and just sit in front of your computer for a night or for a weekend and figure it out,” Berg said after she spoke. “It is not difficult, it just takes a little bit of time. Get your rhythm and see how things work. That’s what I did. It’s taken me pretty far.”

Southwest has been using social media on a regular basis since 2006. The most important lesson Southwest has learned in using social media is speed, Berg said. Social media moves at the “speed of light.” A company using social media cannot wait, it cannot reactive, Berg said. It is important for company to get out ahead of issues with good information, she said.

Southwest has one of the best corporate blogs in the business, in my opinion. I read it as often as I can. I don’t know for sure, but I think it is one of the most popular corporate blogs. The company uses it for many things – communicating with customers, crisis communications, and as a brand platform to name some examples.

Berg said the blog taught the airline another lesson – customers want to engage with them. That’s something I tell clients all the time – their customers really want to talk. Not yell, or scold, just talk. People want to know they are being heard. As Berg pointed out, it can also be a lot fun. One of aspects of social media is breaking down barriers. It can be fun to actually to your customers or clients in a more informal way.

Harley-Davidson’s motorcycle riders have been socializing for almost as long as the company has existed, Sprenger said. That’s part of the lure of owning a Hog – the chance to hang out with people who have the same interest. Harley riders see themselves as individualists. One of Harley’s social media goals to join in with that, he explained.

“Harley-Davidson is just now adopting social media,” Sprenger told the group. I work in advertising, but I do a lot with social media. We have done a lot of leveraging of outside resources, social media agencies and search agencies.”

The motorcycle company’s first foray into social media was when an advertising agency suggested that Harley create a “Biker Claus” channel on YouTube, Sprenger said. He explained it was kind of takeoff on 2003 movie Bad Santa.

“The thing was, they wanted to do just that channel for a campaign,” Sprenger said. “A lot of advertising agencies are like that. They want to use social media as a tactic. They don’t see it as a bigger solution.”

Harley’s owners are already among the most fervent in the motorcycle world. I know that from personal experience. I live in Milwaukee, Harley’s headquarters city. I have many friends who work there and many more friends who ride Hogs. Social media is another way to link those dedicated riders. It allows them to evangelize for the brand in a larger forum.

That’s key for the motorcycle company. The average rider is aging. The company wants to lower the average age of its riders. Social media is a way to reach out to the group – mostly younger – who have rejected traditional marketing channels. So for Harley, social media is not just a tactic. It is a strategy to reach out to potential customers.

That’s what led Sprenger to decide that corporate websites are going to fade away.

“Traffic at corporate websites is trending down,” he explained. “People are no longer going to websites for information. They are using feed readers, Facebook and blogs. People will go to product pages.”

Which hammers home a point I make often, social media is changing the way marketing is done. Berg and Sprenger made the point better than I ever could.

To run a successful marketing campaign in the first part of the 21^st century means using social media. It’s a fact of business life. It is one that scares a lot of chief marketing officers and their bosses because they don’t understand how to use social media. But that doesn’t change the fact that not using social media creates the risk of your business being left behind the competition.

No one wants to have his or her company left behind. Still, the idea of switching to an entirely new marketing system is daunting. It doesn’t have to be. That’s where I come in. For the next several posts, I am going to over some of the common applications and how they can be used for public relations and marketing.

I was going to write about this last month, but I got sidetracked. It is so important – I think – that I want to come back to the subject.

Before I start, let me give you a bit of my background in social media. I started doing it three years ago when I created a podcast for a client. It wasn’t even called social media then. From there, I started attending seminar, webinars and reading everything I could on the subject. Eight months ago, I stumbled across Simon U. Ford’s in-depth social media courses and took them. They really helped. I now use social media on an everyday basis – both in business and my personal life. I am a member of the Social Media Boomers, a group of six dedicated to spreading the world about social media.

So now – first, why social media? It is because that’s where your potential customers are. If you want to see the social media usage statistics, read Lesson 25. And remember, those are slippery numbers as social media usage keeps increasing.

So, how to you reach those customers? Well, you find them by driving the search results for your company on the first two pages of Google. That’s where social media enters the picture. It is what gets you there.

Why Google? Because Google dominates search. No other search engine is close in the amount of usage. It is where over two-thirds of those around the world conduct searches go to find something. So, if someone is looking for an advertising agency, a plumber, or a doctor, chances the first place they will look is Google. Why the first two pages? Because most people will not go beyond the first two pages. Yes, it looks cool when Google returns two million results for a search term, but no one wants to take the time go beyond the first 20 or so results

Google is the best illustration of how marketing has been turned on its head by social media. It used to be companies looked for customers and seduced them into buying something. They did it my shouting, or cajoling, or making promises, or offering a deal.

Well, starting about five years, consumers turned on that kind of marketing. The power paradigm shifted. Using the Internet, people found they could talk to consumers all over the world. If a company did something that angered consumers, the entire wired world knew within about an hour. If a product was good, customers told each other.

What those customers were doing was building a community. That’s the key takeaway from this post – social media is all about building a community. These are communities that demand openness and honesty. If you don’t do that, you ain’t selling them anything.

This is another reason why I think many executives don’t like social media. It demands a lot more effort. To be successful at social media means interacting with the community that is being created. It cannot be done any outsider. A lof of executives think they don’t have the time to do that.

So, what to do? Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, let’s start talking about using social media. It is going to take awhile – several weeks or more probably – but I will give you the mountaintop view.

Social media marketing expert Brian Solis developed this diagram to explain how social media marketing works. Don't worry, it is not as complicated as it looks.

The first thing to deal with is the sheer number of social media applications. If you use Google to search for social media applications you will get thousands of results.  I compare it to my first day working as a bike mechanic. I looked inside my new shiny four drawer red toolbox and wondered what the hell all of those tools were for. With their blue and yellow handles, they looked cool. But, I didn’t know a “third hand” from spoke wrench.

In the following weeks, with the help of skilled and patient teachers, I learned how to use those tools. I figured out which were essential and which were only for specialized jobs. I can now take a bike apart and put it back together the same way.

The same thing is true about all those social media applications – think of all them as tools. Some you will use constantly, others will be for specialized jobs. But, they can be used together. In fact, you should always use more than one application. As I tell clients – maybe you build a house using only a hammer, but it would be very difficult.

There are five tools you always have in your social media toolbox. The four applications are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The fifth tool is blogging. Blogging is not application, although the software that allows it to happen is one. Those five – in different combinations– should always be part of any campaign.

It will be impossible to cover every social media application. Every time I think I know them all, five more pop up. So don’t try. Next week, I will talk about how to chose the applications you need for each campaign. As a preview, it boils down to quality of followers versus quantity of followers. But that’s next week.

NOTE TO MY READERS: IF YOU WANT TO REALLY LEARN SOCIAL MEDIA, GO TO THE SOCIAL MEDIA BOOMERS SITE AND CLICK THROUGH TO THE SOCIAL TRAFFIC INC. SITE. THERE YOU WILL FIND INFORMATION ABOUT THE SAME SOCIAL MEDIA COURSES I TOOK FROM SIMON U. FORD.

SECOND NOTE: FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WANT MORE OF AN IN-DEPTH INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA, JOIN THE SOCIAL MEDIA BOOMERS ON BLOG TALK RADIO STARTING OCT. 21ST AT 8 P.M. CDT (GMT-6). WE WILL TALK ABOUT DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA. JUST CLICK ON THE LINK TO LISTEN.