PR 101

Note: The blog talk radio show scheduled for tonight has been canceled.

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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.