PR 101

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.