Social Media 101

Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online

Chris Brogan

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470563410
• eBook ISBN: 9780470621004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

100 ways to tap into social media for a more profitable business

In Social Media 101, social media expert and blogger Chris Brogan presents the best practices for growing the value of your social media and social networking marketing efforts. Brogan has spent two years researching what the best businesses are doing with social media and how they're doing it. Now, he presents his findings in a single, comprehensive business guide to social media.

You'll learn how to cultivate profitable online relationships, develop your brand, and drive meaningful business. Brogan shows you how to build an effective blog or website for your business, monitor your online reputation and what people are saying about your business online, and create new content to share with your customers.

• Presents specific strategies, tactics, and tips to improve your business through improved social media and online marketing
• Looks at social media and the wider online universe from a strictly business perspective

If you aren't using the Internet and social media to market your business and stay in touch with your customers, you're already falling behind. The Social Media 100 gives you 100 effective, proven strategies you need to succeed.

1

Above All Else—People

Have you had a good conversation lately? What do you remember about it? Who do you enjoy having conversations with?

Conversations require people, and the purpose of social media is to empower and enable conversations digitally. Blogging, podcasting, video blogging, and all the various social networks we use are all geared toward one thing: giving us a way to reach out and connect. With that in mind, let’s start this out right and consider people. Let’s think about people from their perspective.

What follows are some ideas for engaging, respecting, and appreciating the people who will interact with your social media.

PEOPLE LIKE TO BE ENGAGED

Imagine there is a choice (because there is). You can either speak at people or you can speak with people. One assumes that the other person or persons will have an opportunity to say something back at some point. Which scenario would you prefer: one where you’re sitting idly while someone goes on and on, or one where you’re just as important to things as the person who started the conversation? I’m going to say the latter.

One way to engage people is to ask a question. How did I start this topic? I asked a question that put you back in your head.

Another way is to encourage people to take part in the activities. Don’t let them be the audience. Audience is a passive term. Think of ways to get people into the story. Can you come up with a way that they can contribute? Are there ways you can encourage follow-on activity in their world?

PEOPLE ARE BUSY

Respect people’s time when creating your media. Don’t ramble in a podcast just because you can. My wife, Katrina, always says, “Editing is good manners.” She means that by being respectful of people’s time, you win their appreciation.

One way to do this is to lead with your lead. Tell the best stuff up front in your blog post or your podcast. Give people a rundown of where you’re going as early as you can. Lots of great media makers script their productions, outline their blog posts, and otherwise use systems to stay on point.

Make sure you provide many ways to subscribe to your media. Posting an RSS link isn’t really going far enough unless you show people how to subscribe in the way they want it. If it’s a blog, show them how to get it by e-mail, if that’s their reading choice. If it’s a video blog, show your audience how they can stay up-to-date with your media. Ask whether you can notify them of special shows you don’t want them to miss, perhaps by sending an e-mail. If they agree, use that method sparingly Don’t make every show a must-see show. Make the best ones a must-see.

PEOPLE LIKE TO BE APPRECIATED

You’re not doing this for yourself (unless you are). The notion is that you’re out there trying to build a relationship with an audience. If you’re in business, you’re establishing brand, or talking about a product, or pitching something in a more human, two-way method. If you’re an individual, you’re building reputation, sharing information with like-minded sources. In all these cases, it’s two-way, and the people on the other side want to know you respect that.

Stop by other people’s sites now and again. Leave comments. Point the occasional blog post or podcast out toward the folks who spend their time with you. Go further than a blogroll. Drive awareness. Build traffic.

A while back, I promoted musician Matthew Ebel’s project, www.virtualhotwings.com, which allowed fans of his music to buy some very special tracks that weren’t otherwise collected or available. But further, the project sent out updates for new tracks that purchasers of the original project received free for having paid for the project the first time. That kind of follow-on appreciation makes lifelong fans from people interested in your media.

As a producer of a blog or a podcast or other media, consider ways to give people something more for the attention they’re spending on you. Think of ways to make special offers for free things to acknowledge that someone’s a fan of your work, or better still, find ways to promote the people in your audience as the true stars in your social media system. Make it every bit as much about them as it is about your relationship with them.

MAKE PEOPLE THE EXPERTS

Finally, seek ways to tap into people’s expertise. The point behind unconferences like PodCamp¹ is that the intelligence and brainpower in the audience is almost always going to be greater than what would normally be up on a stage at a traditional conference. To that end, seek ways to tap your audience for their expertise. Ask them to tell you about things. Find out what they know. (You already know what you know.)

That’s why I end every post with a question. It’s a way to prompt for interaction, but it’s also a way to learn from the people who spend time with me. I learned a long time ago that the folks spending time with me know more than me in the aggregate. I can start a great conversation, but they always have the better ideas in sum. So ask for it. Seek information. Learn from them.

Besides, people love giving their opinions. It’s a great way to give them the chance to do so.

Have you tried this before? How did it work for you?

2

What Social Media Does Best

If you’re still looking for the best ways to explain to senior management or your team or your coworkers or your spouse what social media does, why it’s different than the old way people used computers and the Web, and why people are giving two hoots about it, here are some thoughts to start the conversation. I look at this mostly from a business perspective, but I suspect you’ll find these apply to nonprofits and other organizations as well. Further, as I’m fond of saying, social media isn’t relegated to the marketing and PR teams. It’s a bunch of tools that can be used throughout businesses, in different forms.

Think about the things social media does best:

• Blogs allow chronological organization of thoughts, status, ideas. This means more permanence than e-mails.

• Podcasts (video and audio) encourage different types of learning—and in portable formats.

• Social networks encourage collaboration, can replace intranets and corporate directories, and can promote non-e-mail conversation channels.

• Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interests with little external force, no organizational center, and a group sense of what is important and what comes next.

• Social bookmarking means that entire groups can learn of new articles, tools, and other Web properties instead of leaving them all on one machine, one browser, for one human.

• Blogs and wikis encourage conversing, sharing, creating.

• Social software, like Flickr,² Last.fm,³ and even Amazon .com, promote human-mediated information sharing. Similar mechanisms inside of larger organizations would be just as effective.

• Social news sites show the popularity of certain information, at least within certain demographics. Would roll-your-own voting within the company be useful?

• Social networks are full of prospecting and lead-generation information for sales and marketing.

• Social networks make for great ways to understand the mind-set of the online consumer, should that be of value to you.

• Online versions of your materials and media, especially in formats that let you share, mean that you’re equipping others to run with your message, should that be important (e.g., if you’re a marketer).

• Online versions of your materials and media are searchable, and this helps Google to help you find new visitors, customers, and employees.

• Social networks contain lots of information about your prospective new hires, your customers, your competitors.

• Blogs allow you to speak your mind and let the rest of the world know your thought processes and mind-sets.

• Podcasts are a way to build intimacy with information.

• Podcasts reach people who are trying out new gadgets, like Droids, iPhones, iPods, Apple TVs, Zunes, and more.

• Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster.

• Human aggregation and mediation improves the quality of data you find and gives you more “exactly what I was looking for” help. (See also Mahalo.⁴)

• Innovation works much faster in a social software environment, open source or otherwise.

• Conversations spread around, adding metadata and further potential business value.

• People feel heard.

And that’s a great place to ask you what I’ve missed. What else does social media do best, in your estimation?

3

Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy

In yet another moment of informational threading, here’s a post by Dan Kennedy⁵ about hyperproductive markets. Kennedy points out that knowing your rough sales target is one thing, but knowing the most productive and yielding part of the whole bunch is worth so much more.

Thread this together with Robert Middleton’s⁶ post about a karate model for marketing. There’s a lot to it, but the key point was something he took out of another presentation he’d seen, which was this:

1. You first have to get your clients and customers to consume what you’ve already sold them.

2. You need to offer new services in progressively more complex stages if you are going to truly serve them.

I’m working on launching a few new things at work, and they are projects that have strong social media and new marketing elements to them. In so doing, I’m thinking a lot about what these tools can do for the communities we serve, and I’m also thinking about the marketplace elements that my business will need to sustain all this. My company is in the business of helping people connect, learn, and do business together. We do this through creating content, building online and face-to-face events, and enabling a marketplace between people selling emerging technologies and people looking to understand which of these technologies will help them next.

Kennedy’s point about understanding that there’s a group of people you can sell to, but within that group lies a more productive area, is useful. Middleton’s point about having some kinds of selective level-ups⁷ in your marketing efforts struck a chord insofar as one might consider narrowing the potential funnel for specific products and services (and thereby marketing efforts) once you move deeper into territory that applies to only a select few.

SOCIAL MEDIA LETS YOU GO WIDE, BUT YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT GO DEEP

The tools we use to create social media (blogging, podcasting, video, social networks, etc.) are great at building potential relationships, growing community, serving an audience, helping people find your business, and several other things.

But social media tool...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Above All Else—People
• Chapter 2 - What Social Media Does Best
• Chapter 3 - Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy
• Chapter 4 - Making Business Sense of Social Media
• Chapter 5 - Social Media as Personal Power
• Chapter 6 - Social Media for Your Career
• Chapter 7 - Threading Some Trends Together
• Chapter 8 - The Vital Importance of Your Network
• Chapter 9 - Using Social Networking and Media Offline
• Chapter 10 - Velocity, Flexibility, Economy
• Chapter 11 - Snake Oil in Social Media
• Chapter 12 - Who Cares?
• Chapter 13 - Participation: The Key to Social Media
• Chapter 14 - Social Media Is a Set, Not a Part
• Chapter 15 - Media Is a Mix—Get Mixing
• Chapter 16 - Social Media Starter Pack
• Chapter 17 - Five Starter Moves for Introducing Social Media into Your Organization
• Chapter 18 - Five Starter Moves: Should Blogging Go Next?
• Chapter 19 - Five Starter Moves: Audio and Video
• Chapter 20 - Five Starter Moves: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter
• Chapter 21 - A Sample Social Media Toolkit
• Chapter 22 - Social Media and Social Network Starting Points
• Chapter 23 - What Friends and Seinfeld Teach You about Growing Your Audience
• Chapter 24 - Twitter Revisited
• Chapter 25 - Case Study: For Those Who Pea on Social Media
• Chapter 26 - Basic Business Blogging Suggestions
• Chapter 27 - A Sample Blogging Work Flow
• Chapter 28 - If You Intend to Blog Seriously
• Chapter 29 - Performance and Your Audience: Blogging Tips
• Chapter 30 - Some Tips to Fine-Tune Your Blog
• Chapter 31 - How to Create Business from a Blog
• Chapter 32 - 50 Blog Topics Marketers Could Write for Their Companies
• Chapter 33 - Growing Your Audience: Some Basics
• Chapter 34 - Be Effective in Meetings, and Use Social Media Tools
• Chapter 35 - Programming for the Masses: Social Computing
• Chapter 36 - Creatives and Your Secret Mission
• Chapter 37 - Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
• Chapter 38 - Social Networks Are Your Local Pubs
• Chapter 39 - Facebook and the Social Graph: Who Benefits
• Chapter 40 - The Value of Networks
• Chapter 41 - Five Things to Do at a Social Networking Meetup
• Chapter 42 - Delivering Content Value to Market Your Product
• Chapter 43 - The Community Play
• Chapter 44 - The Power of Links
• Chapter 45 - Authority, Ownership, and Mechanics
• Chapter 46 - Enabling Peer Collaboration Using Social Networks
• Chapter 47 - 10 Ways to Make Your Next Conference Better
• Chapter 48 - Who Is Secretly Pitching You?
• Chapter 49 - The Sound of Content Ripping Free from Its Page
• Chapter 50 - Social Media—Talk Is Cheap for Businesses
• Chapter 51 - The Community Ecosystem
• Chapter 52 - Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
• Chapter 53 - Making a Business from Social Media
• Chapter 54 - Make Your Blog Design Work for You
• Chapter 55 - Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate
• Chapter 56 - How Do Realtors Demonstrate Community?
• Chapter 57 - Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers
• Chapter 58 - Social Media Starter Moves for Entrepreneurs
• Chapter 59 - Customer Service Needs New Channels . . . or Does It?
• Chapter 60 - What I Want a Social Media Expert to Know
• Chapter 61 - On Managing a Community
• Chapter 62 - Make Your Linkedln Profile Work for You
• Chapter 63 - Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online: Part 1
• Chapter 64 - Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online: Part 2
• Chapter 65 - 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media
• Chapter 66 - Blog Topics for Business-to-Business Customers
• Chapter 67 - Starting a Social Media Strategy
• Chapter 68 - Social Media Strategy: The Planning Stage
• Chapter 69 - Social Media Strategy: Aligning Goals and Measurements
• Chapter 70 - Writing E-Mail That Gets Answered
• Chapter 71 - Where I Learn Even More
• Chapter 72 - What Do You Think People Want from Your Site
• Chapter 73 - Musicians Play for Tips: The Importance of Comments
• Chapter 74 - 50 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing
• Chapter 75 - Should Hotels Have Social Networks?
• Chapter 76 - Essential Skills of a Community Manager
• Chapter 77 - 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice
• Chapter 78 - How to Reach and Influence Prospects
• Chapter 79 - How Content Marketing Will Shake the Tree
• Chapter 80 - Write Your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future
• Chapter 81 - Consider a Marketing Funnel
• Chapter 82 - Content Networks and Storefronts
• Chapter 83 - How to Do More with Less Time
• Chapter 84 - Creating Honest Content Marketing
• Chapter 85 - How I Do It
• Chapter 86 - What I Want PR and Marketing Professionals to Know
• Chapter 87 - Best Social Media Advice from chrisbrogan.com
• Index