You should also incorporate original content as part of your social media strategy. Here are some sources of good content or content inspiration for your next original blog or article:

Blogs. When sharing blog posts from other sources, make sure that it is coming from a reputable blog, an industry expert or a well-known news blog.

News. Share links to mainstream news articles, breaking news or just interesting articles regardless of the date. These articles should be relevant to your brand, industry, products and services. Sources like Google News (set up a daily news alert or RSS feed) and Alltop.com are fantastic curators of the most prominent news items of the day.

Videos. YouTube and Vimeo have a wide assortment of videos on various topics. Find a topic that you think your audience would appreciate and share it on your profile, page blog or Twitter.

Links. You can send links to other websites as a reference or suggestion. When doing this, always include a few lines about why you think your audience might find it interesting.

Facebook: Asking questions or using polls on your own Facebook page could reveal some interesting insights and compelling topics.

Twitter: Set up a list or saved search on a hashtag or industry topic and see what people are talking about, or what questions they are asking.

Google Adwords: Use Google’s Adwords tool to search for popular topic-related keywords that don’t have much competition. This is a great opportunity to optimize an article or blog post around good keywords that could bring good traffic to your site.

What are your favorite sources of content or content inspiration?

Why your content development is critical to long-term social media strategy success:

1. The Stage May Change, but Your Content Will Stay the Same: Social media sites are always evolving, and some will disappear altogether—but your content can last forever. When sites shut down or “evolve”, you want your content polished and ready for the next platform.

2. You Own Your Content, but Facebook Owns Your Facebook page. Your content is your online asset. You own it, you control it. Focus first on investing in your own material.

3. People Engage With Content, Not Platforms: Your social media profile is blank without content. People interact with your company on social sites because your content adds value—it gives them information they want or need, or entertains them. Because your audience is most interested in what you have to share, how well you share it is the key tool for your success.

4. Content Gets You Coverage. The best marketing campaigns are those that garner public attention, and the most effective way to get your desired media mentions is to produce quality content. Authoritative endorsements can mean big business victories; use your content to get you the news coverage you want.

What topics or types of content wold get your customers talking and sharing?

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1. Formulate Your Goals: As I said, social media isn’t a strategy unto itself, it exists to support your other marketing programs and business goals. Make your goals clear, focused and achievable, and tie them back to the overall business goals. Formulating your goals may be as simple as answering these questions:
- Do you want to increase visitor traffic?
- Manage your company’s reputation?
- Engage your audience and stay on its mind?
- Improve online conversion performance?
- Increase brand awareness?

Take a minute or two to write down your goals and at the very least discuss them with your social media team. Check back occasionally to ensure that you’re keeping your eye on the prize.

2. Conduct an Audience Analysis: It’s simple: a successful strategy is based on knowing your audience. Who is your audience? What’s important to them? It’s your job to determine how you can offer them fun or value—or both! Your audience analysis tells you which social media tools will work best and drives your content development. Once you know your audience’s likes and dislikes, you can craft appropriate and effective social media messages. Conduct an audience analysis regularly; because your social media strategy depends on how well you know your audience, it’s important to stay in tune with them.

3. Measure Success: How do you define a successful social media strategy? Go back to your goals to help you determine how you’ll measure achievement. You need to select key indicators to identify outcomes. If you’re obsessed with Facebook followers or retweets, you may be missing the point. Important metrics include conversions, opt-ins and page views on your website or blog. You want your users engaging with your company and as close to the point of conversion as possible. Fans and followers aren’t a business goal, but what you do with them is.

Social Media Strategists Can Help

When all else fails, call in the experts. If you find yourself struggling with putting pen to paper, or discovering the creative ways social media can and should support your specific business and audiences, perhaps hiring or contracting a social media strategist is the way to go. Or find someone who is experienced in creating strategic marketing plans to help you create yours.

What are your biggest challenges to developing the right social media strategy?

Ask for opinions. Rather than just posting content, present it in a question format so that it involves a call to action. This can include polls, quizzes or questionnaires. Fans will not only answer them, but are more likely to return to see results or view how other fans have answered. You can use relevant, fun quizzes that lead to a giveaway or a promotion.

Show your thanks. Provide something of value to your fans whether its free tickets, coupons, discounts or prizes. Prominently announce your giveaway so that fans can comment and share.

Provide interesting content. Don’t just talk about your company and your product. Share other information such as industry news, interesting articles or links to other websites your fans may find useful.

Facebook is continually evolving and changing–as marketers we have to adapt our social strategies, but one guidepost remains constant: Think like your customers and find ways to add value (and maybe a little fun) to their lives and you will connect with them. Two-way interaction is the power of social media. This means getting your fans to respond to you. These are just some of the ways to engage fans. Growing and building your fans requires some work and consistency–AND TIME–but in the long run, will pay off with some big dividends.

What tactics have you successfully added to your social media strategy to increase engagement?

• Heardable.com is a brand optimization tool that is free and works like an SEO tool. It measures a website or brand’s competitive edge by displaying how well it is performing within its target audience/market so that you can make the necessary changes to further optimize your site.

• Twiends.com is a tool designed to help you gain more Twitter followers. It provides introductions when you are looking for followers and helps you decide who you should either follow or have as followers. It’s a great tool to get you an initial seeding of Twitter followers, in addition to the directories like WeFollow and Twellow.
• GuestPulse.com is a great little social media monitoring tool created just for the hospitality industry. It helps restaurants and hotels monitor their brand mentions and reviews.
• SocialTwist.com helps you acquire referrals for your social media campaign. Their Tell-A-Friend feature allows people to recommend products or services by creating and sending messages through different social media sites.
• PitchEngine.com allows you to spread your press releases and announcements through social media. You can create a profile and share your “pitch” with your friends and followers with the click of a button.

• Payvment.com provides a social networking application on Facebook that helps you to setup an e-commerce storefront on your fan page using Paypal as the payment processor. Very cool for eCommerce businesses.

• ObjectiveMarketer.com Learned about this tool (still being refined) from Guy Kawasaki. It lets you create a social media marketing campaign and manage your social profiles in one location, like many other tools, but the really great feature is the reporting. You can track click-thrus by individual post and download it into a CSV, which give you great insights as to tweet verbiage and times of day that work best.

What are your favorite social media tools?

“Our survey results suggest consumers show preference to interacting with brands that offer coupons and promotions via social media outlets. It’s important for brands to recognize consumer preferences and what will help encourage them to visit an establishment.”

~Gary Edwards
Executive VP of Client Services, Empathica

This quote was from an article in Information Week about using coupons and promotions to attract brand followers in social media. I think some social media purists–and even some of our clients–think there is no room for promotions or couponing in social media, and I agree with Gary that this line of thinking is flawed. People want to engage and converse with brands, yes, but they do ultimately, want something in return. Usually savings.

“A prosumer is actively involved in researching and interacting with the companies from whom they will buy…In short, those companies that take the time and effort to establish trusted relationships with their prosumer buyers have the best chance of thriving throughout tough economic times, while their competitors, clinging to old-school ways, will be left by the side of the road.”

~Newt Barrett
Founder of Content Marketing Strategies and Voyager Media, Inc.

I read this quote in an excellent article in Content Marketing Today about building trust with your customers, geared towards small businesses. We work with with some small businesses who think that social media doesn’t apply to them because they are “too small” or “would never be able to build a huge audience.” The fact is, that following size doesn’t matter. It’s all about building a relationship with your core customers. Those small businesses that understand this will out-pace their competitors online, and thus, succeed overall.

“It’s impossible to measure the value of preventing a hypothetical social-media PR disaster, but it’s vital that everyone in your company understands that the best social strategies are defensive as well as offensive…You need to be able to articulate within your organization the reputational risk you’d take by not doing this,”

~Joshua Karpf
Digital Communications Chief at PepsiCo.

Great quote from Mary Ellen Slayter’s blog on Smart Blog on Social Media. I agree with Joshua that the risks of not having a social media outpost for your brand is bigger than the outside chance of a rogue negative comment or two. I’ve seen very little brand bashing on brand pages on Facebook and Twitter…and I used to work in timeshare! Having said that, the risks of harm to your brand’s reputation are extraordinarily high if you decide to jump into social media and use it to fire off contrived or disingenuous marketing content. It has to be a genuine conversation or the masses will sniff you out and exodus from your brand online will ensue. But everyday you’re using social media in your business strategy, your brand becomes that less relevant to consumers.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em…People were engaging on those sites and communicating about our products anyway, so we might as well embrace them and bring them into the fold.”

~Mark Keys
VP of web production, digital media, WWE

Mark’s quote from a Social Media Examiner article about the World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) efforts in social media show that it’s true what they (and by ‘they’ I mean everyone) say about social media: your customers are already using it, with or without you. So you can join them and reap the benefits, or watch your competition do it. It’s a fact. And it is that simple.

“There’s a growing list of people with titles like social media strategist who have never developed any kinds of strategies in their entire career. They know enough about social media to talk themselves into a position that has no real objectives or success metrics and three months in, everyone is miserable.”

~Angela Connor
Social Media Manager at Capstrat

Not to be a doomsayer, but this quote from an iMedia Connection article said what we are all thinking these days: when’s the social media bubble going to burst? There is such a lack of uniformity (which is kind of the cool thing about it) and a lack of expert knowledge, and anyone and everyone is trying to do it, some better than others. But now it’s reached the point where companies need to hire community managers and there are no measurable or define skills for this role…yet. My gauge of a so-called social media expert (I actually believe there is no such thing), boils down to two questions: What have you done for other brands/companies AND What were the results? I would also ask them to produce samples of strategies they’ve written…yes, an actual document with metrics and deliverables. Not pie-in-the-sky ideas.

“If you want to win, you don’t just employ a ‘knight strategy’ in chess, do you?”

~Steve Woodruff
Connection Agent

Remarking on how a social media marketing in and of itself is not a strategy, Steve said this great line in his blog post called “Social Media is Not a Strategy”. I happen to agree with him that social media needs to be fully integrated into an overall business strategy. Social media are a set of tools to support business and branding goals. They are online outposts for your customers to engage directly with your company. They are service venues. Social media marketing is not a game changer. It’s not the miracle your company has been praying for. And it never works as a stand-alone strategy. Seriously, if I have to hear someone say, “We need to do social media” one more time…

What great quotes have you read this year?

Part of the new updates are the ability to see retweets and replies to a tweet without leaving the tweet and clicking around. Which is a fine feature (that should have been added a long time ago), but there appears to be no export function of this data and no way to integrate into any kind of analysis or report. Now, to be fair, they did also announce a new URL shortener, t.co. They say, “Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting.” But for the time being, there appears to be no real way to export this data into any kind of reporting. For those of us who manage Twitter profiles for clients (or ourselves) and want to analyze response and trending, this “upgrade” falls short of being a significant improvement. For that reason alone, Twitter fails in impressing this marketer. I’ll stick with my Hootsuite and Objective Marketer.

In my opinion, if Twitter wants to successfully monetize their business they need to look at the functions agencies, marketers and advertisers really want and need in their back-end and build something great…right now, they are merely playing catch-up and are still far behind.

What features would you want to see in a major Twitter upgrade?

1. Social media is a set of tools.

Social media is not a singular or solitary communication method. It’s simply a set of online communication tools that people use to share content, profiles, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself. Social media facilitates conversations and interaction between groups of like-minded people. These tools include blogs, message boards, podcasts, micro blogs, bookmarks, networks, communities, wikis, and vlogs.

2. It’s more than just Facebook & Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter are the big ones in terms of usage numbers. But don’t neglect the secondary ones, especially if you are a B2B business. When it comes to social media, you want to go where your prospects go to talk about your product. Spend your time and effort in the most targeted places where you can find your perfect customer. LinkedIn, Merchant Circle, Fast Pitch are great for B2B companies. To find other niche social sites, visit: http://www.Traffikd.com

3. You can measure social media ROI.
Sure, tools are still evolving, and there is no end-all, be-all measurement standard for social media YET. However, there are multiple metrics you can use to measure the return on your investment of time and money. There are the obvious ones: website traffic, number of fans & followers, etc. But what about newsletter subscribers, average sale, overall sales volume, exposure value vs. marketing cost, conversions, coupon code redemption, sales event traffic (in-store or online), ebook downloads…the list goes on. If you truly want to measure ROI, you have to do a little work. Start by taking benchmark measurements of your business today. Then map out your marketing efforts into a schedule and plan. Track your metrics every month and compare them to your marketing and social activities. Use tools like unique URLs, coupon codes, landing pages and unique phone numbers to segment response from various sources. These are basic marketing measurement tactics, and they do work in social media.

4. Strategy makes you successful.
Almost 60% of social marketers say that their campaigns don’t generate new sales or help their company’s bottom line, according to a recent study conducted by R2integrated, an Internet marketing strategy agency. The report showed that companies seeing a bottom-line boost from their social efforts were almost twice as likely to have crafted an official social strategy. Bottom line: In order to move the needle, you need to plan how you will move it, and how you will measure it. Otherwise, you are just shooting in the dark. Think and ask yourself: What do I want to happen AFTER I get a visitor or fan on my social page? Where will I send them? What do I want them to do after they get there? Then tailor your message and content around that, keeping in mind that you must provide value for the consumer.

5. It takes time and effort.

A fairly comprehensive social media program takes roughly 30-40 hours per month to operate successfully. And you should expect to be building your initial audience of followers for 6-12 months before you get any decent interaction or monetization from it.

6. It’s not free.

You spend your time and sometimes money to make it successful. Time is money, is it not? Social media can be done without hard costs like advertising, but you will still invest your time. That’s time away from other business duties. There are great tools out there to help you organize your efforts, monitor your impact, and save time, but these tools frequently cost money. Social media pages (like Facebook) grow faster when there is advertising sending traffic to them. So the costs of social media certainly are not free.

7. Social media did not kill traditional media.
Social media made traditional media work harder. Integrating your social media into your traditional marketing will make the impact that much more significant and measurable. Each one should feed the other, and with every marketing piece (whether social or traditional) you should ask yourself, “how can I turn impressions into audience members?” Think about including links and unique URLs in your email, print, TV, direct mail, etc. to send those eyeballs to a place where they can interact with your company and subscribe to more info from you.

8. You can use it to sell stuff.
There are those who say social media is only for conversation and not for conversion. We don’t believe this to be true. We’ve seen companies convert followers into sales and you can too. Just don’t overdo it. You want to keep people engaged, so they keep following you. They won’t likely stay engaged if all you do is bombard them with marketing offers. But they do expect the occasional offer peppered in with the discussion. So don’t be afraid to ask for their business once in a while.

9. One hard and fast rule: Provide value.
People stay subscribed to your messaging if you give them a reason to. As consumers, we spend a good majority of our time dodging marketing and advertising messages, and actively seeking useful information from various sources. Be an information source and you will capture their attention and loyalty. Think like your customers. What do they wonder about? What do they need help with? What is of great concern to them? Answer these questions with content and they will keep coming back to you for more info, and eventually your product.

10. Social media is a cost of doing business.

A recent poll showed that 90% of consumers believe a company should have a presence in social media. Like a website, phone and email contact methods, social media is a cost of doing business today because it is the preferred contact method for many of your customers. Even if it’s just a basic profile on a couple sites, you need to have a presence in this space. And on Facebook and Twitter, you should sign up even if it’s just to claim your company name…before someone else does!

Do you have any truths to add to the list? Share them please!

Mashable.com. If you do not know Mashable, you need to. Just the absolutely definitive source of social media and technology information. If you use one source for your research and news, this should (and could) be it.

Social Media Graphics Blog. Cool blog with constantly updated, visually interesting infographics. Just a great resource for meaty, usable info and stats.

Social Media Today. Awesome source of news and research on social media. Especially useful at identifying good tools and social media tactics.

TechCrunch and eConsultancy. I visit them less often, but still have good info–it’s definitely worth subscribing to their feeds.

Do you have any favorite sites for social media or digital marketing statistics? Please do share!

Now that’s out of the way. Let’s talk–like so many others–about the branding and PR implications of this oily mess. So many are saying they should “go dark” on the media messaging and posturing. I agree. Rumors are swirling about a BP breakup. I agree that’s a possibility. But after the gaffes from CEO Tony Hayward and their complete lack of focus on the singular effort of stopping oil and saving life in the water, air and land, it is clear to me what BP is going to have to do to preserve not only their image, but their very company.

There needs to be a fundamental, monumental change in the DNA of that company. Every oil-leaking day that goes by, they lose more credibility and more respect…and they don’t have much more left to lose. They need to stop saying the “right” things and start doing what is right or no amount of PR will ever help them. To survive, they need to show the world the profound impact that this catastrophe has had, at every level of the company. They need to change the company philosophy, right down to the mission statement, to refocus on protecting the environment, whenever and where ever they conduct business. They need to do something BIG–not a publicity stunt, but something that shows their seriousness on environmental issues, no matter how it impacts the bottom line. Something like…shutting down their other deep water oil rigs. (Because obviously, they haven’t created any feasible contingency plans should there be an explosion or leak on one of them.)

BP is running ads saying they “will make it right”. How? Exactly? Cleaning up isn’t making it right. And they couldn’t possibly clean up everything. The beaches are one clean-up. What about the water? How will they make right the thousands or maybe millions of fish, dolphins and other underwater creatures who will die from exposure to the oil? They can’t very well construct a big strainer to scoop up all the underwater wildlife so they can all be cleaned up. Or can they? $50 million might build a hell of a strainer.

What do you think? Can BP survive this from an image perspective?